throwaway-bozo
It’s hard to overstate how hard it is to leave this kind of project as a manager. You spend years of your life building relationships with engineers and trying (and sometimes failing, admittedly, but trying) to protect them. You know the situation is a disaster and you want to get out of it. But you’re afraid of letting down your people and hurting their careers. You’re afraid the next person won’t be able to protect them as well. You’re afraid of losing the years in your resume and not accomplishing anything. You’re afraid of being a failure if you give up. When your body is breaking down due to the stress, you’re afraid to lose your health insurance.
You’re right - I should have quit as soon as it was clear it was a death march. But in the shit, I found it almost impossible to lift my head up and say “this is literally killing me, I quit”. When each individual day is at your maximum trauma threshold, it’s hard to work up the time, willpower, or ability to interview prep and change companies.
I regret it immensely.
To give a concrete example, at one point in my career, I was leading a team trapped on a death march project. We did not have the option of abandoning it, due to a meaningful fraction of the company’s revenue riding on its success. We did not have the option of more resources for the usual reasons. And we did not have the option of more time, because executives had already de facto announced when it would be done. Unfortunately, our direct upstream dependency in the company saw us as a rival - because they had wanted to own this project - and spent multiple years trying every way they could to sabotage and undermine us, including lying to us in meetings, lying about us to others, changing key system aspects to make our problem harder to solve, denying access to critical resources and people, pitting vendors against each other, and giving unsolicited negative peer reviews to people working on our team.
To say this was a difficult experience would be an understatement. I had four employees quit. I myself started having panic attacks twice a week and was in therapy for over a year to work through the crippling anxiety I was feeling every waking moment. I still have persistent health issues from the incredible stress of those years. We landed the thing, got our pats on the back, and then I quit.
The main guy responsible for this campaign of sabotage and mistreatment was much higher level than me in the company and punching down as hard as he could. He left successfully for a larger role at another company once it became clear that our team was going to hurdle any roadblock he threw at us. It was a knock-down, drag-out fight. I will never do anything like it again.
If I ever found myself working with that person or any of his leads again in any capacity I would quit instantly. The bit is set.