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[mdthomas at mindspring.com (Michael D. Thomas)]

Hey,


I've spent most of my career working on large software development teams, and
I'm starting to collect my share of war stories. Seems when your project grows
to the size of a million lines or more, the least challenging aspect of the
job is writing
clean, fast and accurate code and doing your job well.

These projects are always stressful and there will always be complainers. It
seems there are some constants in the complaints that are spoken around the
water cooler... There's never enough time, the salespeople oversold, the
management never has a clear grip, the architecture is broken, the
Alpha-Geek-Emperor has no clothes, etc., etc., etc...

I've learned over time it's best to ignore the collusion of bad morale and
stay focused on being productive. Keeping your friendly neighborhood recruiter
on speed dial, maintaining a good network and doing high profile technical
work beyond the workplace is good, too. But now that talented developers have
less choices, I'm seeing more and more friends and peers stuck on death march
projects from which they have no reasonable escape. With the mortgage to pay,
why risk pointing out the wrongness of a decision that will chew months of
development time and cost millions of dollars? Just how far do you stick your
neck out? How do you decline yet another invitation to work all weekend?

So how do we cope with the bad work environments? What are some of the good
war stories out there? If you believe in anti-patterns, maybe we can find
some anti-methodologies...

Maybe we can identify some of the archetypical difficult personalities that we
find on big projects and how
to deal with them...

In an increasingly competitive employment environment, how do you deal with
difficult people without becoming one of them? How do you maintain your
integrity without becoming an example of a replaceable part?

Discuss.