"I'm not saying death marches are a good thing. But I've seen that in certain industries they do seem harder to avoid."
How hard they are to avoid depends entirely on how good the management is at coming up with excuses for them and at using carrots and sticks, and on how gullible and desperate their developers are.
I'm not sure that's true. But if you look at certain industries, like web startups, death marches are almost the complete culture.
Try to be employee #1 of a YC startup while being upfront that you work 40 hours a week, period. Not going to happen in many cases. The death march starts on day one in this industry.
How many YC startups would kill to get Steve Jobs to work even 1 hour a week for them as employee #1?
It's all about perceived value and negotiation. If your company values you enough, they will not make you work unreasonable hours. And if a non-workaholic employee values himself enough, he will not agree to work unreasonable hours.
Death marches are definitely a pathology in the computer industry, as they are in the medical field, where residents are forced to work insanely long shifts without sleep. In both cases, people's mental and physical well being is put at risk, the chance of burnout increases, and the quality of the results suffers.
It does not have to be this way. What will it take for management to stop understaffing and overworking their employees? And how long will employees consent to being worked in to an early grave?
Companies pulling this sort of crap is what really makes me wish the computer field had some effective unions that could collectively bargain for reasonable hours for reasonable pay. I know I'd join in a heartbeat.
I worked on bug, almost full time, about a decade ago, for about a month. A single bug. I hadn't anticipated the bug, and didn't plan for it. I've seen teams spend months trying to hit perf targets. It's the type of thing that isn't uncommon in our industry. I'm not sure how you plan for it.
What will it take for management to stop understaffing and overworking their employees?
Many tmies its not understaffing. Again, I've seen teams struggle to hit perf targets. If you doubled the size of the team it wouldn't make their lives much easier. It may even make it worse.
Our industry is one where you are fundamentally solving new problems (because if someone else solved it, you'd use their code).
Now maybe you're saying we need to toss schedules altogether. Things are done when they're done -- and no crunch time. You do it with 40 hours/week for however long it takes. I'd love to see that dream happen to, but I honestly don't think it ever will.
How hard they are to avoid depends entirely on how good the management is at coming up with excuses for them and at using carrots and sticks, and on how gullible and desperate their developers are.