If you don't read Stevey Yegge's blog, you should. You can consider him to be the new school version of Joel Spolsky especially now that most of Joel's writing is about what's going on at Fog Creek software and random rants about applications he's using. However you should be warned that Stevey writes long posts full of metaphors which often border on allegory.
Consider his most recent post That Old MarshMallow Maze Spell which is an interesting read but full of obfuscation. I actually haven't finished it since it is rather longer than I tend to devote to a single blog post. I've been trying to track down summaries of the post and the best I've gotten so far are some comments about the post on reddit which seem to imply that the allegory is about being burned out due to some death march project at his current employer.
I'm as down with schadenfreude as the next guy but a death march project seems wildly contradictory to Stevey's previous post Good Agile, Bad Agile where he wrote
The basic idea behind project management is that you drive a project to
completion. It's an overt process, a shepherding: by dint of leadership, and
organization, and sheer force of will, you cause something to happen that
wouldn't otherwise have happened on its own.
Project management comes in
many flavors, from lightweight to heavyweight, but all flavors share the
property that they are external forces acting on an
organization.
At Google, projects launch because it's the least-energy
state for the system.
...
Anyway, I claimed that launching projects is the natural state that Google's
internal ecosystem tends towards, and it's because they pump so much energy into
pointing people in that direction. All your needs are taken care of so that you
can focus, and as I've described, there are lots of incentives for focusing on
things that Google likes.
So launches become an emergent property of the
system.
This eliminates the need for a bunch of standard project
management ideas and methods: all the ones concerned with dealing with slackers,
calling bluffs on estimates, forcing people to come to consensus on shared
design issues, and so on. You don't need "war team meetings," and you don't need
status reports. You don't need them because people are already incented to do
the right things and to work together well.
So, did anyone else get anything else out of Stevey's post besides "even at Google we have death marches that suck the soul out of you"? After all, I just kinda assumed that came with the territory.