I’ve had a few projects over the years that have required insane amounts of work in a very short time period and usually have tremendous and horrible consequences for at least one person on a team (or the company as a whole). Besides the occasional server crash or “if we get this thing out, we land a huge customer” type of work, I’ve noticed some significant commonalities about deathmarch projects that I believe could be used to help an individual detect whether they are about to sign onto one. It’s hard to tell when you are interviewing, but after mulling it over, every single time it has happened to me, the signs have been there all along. So, without further ado, allow me to introduce some warning signs that I’ve noticed that frequently come during interviews or the first week of working a death march project.

Judging by the actions of a few companies I’ve encountered over the ten and a half years of my full-time, professional programming career, many companies would like to quickly lose their most talented people, preferably to their competitors and preferably for easily and cheaply avoidable reasons. Towards this end, I’d like to offer a list of suggestions of ways to make absolutely certain that your development staff is interested in greener pastures, no matter how much barbed wire they have to climb to get to them. Here are my suggestions for how to achieve near perfect turnover (except for sadists) within a three to four year period.