Disaster Driven Development

Back when I worked at Ixia, one of my managers had a software process I called "Disaster Driven Development". He would overcommit our schedule by saying yes to everything, and then we would work on whichever project someone was screaming about the loudest. We were always, always, always fighting fires.

Weirdly this ends up making you look good. Firefighters are treated as heroes, and since we were always working crazy hours to get things to work for other people, somehow we got a similar heroic luster. Meeting an impossible schedule set by someone else felt onerous at first, but after months of this, I learned to treat it as a fantasy, since the real agenda for each and every day was "work on whatever is blowing up". When multiple groups are complaining, things can actually become easier as now you can play them off against each other.

Alarm fatigue is indeed fatiguing, but you'll eventually become desensitized, and you can't hurt someone who's already dead inside.

Having worked this way for years, my manager screwed up and undercommitted us for a quarter. We actually were able to work on problems of our own choosing. I had one of the worst cases of analysis paralysis that I ever experienced. I had forgotten how to schedule my own time, and while I had a long "fix this someday" list, I was gun-shy about starting any of them, since I feared as soon as I got started, I would be called away to some disaster.

Fortunately, my manager learned from this and redoubled his efforts to overcommit us in the future and this never happened again.

My eventual escape from this was quitting.

P.S. This manager later rose to international fame and fortune. You can read about it here in the New York Times: A Tech Guru Captivated Canada. Then He Fled to China.