Sometimes you don't have that luxury. What if your company requires an influx of new capital to be able to maintain your current staffing levels and one require

Sometimes you don't have that luxury. What if your company requires an influx of new capital to be able to maintain your current staffing levels and one requirement of the funding is delivering a set of features in a week? Adopting the attitude "we'll just ship a few weeks late" may result in funding not going through, everyone losing their jobs, and the company dissolving. I agree that death marches are counterproductive. However, if you've been around long enough you've run across situations where they are unfortunately necessary. Another example: production goes down Friday at 5pm. Do you say "we'll pick this up Monday morning"? No... it's all hands on deck to get production back up working as long as it takes, assuming your company isn't large enough to have its own dedicated 24/7 incident response team. Hopefully there's a lot of process and automation which helps to minimize the effort, and if not that's a great takeaway to improving the process down the road.