That’s a struggle I have at my current employment. I work in a county where failure is not accepted at all so we all have to pretend every project is well plann

That’s a struggle I have at my current employment. I work in a county where failure is not accepted at all so we all have to pretend every project is well planned, has ample time to complete all features before the deadline, and be optimistic about it all. These things are never true but no one wants to say the emperor has no clothes. So instead we go full steam ahead towards the wall and whoever brings that up gets lynched. The result is always the same: we deliver a subpar software product, that barely works the way it was expected to, after a few weeks or months of crunch, it is very hard and costly to maintain, the customer is pissed, and we’re all told by our managers that we suck. How can you cope then? I’d think it’s healthier to see the monumental failure for what it is (and thus, not sound optimistic, especially when you’ve seen this happen in other projects before). Or should you hide your head in the sand and keep pretending like everything is peachy and this time it’s different, the project won’t fail like the dozens before it?