I think the answer is pretty dependent on what your personal role is. Are you a PM or tech lead or similar with the political clout to influence things? If not

I think the answer is pretty dependent on what your personal role is. Are you a PM or tech lead or similar with the political clout to influence things? If not, and your company asks you to work your ass off for their screwup, leave and never look back. You might be pleasantly surprised at what developer compensation is like these days. If you are in a position to influence things, it depends how badly off track you and your team are. You need to be able to push back on unrealistic expectations. If you work yourself and your team to the bone and you still won’t achieve what’s being asked, definitely don’t bother. You’ll still have unrealistic and unreachable targets and all you will have achieved is moving the needle on how much you’re expected to work. If you think you might be able to pull off some heroics and save the project with hard work, you need to ask yourself: “Will I personally see any benefit from doing this? Will my team?”. If the answer is no, don’t do any heroics. Your bosses wouldn’t do it for nothing either. They may have KPIs that depend on this that you don’t have. That sucks for them. You don’t want to set a precedent that you will pull weekends and evenings if you won’t see any benefit from it (think hard even if it has some upside). What should happen is that the scope should be reduced to something that can be delivered in the original timeframe if possible, and then some milestones should be moved further out (far enough out that it’s deliverable). You don’t want to buy yourself time and then find it’s not enough.