I was one of the lead devs on ESPN's "League Manager" Fantasy Football engine rewrite back in 2002. The Yahoo outage reminds me of that experience. League Man

I was one of the lead devs on ESPN's "League Manager" Fantasy Football engine rewrite back in 2002. The Yahoo outage reminds me of that experience. League Manager had no clear project or product management leadership. After four months of 60h weeks, most working 7 days, we ended up in a late-August crapstorm when we launched an incredibly buggy product. Things stabilized in about week three of the NFL season and I took the next three weeks off to recover, telling myself that the Christmas bonus would be worth sacrificing my time, energy, health, and relationships. My key lessons: 0. My bonus was $1500. Not only was it not worth it, it was a slap in the face. 1. No death march projects like that ever again. 2. The opportunity cost to work on a project like that wasn't worth it, given the tiny rewards. An instructive lesson that helped push me towards entrepreneurship - working hard isn't a problem, but it is when the rewards are controlled by someone else. 3. In retrospect, I'm incredibly thankful that social media didn't exist. The closest we had were user forums. A quick perusal of said forums ensured a crappy day due to the vitriol and hate thrown towards the dev team, who were busting their humps to fix the product. I remember one commenter who sympathized with the dev team -- whenever I was down in the dumps, I would read his comment to trudge on. It motivated me for weeks. For anybody on the Yahoo Fantasy Football dev team, it gets better. Take some time, reflect, and do your best to integrate the lessons you've learned here as you decide what to work on down the road.