alt Hacker NewsThat's what I experienced early in my career, and then I independently discovered Rule 3: "Tell the truth to people who want to be lied to, and you'll go broke."
The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it. Deliver the lies that will make them happy and only those lies. The lies themselves are usually reasonably realistic; it's only when you combine them with your common-sense notions of truth that they become stressfully unrealistic. So give up your common sense and just deliver the lies the customer is asking for.
A less cynical way of putting this is to adopt the customer's frame of mind. The stress comes from the tension of your internal beliefs vs. the customer's internal beliefs; because they are coming from two different people, they are frequently incompatible. When you are working for a customer, you are working for a customer.
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You don't have to lie!
You do need to understand the customer's perspective so you can reframe the reality in a way that they will agree with.
Yup, my breakdown was that I couldn't understand that the client doesn't actually care, they actually prefer to be lied to. Personally, I decided not to live in any system where either side is acting like this. Knowing the rules probably wouldn't have helped me, because I would've found the whole thing (and still do) disgusting and idiotic.
God forbid you go broke, can't have that
> The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it.
This is exactly it!
Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.