Trying not to rant, but this is a frustrating situation, so mod me if you must. Took a new gig in October. The company has some crusty but functional tech that they're looking to modernize. As part of that, we have a big project to upgrade some key systems. We're taking on a new vendor. Said vendor told the c-levels (theres no CTO in this company) that a migration to their system could be done in three months between June to September. The vendor sold them on this with no real insight into what the actual implementation would look like on our end. No discovery, no technical due dilligence, just a timeline pulled out of thin air and handed to people who had no way to push back on it. Requirements werent "fully" gathered until mid-September, so the deadline that the vendor told us about and the c-levels agreed on gets pushed. In the first month its clear why. The project is being orchestrated by a top-down architect who only plans for the optimal case, and one engineer to instrument several new services to interface with this vendor. The team I'm on as well as several other teams realize its more complicated than this new team is letting on and raise the alarms. The new team doesnt have enough staffing or context to do this project. The deadline gets pushed and job recs go out. Five months go by, the staffing hasnt meaningfully improved. By the time the recs actually got filled we were already in the final stage of the project. To make matters worse, two of the people that were supposed to be added to the core team got pulled for the vendor cutover itself, and one of them left the compamy with less than a weeks notice. So the team that was already understaffed going into the home stretch lost a body right when it mattered most. My team specifically called out a critical dependency. The vendor team needed to deliver feature parity on several endpoints to replace existing services. We flagged it repeatedely, pushed for a realistic deadline, and got heat for being the squeaky wheel. The team we depended on meanwhile wasnt delivering, and has since burned out one of their tehre engineers. We're now in a mandatory "war room," a persistant Teams meeting with 40 people expected to be present and available during all core business hours. My team of 6 has been dissolved into this supergroup. My role as tech lead is esentially invisible. We've been pulled into covering the dependency team's gaps on top of our own work, which we completed and deliverd. The COO held a meeting the other day. We were told the project is seven months late and that its unacceptable. That participation in the war room hasn't been sufficient. That cameras need to be on and attendence will be tracked through Microsoft Teams. My boss's boss knows exactly how this project got here and sat silently while the COO delivered this to the entire group. We didnt have complete requirements until the original deadline had already passed. There was no CTO to push back on an unrealistic vendor promise. There were no project phases, this was planned as a hard cutover accross everything simultaneously. The teams that raised alarms got heat. The team that caused the bottleneck got sympathy and our resources. The response to all of that is cameras on and attendance tracking. My team will get this done, because we always do. But I've never seen a clearer example of leadership confusing visiblity with accountability. The COO will get to claim the win when this ships and the narrative will be that strong leadership in the final stretch turned it around. For the experienced devs here, is this as common as it feels like it should be? How do you protect yourself and your team in situations where the official story is being written around you? And how do you stay engaged when you can see exactly how this is going and nobody in power wants to hear it? Sure, polish my resume and find better leadership are the take-aways. But how does one persist through the crunch and the grind?