Well, salaried, so not 'overtime' per se, but at least I walked away with a bonus equivalent to about 4 months pay. Not solely due to that one incident, but that incident put things over the top.

Well, it's complicated. Basically my team has done this sort of work for a long time, but for a different market segment. This is a new market segment, but with respect to our work it acts the same. However executives don't understand that, so they spun up another organization to deal. Further, the company that was supposed to do it instead of us had brand recognition in the market despite being terrible at the part of the work that we know how to do.

So we weren't being replaced, we were seen as not relevant to this "new" market. That vendor wasn't going to touch our market with a thousand foot pole.

What we seem to be settling into is for us to do it our usual way, then hand over to that revered company to finish it in a way to cash in on brand recognition and admittedly do things a bit more particular for that market after our usual jobs are done.

This as a good example of how people fail upwards.

If he had listened to us from the onset, this would have proceeded, he would have been maybe casually acknowledged for a solid enough job, business as usual even though the money in play was abnormally astronomical, leadership would have just taken this part of the business for granted.

Because he didn't listen, he created a disaster. Because the disaster had just unimaginably large amounts of money attached with just stupid amounts more potential money in followup business, the executives were panicked. The ability to recover it on schedule suddenly they appreciated it, and he manages to bask in the spotlight.

Ok, so what if we had left him out to dry? We probably would have been fired. He probably would have too, but declining to assist and risking millions of dollars of business screws you too.

The upside? Well, this was noteworthy because this was the first time in many years I had to lose a weekend, so it's not super common. To the extent stuff like this happens more regularly, it usually isn't this bad and is more annoying but on normal business hours. This also happened close to review cycles, and was fantastic relevant information to hold over management so while I didn't get broad recognition, I did walk away with the second largest bonus of my career. Also the project manager learned the lesson and his standard game plan for this sort of thing is now consistent with what we said. He fails upward, but at least he's an ally for the foreseeable future.

The true mark of experience

its probably designed to make people "constructively dimissed."

I’d sit there and work a shift, and tell them it’ll be ready in the week that I estimated at the kickoff.

For the work that's being done, the people doing the work are most definitely underpaid.