Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened (2001) [pdf]
And the matching rule: badly designed projects that blow up end up getting a lot of attention and resources, their engineers end up looking like heroes.<p>I remember the worst module of a very large J2EE website getting all the attention, got more developers, got 10x more hardware than planned... And in the end the lead was promoted. While several other modules did their work flawlessly and went unnoticed.<p>This is what you get when business people make decisions on technology projects.