i will even in depth sauce you anon
There's no reason to assume that the fraud that pervades the finance and real estate industries doesn't also pervade the IT industry. After all, the same generations work in all of them.
And once again we have the lethal combination – stupid Boomers who can't lead or manage, manipulated by nihilistic Gen-Xers with contempt for anything but the simplest cookbook programming methods, and a willingness to collude just to screw the customer and extract as much money as possible, even for a failed project.
In such an environment, everyone is required to collude, to play along. Anyone who points out that a project is in trouble is a danger to the entire scheme, and must be dealt with harshly, and fired.
I saw this recently when I recently applied for a job with a large software and consulting firm. I was being interviewed by two managers, and in response to some questions I told the Fidelity story (summarized above) and that I feel that it's my professional duty to tell my manager when I believe that a project is in trouble.
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ww2010.i.java080701.htm#ccc
A 'subversive stakeholder' is a person who wants the project to fail — that is, a stakeholder who wants to sabotage, to disturb, or to destroy the project. Only people who act intentionally to the detriment of the project are considered 'subversive.'
Stakeholders who disturb the project due to incompetence or who are not aware of the consequences of their actions are NOT considered subversive in this survey."
Ross/Glass's research finds that over 20% of software projects have subversive behavior.
However, there are some important nuances missing from the above definition. In the Healthcare.gov web sites, the main problem wasn't stakeholders trying to sabotage or destroy the software project. It was the opposite – stakeholders with disastrously failing software projects lying and cheating to cover up the failures, in order to keep the money flowing in. In my experience, this is quite common among dysfunctional projects.
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ww2010.i.academic150823.htm#subver