Early on in my engineering career, there are a handful of times I was assigned to a project where I was set up to fail. I didn't understand the situation until far too late. There are a few tell-tale symptoms: I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do; I didn't really know how to do it; and I didn't understand how the assigned work actually solved a higher-level problem. No one else did, either (these situations usually represent a failure of management.)

As those projects dragged on and I was unable to make "progress", whatever that meant, I felt shame and a mounting dread of returning to the console each day. Eventually, fortunately, I was able to roll off them (not having accomplished much in the preceding month or two) and got back to doing useful things.

These days I can usually recognize such projects in advance, but it's still not always possible to avoid them.