Cassandrafreude

Been trying to remember this word for the last few weeks; finally popped back into my head today while reading "How to be an Antiracist".

Cassandrafreude: the bitter pleasure of things going wrong in exactly the way you predicted, but no one believed you when it could have made a difference. A portmanteau of Cassandra, the mythological Trojan princess, and schadenfreude, a German word meaning deriving pleasure from someone else's pain.

An awful and all-too-common experience in software development: you've seen the signs and have done your darnedest trying to warn your manager just how badly the project is going to go if action isn't taken. The architecture is wrong. The estimates are off. There's a mismatch on expectations.

And the response back is that everything will go ahead as planned.

It's not a good feeling. It's a striking failure of leadership.