I'm not saying he needs to stick with the project. I'm saying that it's, on average, bad for your career to try to save a failing project. Better to move to one that will succeed, but you don't get mobility by offending everyone around you, which is often what happens when you try to "save" people in spite of themselves.
Exactly; I have a bad habit of saving failing projects, generally of companies that had to have them succeed, and very seldom got any thanks from it, even when I was explicitly hired to do just that (sometimes was even purged when technical success was achieved but not cemented, causing the company to later crater). If there is a gentle way of doing this it was beyond my limited interpersonal skills, and I agree with everything Mr. Church is saying here, if you can pull it off (I can't): keep your mouth shut while you pull the ejection handle.
Or to learn how to differentiate projects that are within your power to save from those that are not.
If you're a developer, you often can help save projects that are failing because they were poorly outsourced, or handed to the wrong team, or technically flawed. You usually can't save projects that are failing because management never really believed in them, or that are caught in crossfire between conflicting factions on the corporate board, or that have never been funded/resourced at the levels required for success.
