In the latter 10 or so years of my career I made a speciality of taking on the very jobs that you would have rejected.

1. It paid extremely well.
2. It afforded me many latitudes.

   For example, I made it my habit to start work at midday or a little earlier, and work until midnight or a little later. This provided sufficient overlap with the 9to5ers to ensure good communication. And sufficient alone time, free of: ringing phones or nagging emails; nearby loud discussion of last night's game or soap; meetings, stand-up or sit down; micro-managing managers and lead-from-all-sides project leaders; to allow me to be at least doubly productive as I am in a 9to5 day. (And often as not triply productive as many of my peers.)

   I would work 4 days weeks or 3 week months, and at least double my usable free time.

   And they picked up the tab for my evening take-outs, as well as the hotels.

3. There is considerable personal (and group; I was usually part of a team that took on these roles), satisfaction in bringing a behind schedule & over budget, doomed to fail project in, back on track.

   Even better if you can bring it in, on or near to time & budget.

As with all aphorisms, over-simplifications and dogmas; there are always (at least) two ways to view things.

If you are charged with developing an up to 12 man-month -- 4 men/3 months; 2 men/6 months etc. -- (say) 50k-100k, data-entry or shopping cart project, for the 3rd or subsequent time, then you can, maybe, get away with a big-design-up-front-and-hope-the-implementation-works, waterfall approach to project management.

But, once you reach the scale of projects costing (multi-)millions and requiring high-10s/low-100s of developers, by the time you've researched and planned your project to the level of detail required to ensure that method succeeds, you are bankrupt!

Because your competitors brought 3 or more revisions of your vision to the market place and stole the march on you. They were probably imperfect--lacking functionality or a slick interface or both--but that improved over their 3 releases. And at that point, it doesn't matter how perfect your implementation is would have been, it won't get a look in. That's in the commercial software world.

In governmental projects, you were cancelled before you wrote your first line of code. Actually, before you even came close, because almost all government contracts call for an early proof of concept demonstration; and then frequent sometimes unannounced, proofs of progress.