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Do Long Work Hours Affect Code Quality?
tooTired asks: "At my company the owner is heavily implying that the development staff needs to start working longer hours and weekends to shorten the time-frames on our current projects. The exact quote is 'These 8 hour days have to stop, we need to be working 15 hours a day and weekends, balls to the wall.' We are heavily under-staffed even with my multiple attempts to show the owner that we need more resources. My general feeling is that long hours is generally a symptom of poor project management, and not something to be sought after. I wanted to ask the Slashdot community their opinions on how working long hours during the week and weekends affects the quality of the code they produce, and the overall success of the project." A large reason why many in this industry find themselves working long hours and weekends is that management makes unreasonable expectations and deadlines. Are there ways of communicating to management that long hours to rush a project to completion is not the way to complete a successful project? Update: 08/30 23:11 GMT by C :Grammatical errors in title, corrected. Sorry about that.
Long hours seem to affect spelling.
Simply, no matter what business your in, you start making poor decisions when your tired. Code quality is gonna drop.
--Stupidity is Self Curing!
and they do accamulate too. So if you do it over long periods of time, you will be a very bad programmer.
p.
Do Long Work Hours Effect Code Quality?
Ask Slashdot: Does bad spelling AFFECT code quality?
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
but they obviously affect the grammatical skills of the editors.
Humans are not machines. You simply do not up the hours that they are 'on', and it works.
Nevermind code quality - what about burnout, resentment towards management, and seeing domain knowledge go out the door when coders get sick of working 15 hour days and leave for another company?
15 hours? He's not serious, is he?
"Old man yells at systemd"
If you work more than 30 Hours a week or 48Hrs in the UK, it is against the law, and you are protected, no matter what littergation.
In Germany companies are fined hundreds of thousands, if a company exceeds working hours.
There are ways round this, but fortunately, in the UK, there are more LAWS to protect the employee, then to protect the employer.
We all live, but we we work to live, not to work.
Thank you Churchill.
For many other reasons than lack of sleep. Lack of sunshine, asshole of a boss, no hot chicks in the office, slashdot blocked, no more Howard Stern... Sleep can be a factor, but its loosing the comfort zone, or a major change around you that is most distruptive. Every office needs one nice piece of eye candy... It makes the day go by so much better. Its like in lectures... If the prof sucks... Just stare at the hot chick... PS: If my gf is reading this.. I'm pissed... She better not become a geek...
Tournament Management Online &
I think some days when you just feel it, you should be allowed to work as long as you feel nessecary. Not be constrained by 8 hours, if you're in "the zone", you should run with it. If its just not happening for you when it comes time to clock out, go ahead and leave, rest up, and come back tomorrow. Weekends should be the same, it shouldn't be mandatory that you come in on saturday, but extra pay and a free lunch wouldn't hurt.
Long hours do affect the quality of code you write. If you're not tired, you'd be more inclined to take the safer, slower way around rather than the faster but unsafe methods. Ever wonder why buffer overflows seem to appear in all types of software?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Only if management happens to be steeped in coding. If they're strictly bean-counting brown-nosing suits (a.k.a 99.9% of them) then no ways of communicating exist. They see deadlines and budgets, whereas the coder only sees silly little issues like writing the application so it doesn't kill 50% of life on Earth at compile time.
Jack
I hate to say this, but sometimes it is the answer.
I've seen a number of projects (mainly large scale eb dev) at my company and others where unrealistic deadlines are met by long hours.
In my average 8hr day, i probably take 1/2 hour lunch, surf and check email for maybe an hour, and smoke for 1/2 an hour. That leaves 6 hours to work, with a break at least once per hour.
Of those 6 hours, at least 1, probably 2 hours will be meetings. You can kind of count that as a break.
Now, when crunch time comes and I start working 14hr days, I generally find that the ratio of work/slack stays the same. The quality of code isn't noticably affected - same #lines/hour, and about the same proportion ripped up in code review.
I do find I'm dead at the end of the day, and 1 day a week off is essential. But... if you take regular breaks and don't burn yourself up, working longer hours is good.
So, kids, the moral of the story is... if you have to work more than 10 hours a day, start smoking.
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
Lots of times, non-management people forget about the business side of a company. It may not be a matter of bad management, or anything preventable, it could just be that the boss cannot afford anybody else and that if projects aren't pumped out in a timely manner, the business will go under.
If thats the case, there is a whole other debate as to whether or not the real reason should be communicated to the people at the bottom, as their reactions can be unpredictable and sometimes hostile.
Remember to try and look at it from both sides!
CMBurns
http://www.netnexus.com
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Don't burn yourself out for this wanker. 8 hours a day is a totally reasonable limit for a job
Sure, sometimes coders spend a lot more time then that on their job, but that's because they enjoy it, because they want to spend that time working on code for their job.
If your boss is demanding you work 15 hours a day, quit.
Will it affect code quality? I don't really know. In the short term I doubt it, actually. Will it affect your quality of life? Absolutely. Will it affect employee satisfaction? Probably, and down the line that will affect code quality. If you don't like your job, you're code will definitely suck.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
n/m
IN TEH FUCHAR, LITERSY WLIL EB OPSHANAL!!!!!111
As a developer, your opinion probably isn't going to make a difference. In my experience, some project managers will give you lip service about your input into project timelines, but in the end all that matters is what the sales/marketing person told the customer. Most of the time (and especially in times like these) the slave drivers get the most recognition from the upper management.
Is it right? Absolutely not.
Does it produce better products. Absolutely not.
But just try to explain this to a CFO who wants revenue THIS quarter.
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
Bottom line is this.......
Coding is not widgets and coding takes a significant amount of mental energy. Tell your boss to try and remember what it was like taking the SAT/GMAT/GRE and say you go through that mental workout every day.
If you code past your mental limit you will spend the next day fixing your bugs and not working on productive work.
For me, my best coding is from 7 Am to about noon. After 2 I stop coding and start doing other things...documentation, bug fixes, things that do not require alot of original thought.
My company suggests that programmers work no more than 30 hours / week because of the code efficiency issue!
T
yes,
if your manager has ZERO creativity and/or ZERO power over how your team does things, then he might choose to tell you to work long hours.
a creative and 'enabled' project manager could think of ways around it so that you dont need to go over 10 hours a day. for example: hire another person or a temp worker!
anytime that a team of workers has to play "catch up" with a development schedule, is a time where the project manager screwed up!!!!!!! come on people! a project manager should take responsibility for not overworking his staff, or he should not go outside of the reasonable expectations that he gave his/her team.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Sure, job markets may be tough sometimes, but your mental and physical health if MORE IMPORTANT than ANY JOB. QUIT.
Encourage your coworkers to QUIT.
Your employers will get the message. If they actually value you, they may offer to re-hire you.
If they beg for you to come back, make sure they back off on the demands or at least give you BUCKETS and BUCKETS of money!
Executives don't like reality. They are all about wish fulfillment. When your project(s) are not completed by their deadlines, you will be fired. You will be the one who has to pay, because you were the one repeatedly pointing out that you needed more resources, given the requirements and deadlines. You contradicted your executive's worldview. In any competition between reality and an executive's world-view, the executive wins, in the short term. Reality always wins in the long term.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Here's a good reference: Forty Hour Week on c2.com, which seems to be the best web authority for Extreme Programming discussions and patterns.
Give it a gander.
fifth sigma, inc.
tell him to work the same hours you do.
That usually works.
If that doesn't talk to him about overtime pay, and how some states require it.
And if neither of those work, then start a programmers union.
After sustained periods of such hours, the programmers will get burned out, lose all motivation, and eventually will find themselves working somewhere else because for some reason the don't produce any more...unless you start taking Prozac. You're being used as an expendable resource. Get out of there.
For one - your boss is gonna have to pay you some pretty sick overtime. It would make more sense to hire more programmers (even if they are just temps) to throw at the project. It would probably be cheaper that way.
A good way to find out if the number of hours relates to performance is to do a small "lines of code"/hour test.
It is not totally accurate of performance but it would be nice to see.
I"m not a programmer, i'm draw on computers. Graphic design is something similiar to programming. When i start rushing my jobs i miss key things, overprint, trapping, SPELLING etc etc. I tell my boss, listen.. you want me to rush a job and have me make these mistakes and then it comes back up here and i have to correct it having more stress on me and you. why dont you just let me take my time and do it right! managment doesn't listen. they think that we can get it out lickady split.. of coarse we can, but do you want half ass work? when i see work come up here i dont want ot see it again until its approved.. if i see a job come back up more then twice and get bitched about it, i throw it back and say, give me more time then.
thanks, had to release that
..demand that Jolt Cola can be considered a business expense and you'll be fine :)
Back when I was in games, I worked the last four months of the project everyday for ~12-14 hours/day. by the time the game went gold, I didn't give a fsck if the playtesters found a bug, if they fired me, or even if my short hairs were on fire. It took me more than a month to really recover and become productive again. I'd say that my company did not get their money's worth once that recovery month was factored in. I also knew that I would never, ever do that again. A few months later, when the company was shut down by it's parent, I left the game industry for ever. I'm much happier now.
There definitely are ways of communicating that long hours don't help meet deadlines. Work normal hours and beat the deadlines. Meanwhile, start circulating your rsume.
There is no excuse in this modern day and age that workers in any industry should feel compelled to work Industrial Revolution hours. This is one step away from slavery, and your manager should be ashamed. Of course, it's happened before. It happened during the 20's in the breakfast cereals industry, during the 30's in the preserved wood furniture industry, and even in modern times on the sets of Hollywood films like the latest Star Wars prequels. It's a throwback to less progressive times, and should be fought tooth and nail. This is a great example of why coders and technology workers would benefit from unionization. We programmers are not professionals, we are laborers. And we deserve the same protection afforded laborers in other industries.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!!
I mean good lord man, you're telling me every symptom of every business that I've seen go under locally. The whole "balls to the walls" syndrome is often more of a "we're cutting budgets that we really shouldn't" syndrome. I fully expect that you'll find that the same managers that are willing to have YOU (not them) put in 15 hour days are also the ones willing to say "sure we can do X+Y at the budget for just X" to his higher ups just to look better.
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
My advice would be to use those seven extra hours in front of a PC to tidy up your resume and get it out there. You are going to be looking for a job soon enough, you might as well get the headstart.
Ask yourself, how many dotcom tales of people agreeing to work without pay for a while; work long hours; all the rest of it, you've heard. Now, how many of those companies actually survived by doing that? Next to none?
Long hours affect motivation more as you slog through code. It hits home harder as you work on a project that you feel is unique, at 3.23am when a mail from a trusted friends arrives, informing you of a discovered project that has been completed and addresses the same space and niche you've been running against time and resources to complete. The motivation begins to deflate, as thoughts abound on how much you've sunked in, as the remnants of your ambition races to evolve the project. The belief that it'll soon complete is erased, and the paradox of thinking that you were alone in the niche. The fear of being misunderstood now vanished, as you know someone else out there understands the work you have done, but has achieved what you are still striving... ...
Life always finds a way...
http://yat.ch/
Does that answer your question?
Every software company I have worked at claims that a 50 hour work week is the norm. However, what I always find is that I am never actaully "working" for even close to that. A lot of the day is spent socializing with friends, longer lunches, and more web surfing. Management needs to wise up to the fact that just because people are at work for longer hours does not mean you always get more work out of them. Longer hours usually just equal less productivity in my experience.
Long hours dont affect code quality, employees ambition affects code quality! If its late and im working on a project (personal) that i enjoy, and im way tired, i still code fine. If its something my hearts not into it then i wont be able to work. My suggestion to employers: Pay lots for overtime and reward good coding with acess to a "special fridge" filled with energy drinks and jolt!
Nuff said. Sorry guys. But I wish I can do more.
Write your congressmen! Oh, wait, they are paid by the corporations that hired you. Sorry, dude. You are fcuked.
Sometimes putting in the extra work is worth it; but, if the end of the project is a long way off, DONT.
If you put in the extra hours now, will it reduce the extra hours later? Again, if so, fine, otherwise, NO.
Why? Because if the project manager gets it in his head he can have 80hr weeks out of everyone he will plan them that way. It is very easy to become burned out and few managers know how to properly handle it to prevent that.
You're living in a Dilbert cartoon. Get to the escape pod, quick!
What about the many stories of caffiene-addled coders working 36 hours at a time, and sleeping under their desks, coding under pressure to get the job done on time? See here for a good one.
I mean yeah, most normal people want to work 8 hours a day. But others want to be supermen, and are willing to put in long, long hours of work to beat the competition.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Don't walk away from this situation, run.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
You're damn right it affects coding quality, and work quality. How can I be expected to work well, with a clean mind and plan if I no longer have my own personal life.
..8 hours day have to stop.. BULLSHIT. Period.
These 8 hour days have to stop, we need to be working 15 hours a day and weekends, balls to the wall.
The company doesn't own me. Period. If I heard that statement from my boss, I'd be in my car and on my way home before she had a chance to even blink at me. Despite I do frequent Slashdot, I have a life outside work. When I get hired by X company, I didn't sign on so I could spend my every waking hour and moment working for that company. Any manager who doesn't realize an employee has a life outside the company isn't qualified to manage employees. Period.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
I manage engineers. I've been an engineer. It's hard when you don't have the headcount you need. It takes alot of communication and socialization on a manager's part to have the process for booking resources institutionalized along with the process for trading projects and features with your customers (internal and external). You have to be able to say here's what we're all doing, it's exactly according to the plan we presented you at the beginning of the quarter and which you agreed to. If you want us to do something else, that's fine but you pick what we drop from our project schedule. The time to communicate and educate the organization about why it's bad to purposely put people in high workload situations is not when they want are asking you to take on a high workload. You engender this knowlege during a non-panic time and around actual failure cases. Also, when upper management walks through the engineer area and sees every out (for whatever reason) and say's it 'feels' like people aren't working hard, there must be 2 responses: First, I don't manage based on 'feelings', I manage based on facts. Let's talk about what you think is not getting done and we can address concrete issues. Second (and reserve this on a case/case basis), if upper management is walking through wondering why few people are in their cube, it may be proper to respond: "they're probably out interviewing".
1. What kind of project?
Remember, 9 women cannot make a baby in one month.
2. What kind of platform/technology/etc?
Some coders have an affinity for a certain technology.
3. What percenteage of the hours is spent on coding and not in status meetings?
If your coders are forced to do 15-hr marathons because they are spending 2-3 hrs a day on BS meetings, then you have a problem.
4. What kind of coder?
There are some programmers that get into the zone big time, and they will crank code out for 10-15 hours (I used to do that back in the day, now my thresold is about 5 hours in a row) on cigarrettes, pizza and soda.
5. How is the work setup?
I spent 9 months on a project that averaged 10-12 hours a day including weekends. What made it bearable? I had a TV card and digital cable fed into it. I would dial it up to Discovery channel and code away. The soothing voice of the documentary narrators kept me going for hours.
Later I got promoted and got an office on the executive wing. That was a disaster! Now at my new job I have a setup similar to the one I have in my home office and sometimes I don't feel tired until I have hit the 10 hour mark (voluntarily by the way, which makes a hell of a difference).
Still, if you don't like the long hours, then leave. All that BS about the tough job market is not valid anymore. As bad as things are in DC Metro area I landed a job with same pay and 1/10th of the stress within a week of activating my Monster profile.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
... is standard at the largest privately held software company, since the company was founded over 25 years ago.
Disclaimer: I work for this company but I am based in Germany, and ironically enough the (trade union enforced) standard work-week here is 37.5 hours.
When relocating back to Germany I would have never expected to work longer hours than my American colleagues (still have much more holidays though).
The founder and CEO of my company always claimed that long work hours adversely affect the quality of the code, and that a 35 hour weeks for programmers makes perfect business sense. I think he is right.
"As of today, August 30, 2002, OSDN will cease operation of DaveCentral.com. The decision to do so is based on a content strategy that will help OSDN provide better, more focused editorial for its readership within the high tech and developer community." - Can Someone translate this into non-PC English. It's hard to see how OSDN can succeed with anything if they couldn't do it with a site this popular.
Being a college student, and constantly staying up for 30+, I have a little experience here. I find that being awake and concentrating on a subject can be easily achieved for 20+ hours straight, the only problem being that the body demands rest afterwards. I remember reading an article before of what the natural sleep cycle would be if the sun were not present, and I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that a person would be awake for a significantly longer period than 20 hours... followed by a sleep of much longer than 8 hours. Working 15 hours a day every other day would be ok, but if you did it everyday it would kill you after a long time. Personally, I wouldn't mind working 20 hour shifts every two days.... and I don't see this as a bad alternative to regular hours.... except perhaps for emergency physicians and the such...
-Matt
I'd suggest you show your boss the results of various studies on lack of sleep and overworking (such as here)
Its not only detrimental to you, its bad for the company because you can introduce lots of mistakes into your code when your overworked
Your boss just has to see the downside to a overworked employee, and how it'll effect him (ie: poor code comes back to bite him).
I know many of the times I've pulled 18 hour coding binges, I've ended up doing more damage than good.
Help pay for my wedding! Go to my kickass website
How it affects code quality - don't know. In my case, if I work for around 3 days for around 19 hours and WORK seriously most of the time, that might work, but after that there is a steep decline in quality and productivity. If I HANG AROUND at work for the same amount of hours per day, I can do it for weeks.
So, I don't have an answer, but I quess it depends strongly about whether you need to concentrate on what you are doing a lot or not.
I read an interesting editorial several months ago that argued that demanding that employees (of any kind) work overtime all the time is the same as over-commiting any kind of resource (assembly line capacity, electrical system capacity, etc).
The one difference between human beings and most other limited resources is that, when required, they can put forth extraordinary effort. Many a deadline has been met successfully with such effort at the end. But when management starts to require extraordinary effort all the time, it is time to split. The company is clearly managed and is probably doomed to fail
-- an actual quote (made partly, but not totally in jest, i'm sure) by our CEO, in which he suggested that, a day being 24 hours, a half day would be 12. Yeah -- we thought it was funny, too :-)
Regards, John
Falling You -- exploring the beauty of voice and sound
Falling You - beautiful
If they want 15 hour days, and they say you need to go "balls to the wall", then that just means that their balls are right up against the wall. These guys probably have a lot more to lose than you. Apply a little pressure, see what happens. Rally the other engineers together. And don't do the long hours unless there are serious bonuses or prospects of equity (and the equity has the potential to be worth something).
Above all else, remember, you can't do this forever, 15 hour days don't mean twice the productivity.
I heard a story about someone on deck at a big 5 consulting firm. They worked 100+ hour weeks and all to make partner, and eventually worked until a lot of the systems in their body up and quit. Just overstressed for so long, everything started to shut down at once. Went way over the million dollar lifetime healthcare cap (the firm has to pick up all future medical bills.) The guy made partner and recovered but became a medical case study.
Troll Like a Champion Today
As Feynman might have said, the managers can fool themselves, but nobody can fool the computer. If you're too tired to do the project properly, it's going to be pretty obvious sooner or later.
/really/ like iterative development. When you get stuck with an unrealistic schedule, it's pretty obvious when it takes you three weeks to pull off what was supposed to take two.
The problem is that it's usually later. Without good visibility into the project's progress, it's really tempting to do unhelpful things (getting the staff to work very long hours, adding more programmers near the end).
This is one of the reasons that I
You may wind up doing hellish overtime earlier in the project, but at least it will be plain enough whether that works before too long. What your management does next tells you whether you should be working there.
Michael
Cheap - Fast - Good. Pick any 2.
Give that choice to management and explain it.
You can do a project with one or two of those criteria.
Cheap (cost of development)
Fast (Time to finish project)
Good (Quality product)
Of course you can't typically change plans mid-project. If you decide you want it good and cheap, then latter decide fast and good, you are in trouble.. adding people to a late project only makes it later.
If management doesn't understand this, find a management team that does.
More hours == give more more fucking money.
If I'm spending all my time on you, you must give me enough so that on that rare Tuesday night, I can relax in my bomb ass pad, which I drive to in my 75 thousand car.
I'm tired of my '99 BMW 525 anyway.
If you enjoy the work then work as hard as you want.
What I would do is not make a big deal of it but make sure you do your 8 hours and go home. If anyone tells you to do more hours tell them politely no. All the time look for another job.
I assume the owner is the first to arrive and the last to leave?
Manager definition of successful:
Complete. Within Budget. Within Time Frame.
Programmer definition of successful:
Efficient Code. Easy to use. Simple to understand. A well rounded product to be proud of.
Here in Europe, we have laws to protect against worker exploitation - You CANNOT be made to work more than 48 hours per week if you don't want to. Emphasis is switching towards a 37 hour week (that's how many hours I work), even 35 hour week in some parts of the European Union. 15 hours per day? That's 75 hours per week. Sounds like you work in a sweat shop in some poor, underdeveloped county.
-- Fuck Beta
As I type this, I'm sitting at my office, 7pm EST, and all the rest of the employees went home hours ago. They were sent home early on the three day weekend. I will work all three days of the weekend, hoping upon hope I can afford to work "only" 5-6 hours on Sunday. I am working on what could be the largest project of my life, which has a hard (initial) deadline of mid-september.
I'm starting to go insane. Literally. I've lost touch with reality. I have a 4 month old son I rarely see. I go straight from the bed to the office to the bed. Sure, we could have started this project 6 months ago, but instead we started 6 weeks ago, because our client couldn't get their act together. And so, I work 75-80 hour work weeks to make sure there's a remote possibility this project will make its deadline.
80 hour workweeks provide more throughput than 40, no doubt, but it's definitely diminishing retuns. I can tell you that around the 11th or 12th work-hour of the day, I'm absolutely useless, but I must keep plugging on, even if it takes me 4 times as long to do something. When I worked 15 hours the night before, I am catatonic at my desk the next morning. But, the job will get done, and it will get done well. Sure, balls-to-the-wall is energizing at first. My first two 70-hour workweeks were no-doubt some of the most efficient of my life-- but now I've lost touch with reality. I can't tell you what day it is unless I look at my computer's clock! (Seriously.)
I work a salary. Every hour I stay past 40, my hourly wage plummets. The boss promised me a 2% bonus of the billing, but if I do the math, that will work out to a bonus smaller than minimum wage. (with no overtime of course)
The net effect is that when this project is done, I will be looking for other work. So make sure and point that out to your bosses. If they can't afford high-turnover, they can't afford 60+ hour workweeks.
I've managed a number of development teams over the years. Here are some of my thoughts. Flame away if you want.
Sometimes, there are days/weeks where it is neccessary for the team to put in some unreasonably long hours in order to get the project done. Especially during the time immediately before a release/launch.
That said, when I ask my staff to put in long hours, I'm there with them. If the team doesn't need "management", I roll up my sleeves and do whatever needs to be done whether that is coding, infrastructure work, or being an HTML monkey.
I don't think it is reasonable to ask for that sort of performance on an ongoing basis or for an extended period of time. It is very draining.
I also think it is very important for both myself and the organization to show it's appreciation for the people who make these sort of sacrifices for the company. This includes:
When people are running late, pay for the pizza. Look for other ways to be considerate.
Have some sort of launch festivities. Celebrate your success. Publicly acknowledge (preferably -- not just within IT) the people who made it happen.
I think that if management and the company treats its employees reasonably well, that the techies should be willing to work their assess off and burn the candle at both ends when needed.
Evolution: love it or leave it
Normal programmers can sustain 55 hour weeks for quite a while without serious problems. Over that, and they start dropping in code quality (but not quantity) pretty fast.
Some programmers with aspergers can literally do 90+ hour weeks on end without any real drop.
And then there are idiot managers who belive that 15 hour/day "sprints" can be sustained for years...
Added to those are the truely evil managers who force 15 hour/day working times because they know that when you burn out they can replace you easily right now...
Idiot managers won't start to believe you until they have a few failures. Evil ones will make examples of those who speak out. If you have one of these, it's time to polish up the old resume.
Back when I was coding for a dot com company, the owner and manager there held pride in getting 100~200 hours PER WEEK from each of us.
The result? The dev team quickly lost precious health. The project leader ended up in hospital.
The quality of our code went straight down to hell since we got so exhausted and disgruntaled.
The management ignored our request for a more resonable work hour, and kept promising the clients quick product developement and giving us impossible deadlines.
The owner kept buying these flashy and expansive toys while telling us that his short on fund to buy us tools or hire more much needed helps. After he said the same about the bonus he promised us, the entire dev team quit.
From my own experience, if you pull to much overtime, most of that time is going to be debugging and fixing the stupid mistakes you make because you are dead tired.
There are always exceptions, but generally long hours, especially long *involuntary* hours equates to bad code.
I've never had problems where there was the occasional long day or even overnighter in the immediate runup to a deadline. When it becomes the norm, there's something wrong in the company that just working longer hours won't fix.
When I hear management utter phrases like "15 hours a day, balls to the wall" and similar bullshit, I start looking for another job or, if it's really bad and the unemployment situation is OK, just quit on the spot. That sort of management attitude either means you're on a sinking ship or one where the captain's lost touch with reality. Let *them* put their "balls to the wall" for a change, most of them probably assume it's golf terminology.
If you have to work 15 hrs/day, then sleep 8hrs/day, that only leaves you with 1 hour of the day for yourself, whether with family, wife/girlfriend, LAN party, etc, etc.
I guess this really becomes a case where your work has taken over all other aspects of your life.
$cat
Of course long hours degrade code quality. When you have to trade in the Dew for serious, non-carbonated amphetimines in order to meet a deadline - something's gonna suffer.
No - really.
Anyway, my company recently changed our development style to take some pressure off the engineering staff. Whereas previously, 14 hour days were somewhat the norm, those have now been seriously reduced. Those with famlilies actualy get to see them. Those without, get to play Final Fantasy X until 4 AM. Overall, moral is better, and there's not been a signifigant change in output - and the quality is improving.
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
The best option, if you can afford it, is to quit and get a better job working for sane people. Sometimes, you'll need to put in a 15 hour day. It's unfortunate, but deadlines happen. But to be expected to put in 15 hour days EVERYDAY is absurd and insulting. You have a life outside of work, you need sleep, and you have rights under the law.
Back on topic, working 15 hour days WILL affect your code quality, not to mention your quality of life. Different people have different ways in which they work best, and sometimes a long coding session can work wonderfully, but over the long term it will result in frazzled nerves and bad code.
If he's expecting you to work 15 hour days, you need to let him know you should have twice as many people working 8 hour days instead. If he protests, drop that job like a bad habit. You'll only be hurting your health and sanity if you stay.
15 hours a day, huh? Sounds 'bout right. Only spending 8 hrs a day playing quake and reading slashdor? So how'd ya like to be Joe Whopper Flopper for those 8 hours? Aren't you even slightly grateful to have a job? You're probably not in high tech, and definitely not in the disk drive biz. I suggest you scale back your work week to something your delicate constitution can handle. Screw the profit-sharing, let's go snow boarding.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
and thre aint nouthibn wrng wuith my cde!
Any manager requesting such work hours should be dashed about the head and shoulders with a copy of "The Mythical Man Month" and then forced to read it.
Reasons To Quit Your Job for $1000, Alex.
You should point out to management that if they fire the whole QA department, they can reduce their headcount AND get the products out the door faster. ;-)
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
You can always do what I did. Resign. :-)
;-)
But on the other hand, the situation might be just as bad at your new job. (If you get one, that is.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I don't do it very often, but sometimes it's ok to work long hours, specially if you're excited about the project. Given enough (but not too much) caffeine, it won't affect the code I'm writing at the moment.
...
However, I found out that every time I do that I feel like trash on the day after, and that day I usually write shitty code as a result. Not deliberately bad code, but it's just that on these days I'm not capable of brilliant insights, so I tend to stay on more bureaucratic code.
Oh well, that's how I react to it at least
My experience, after more than 6 years working in Silicon Valley, is that sustained periods of long hours can be damaging. But short bursts to hit a specific project goal can be a good thing. Programming - when done well - requires huge concentration. You have to focus hard on the code. Once you're in the swing of it, you don't want to be interupted. That's why the culture of long and eccentric hours has grown up - its the way good engineers usually work.
As a rule I figure you can sustain two or maybe three major bursts of 100 hours a week. Each burst shouldn't last more than 5 weeks. I once did a ten week burst and it nearly killed me. Once you go over 5 weeks, you'll get into serious counter-productivity.
Its also important to have a good reason to do so. If your company doesn't have the cash or revenue to hire more people and needs you to put in the hours to get a revolutionary new product out, that's one thing. If its poor planning or management that causes the crisis, it will be much harder to motivate people to put in long hours.
Sailing over the event horizon
That is part of starting a company. My feeling is, as long as management is honest about the financial position and project deadlines, it is OK to ask for employees to be asking for extra effort to complete the project/build the company. In return you, the employee, should be recieving equity in the company. This is the deal that should have been made clear to you when you accepted the position.
If you are not cut out for it get a job somewhere more stable.
I've seen a number of projects through to completion, and my general feeling is that long hours are a last-ditch measure to try and pull things together. There are a few exceptions, like some people who like working evenings.
The long hours I and my coworkers have endured have generally seen many last-minute accomplishments. We referred to a fairly recent project as "X and Y's miracle show." Perhaps that is what your boss is trying to tap. Ultimately, I think this is misguided.
Your team's talent should be used almost exclusively to prevent massive problems in the first place, instead of curing them at the last minute. While your team likely has talent to both fix problems in their infancy, and scramble to patch them at the last minute, the repeated long hours are eventually going to wear away at your most senior staff. The ones who've been through the most projects and who have the most invaluable experience. They will leave, thinking there's a better way. And they're right.
I think some long hours are unavoidable. I've been coding professionally since 1989 and haven't seen a project complete without them. But the projects I've been working on lately have been getting better and better with less effort. The amount of trouble a team went through to complete a project is not a valid method of measuring a project's quality.
If you focus on doing less for a given system, with maximal impact, while avoiding as many problems as you can ahead of time, you'll be rewarded.
Are there ways of communicating to management that long hours to rush a project to completion is not the way to complete a successful project?
Quitting might get the message across. But, management may choose to be oblivious, that's their perogative.
Also, you have to realize that "successful" may mean something completely different to management than it does to a developer. Successful to a dev means the nasty bugs are gone and the product performs the intended functions. Successful to management might mean that they finally got the thing out the door just in time to capture a high-profile customer that was being romanced by the competition, and we can worry about the bugs later.
There are lots of people who are happy to put in 80 hours a week (Microsofties for example) but it doesn't sound like you're in that position. Putting in overtime because you love your job is one thing, "required" overtime is different.
Your well-worded voluntary resignation, quoting the "15 hours a day," and CCd to your State Attorney General will get the message across.
how about affecting ur relationship w/ ur SO? no one seems to be taking that into account. this can really make it or break it, folks. i know a (at least one) company that does this. this seriously damages life at home. i see the person come home, by wiped out, go to bed, wake up and go to work again. that is SERIOUSLY not healthy. the boss himself must have a poor relationship, unless he is not willing to stay that late and supervise himself.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
", balls to the wall"
;)
sue the company for creating a hostile work place, and making sexual innuendo, then retire.
this depends. I have seen a 'crunch time' where long hoiurs where out in to meet a deadline. This will work, on ocasion. it will fail long term.
Look at Tivo. in order to get a product out befor the competition, they had to rethink there process, and pretty much work everyday to meet there new deadline, and they did it.
now those where people that most, if not all, got a piece of the company, so thats strong incentive.
However, if you are suddenly expected to work 15 hours a say, and weekends as part of normal operating procedure, I would contact the labor board and see if they can bring pressure onto the management and keep you anonanous.
This is why I would like to see software developers orginize. If you think you can get support, start a union and strike.
they can replace you and that impact will be a speed bump, but if they have to rehire everybody, that would be chaos, and that is where the worker has the power.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Now if we step back from the coal face and take a longer view the question you have to ask is do we expect our programming staff to pull insane hours every project? Hell no, they'll leave or in an even worse scenario they'll stay and their productivity will drop below the Z. Your fella sounds like he's either new to the game or just wrong for the job. Your can't afford to burn out a development team per project even in these down turn days.
Programming is an essentially human activity and to get the best out of your real software (the fleshy pink stuff) you need to take a long term view, but I can understand how their are many managers out there who think productivity = longer hours and thats it.
So use the simple arguments, people who are tired make more mistakes, are less likely to confer with peers, get upset when confronted or corrected, get angry more quickly and generally do a bad job (no surprises here).
Joe.
Who cares if working 15 hour days "works"? Sending kids down the coal mines "works" if your goal is to get coal, but you wouldn't be dumb enough to do it would you? Tell management to get stuffed.
If you're not getting paid hourly wages with overtime for the extra hours (e.g. your employer considers your position exempt) there are still rules about how much they have to pay you that may be to your advantage....
/ as k310.html
http://www.fairmeasures.com/asklawyer/questions
You want to know what affects your code quality
more than anything? Attitude. If you can't take the hours (as most people, including me, can't) then get a different job.
I wanted to ask the Slashdot community their opinions on how working long hours during the week and weekends affects the quality of the code they produce, and the overall success of the project.
Forget about code quality. Forget success. Your life is too short.
There's nothing wrong with having a modest carreer, and enjoying your work. But just be straight about one thing: when you are 60, you will in all likelyhood look back and see it as a waste.
People who are happily married live longer. Having a relationship takes as much time as a full time job .
You cannot have a relationship with your partner on 20 minutes a day of discussing the bills, the chores, or over a sandwich. It's a full time commitment. It takes spending quality time together, and not just quality, but quantity also.
Wanna have children? You think they're going to turn out great if you're never there to be there for them? You want them to feel loved, and nourished, and mentored? Then you have to be there. Not at work, not on business trips, not at the mall. But there, with them.
You want your parents to feel loved by their children (ie. you) when they grow old, and you're all they've got? Then you have to spend time with them.
Time is all we have. And all we really have, that really counts, is each other.
Geeks are probably the last people to get this, but if you really knew that a truck was going to hit you tomorrow, you would find that your real desire would be to spend the time with those who are close to you. Your job, money, and gizmos are meaningless by comparison.
Work, and prosper. Don't be a slave. Have balance. Be sweet to each other. Don't let some stupid and misguided manager tell you that you have to kill yourself to "succeed". Success is measured in happiness, not paycheck or accomplishments.
If you have the talent to work on class projects, then fine. If you don't, then just let it go. You can still be happy. Truly happy. Just open your eyes and see that life is more than a resume. You have the capacity to love and you can learn to use it to create happiness.
Be true to yourself.
A demmand of 10 hour days will get my boss a grumble and an "OK, if we have to we have to."
A demmand of 12 hour days will get my boss a moan and an "OK, if you buy me dinner."
A demmand of 15 hour days will get my boss a scream and an "Are you F***ing nuts?! I want a 50% raise!"
A demmand of weekends on top of that will get my boss a foot in his ass.
There is no reason to put up with it. A *request* maybe but not a demmand. Also, if you don't refuse and let them walk all over you, they will expect to be able to do so with everyone they hire. Before long 15 hour days will seem a happy memory. This is the sort of thing that would spread throughout the industry. Before long it would be mass hystaria. Dogs and cats, living together in sin...
"You didn't have time to do it right, so you will have to do it over."
You tired Cliff?
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
If my boss told me to work 15 hours a day, I'd spend 7 of 'em doing my resume.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
you get overtime for the hours.
At my job I'm in a union, with computer maintenance as the main job, and some embedded and web program as a sideline. My boss came to my on a wednesday and said a project HAD to be done by monday, 4pm. I told him I'd try, and finshed by sunday 6pm. He got my timecard and hit the roof! He tried to claim that because I was programming, I wasn't entitled to OT, the union told him to shove it, they went to the NLRB, about a year later I got the cash.
Funny, they don't ask me to stay anymore...
What counts is "effective hours".
But, how does increaing the real hours affect the effective hours?
I believe the best solution is to have a large open-plan office per team (the Clean Room). When in this room you must be working: internet/email strictly for work, talk quitely - only about work - and document, design, test or code continuously while there. Overwork? No! Since you only have to be there 5 HOURS PER DAY (timed using normal swipe-cards say).
When you want to talk, surf, play games, eat go for a walk - even go home or to a movie, you go (meetings have to be worked in, in some reasonable way). Perhaps there's a communal area with "recreational" computers, a mini-gym, food, drinks, whatever.
As long as you get through those 5 hours, you do what you like.
...when men were men and were happy to hack 15 hours a day and weekend?
If you really enjoy what you're doing, you're probably already working 15 hours a day and weekend.
If you don't enjoy it, just quit and do something else.
But please stop whining !
I'm a manager (government, no less) and this idea of regularized overtime is absurd. If your people are already working 15 hour days, what do you do when a crisis hits? Nothing, you crash and burn. On the other hand, with a well-managed workforce doing normal hours, when the crisis hits they all rise to the challenge because it's unusual, a bit exciting and they know it is not normal. They all pitch in and once you have crushed all before you, they can settle down to the regular routine again. The hard part is not responding to a crisis, it's ensuring the regular day-to-day wellbeing of your staff so they can perform well during a crisis. This guy should be fired instantly.
Time to stock up caffine from thinkgeek.com! Hey, if the hours get too bad you can bring Caffinated Soap for your on the job showers.
The above not endorsed by thinkgeek.com or the OSDN network, but they might like the extra sales.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I highly recommend that you get a copy of Peopleware. It is a fantastic book overall, but it deals in extent with the death march that is development overtime. I highly recommend you give a copy to your boss as a "Boss' day" present or the like, feigning that you're not quite sure what it's about.
One of the principles of Extreme Programming is that of No Overtime. You should be able to find a lot of XP resources that attest to that fact.
Your manager is at best a fool.
A while back (I won't say how big a while), I was working on a fairly large project - happily not one with seriously bad time pressure. I'd been trying to work out a bug for a day or three and was very tired.
Suddenly I had the fix - it involved just exchanging two lines. I compiled and ran it and the bug I was chasing was gone. So I went home.
The next day the bug was back.
But by then I'd forgotten what I had done (in part, I suspect because of the fatigue) and how to unfix it. (Yes, I did know about source code control systems - but I was very tired, relieved and really wanted a beer to (um) celebrate. I learned my lesson, I assure you.)
Two weeks later I found the problem - exchanging those two lines was very wrong indeed. But it did fix a few simple cases. (The real problem was elsewhere.)
So it took two weeks to fix a problem made (in about two minutes) when I was very tired. This is probably a sigma or two out from the mean, but hardly unknown.
My experience since has been that people work far more effectively with good sleep, rest, food and all that.
On a related note, I've also found that when faced with one of those tough bugs, or when dealing with a hard design problem - that taking a day to go for a hike or a long bike ride will usually save far more time than it takes. Managers never quite seem to understand that though.
...if the management is putting 36 hours a day.
This guy wants me to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week, but if I complain, he tells me that he is putting much more than. If I add up everything he says he is doing, it's like 36 hours a day, so I think it's fair.
The weirdest thing is that I don't work for him. I just set up some servers he sells. When I get one I normally only take like 2-4 hours to set it up.
So I would say that the first thing to do is to make sure that the "management" knows that 8+7=15, and other complex things like it.
please excuse my apathy
Management has to realize that their employees have lives and responsibilities outside the workplace. A 15-hour work day is insane. Even 12-hour work days will rapidly lead to poor productivity and burnout. It can also cause serious damage to your health. No job is worth that.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"My general feeling is that long hours is generally a symptom of poor project management"
Actually long hours are good project management but the project manager needs to understand that there will be a huge loss in effectiveness and the more overtime hours somebody works, the less effective they are. If that is not accounted for, that is bad project management.
I guess there are two parts to this post. First:
I believe that working continuous long days and weekends ultimately decreases long term productivity. People get tired, they get frustrated, they make more mistakes and while they may spend more time 'on the job', their actual productivity tends to slip. After the first spike in productivity due to more time 'on the job', productivity will start to even out, even with longer work days, and eventually start to decline. So, this is usually not a good way to go.
Second:
But...there are times when increased work time is a tremendious benefit. Having the opportunity for contiguous thought and work for example. I know I've worked some 36 hour days to get massive work accomplished on a project. Now this was on my own accord and when finished I had time for significant down time and 'fun' work, but it was a long day, and was very productive. Second, with the proper motivation even medium length work spikes can yield high production. This production isn't without costs however. As another example our company asked engineering to work 10-11 hour days and Saturday for 3 months in prep for the rollout of our first product. However included with this, were many consessions made by management including: Additional time off, bonuses, free dinner & beer (yep that's right), flexible hours, the ability the throw nurf balls at management (who was there late too) and the realization that we were all working for a common goal. In this case we weren't under the gun due to crappy planning, but we wanted to get to market fast and everyone agreed and stood to benefit. Another example of long hours paying off.
So I guess my point is that long hours aren't enherently bad. They have to be taken in context of how they're used, how they're brought about (motivated), and what the end goal result will be. It should also be noted that in each case of longer working better, it also cost much more. Explain that in order for productivity to actually match what they expect, they'll have to take into account that it will most likely cost a few orders of magnitude more to due it.
"We've had you guys slaving away 15 hours a day and the amount of time squashing bugs has increased 200%. You're just not working hard enough. As of today we will require all programmers to move into the office so that you can work without wasting valuable time commuting. Cots will not be allowed inside the cubes so you will need to bring your own sleeping bags and pillows. You will be allowed 5 hours of sleep every 15 hours only if your code is 99% bug free. Visiting slashdot is off limits, and any programmer attempting to do so will be forced to write documentation for 36 hours straight. Those of you who are married will need to sign the divorce papers by next Tuesday to retain employment with the company. That is all."
In Korea, we work 16 hrs avg. and six days a week minimum. Want some cheese with that whine?
A possible answer to this kind of problem is to demand that the boss be there the whole time that he expects his coders to be there. Let him work a few weeks of 15 hour days plus weekends and see whether he thinks that it's good for productivity and morale.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
i live every day as if it were my last
when i party, i go balls to the wall
</balls to the wall>
By the time you get to this point, it likely that management has already painted themselves into a corner by promising an unrealistic delivery date, budget, or both.
Something has got to give. And usually in management's view it is the programming staff's responsibility to make up for management's lack of skill (or honesty) in planning and estimating the project.
(Then again, your company may not have gotten this job in the first place, if the sales people had told the customer how long it would really take.)
We all know that the best code is written at 3:00 am...
Of course that's powered heavily by Mtn. Dew and Chee-tos, and probably didn't start until 9:00 pm, so I guess those aren't really long hours.
To be honest, from personal experience it only affects performance when you are doing it for someone else. If you can picture youself coding on all hours of the night because your so involved in what you are doing for personal reasons, it will not suffer nearly as much as when you realize all your back breaking and eye straining is going to make someone else rich.
Im sure weve all had the asshole boss like this before, I remember one of mine dcwi.com told me to "hurry up with making those damn network cables". At whuich point he came back and started telling me to just throw on the ends and not follow my 'stupid pattern'. Later that day when all of HIS cables came back because they didnt work, I cut the ends off, put them in a clear plastic bag and stapled them to the wall with a sign to always remind me "RESULTS OF A RUSHED JOB"
No, I dont work there anymore, I like making myself rich, not my boss
If the demands really can't be met in time consider using external libraries/applications.
There are bound to be areas where you're re-inventing the wheel. Do a freshmeat search and find something which does the work for you.
You might be able to remove entire sections of development and the areas replaced will probably have extra features you'd never have added.
I think this approch should be taken more often.
If the code isn't precisly what the software's about -ie where it adds value, you need to justify not using external code.
Remember, if you code remains in-house you can use GPL'd code.
Also, make sure all the functionallity really is needed. Drop any extra work to improve flexibility, -your guesses will probably be wrong so spend the time once you know what the new features are (this is just XP).
Lets see, here you can work a max of 13 hours straight I believe, and you are required to be off work for an uninterrupted 11 hour period between any shifts.
;)
As for coding in the wee hours of the morning, that's what I do (on private projects), I do it well, I do it better than any other time a day. BUT that's simply cos that's when I can get the most peace and quiet to entirely focus on the project at hand, not cos I'm fueled by the phases of the moon or anything (hey, I'm not female you know)
Coding 8 hours straight... I've yet to have an employer ask me to, doing other tasks and programming in turns seems to keep both me and the bosses happier since I'm faster and more efficient (less bored = less mistakes) in both areas that way...
Coding 15 hours straight, I'd kick 'em in the nutsies and tell em to shove their cubicle
Heck I'm rambling, goodnight *loads up ultraedit*
... people leaving the company. That will be the people that have to shoulder the heaviest load and are the most essential to the project. Alternatively they will burn out or get sick, making them phyiscally unable to contribute even these 40 hours a week.
Of course the work done before it finally all comes crashing down will be of low quality, with obscure problems and no documentation.
Bottom line: While there is usually no way to speed up a delayed project, there are quite a few ways to delay it even more or make it fail completely.
Good literature for the general topic: Brooks: The Mythical Man-Month, Addison Wesley
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
If your manager could not effectively manage their resources, then it is not your responsibility to cover up their incompetence. If they are willing to pay you overtime and you are willing to work the extra hours - then great. Don't let yourself get sucked into working 80 -100 hour weeks without compensation (and it does happen quite frequently) - they have no right to ask this of you. There seems to be a common perception that programmers are happy to work constantly to the exclusion of all else. For some of us, this simply is not true - programming is just a job. When I go home at night I do not want to think about the problems of the day - I have other hobbies and interests. Programming is not my life, and no one can force it to be my life.
If you do your job well, then they should have no cause to dismiss you for refusing to work extra hours.
Whn I got my job, my boss made it clear to me that when we're behind it will be nessisary to put in lots of hours (not excessive about 60-70hours/week).
Now, I am fine with that because he does not place unrealistic expectations on me, and when times are slow allows me to take days of randomly. I get paid by the hour, so any extra time I work, I get paid for. Also my boss is not one of those M-F, 8-5 people. He lives for his work and works 7days, 10am-midnight.
This very simple exercise will show you the true colors of the firm you are working for:
1) Tell them that you are willing to increase your hours to 15/day, but it is only fair for your equity ownership in the company to also double (no vesting crap, make it immediate) and that your salary should also more than double since the benefits will presumably not increase. (This is the capitalist way since they are increasing their demands on *your* time resources. Actually, under capitalist models, your price should actually increase super-linearly...)
At this point, if the firm's bosses are feudal lord's in disguise, you will get some sort of confused response. (since the feudal mentality implicitly holds that you are their serf/slave and there is no concept of your time. In the feudal mentality, you are expected to be grateful to get whatever they happen to offer. Buying you dinner is considered more than enough...) If you hear indignant responses about "company policy," "standard contracts," and "industry norms," I suggest you calmly tell them that a 40 hr workweek and free enterprise is the policy that the people of this republic have agreed upon, but that you are willing to be flexible within that framework.
2) If you want to confirm your suspicion that these are feudals in disguise, offer to negotiate a tradeoff between the additional salary and equity that you are owed. If they claim that cash is tight, offer to take some of the cash portion in discounted equity (after all, if cash is tight those shares are not worth as much as everyone else might think....)
If they still do not agree, you can completely confirm your suspicions with the following:
3) Offer to set up a simple auction site where they can bid on additional hours of coder time. The coders can accept whatever bids they find personally acceptable. What could be more perfectly "market oriented" and flexible than that?
Their response will let you know what they are.
If they turn out to be feudal lords in disguise, I suggest you get out of there fast.
Update: 08/30 23:11 GMT by C:Grammatical errors in title, corrected. Sorry about that.
Hey, are those the four horsemen of the apocolypse I see on the horizon?
Yes it will result in worse code:
a) Concentration is reduced
b) Morale is reduced
c) Quality is sacrified for "delivery"
d) Deliveries become bug riddle pieces of crap
Been there, done it, got the T-shirt. At an absolute crunch you work the weekend, you might pull 50+ hour weeks for a while BUT....
YOU MUST THEN REST... take extra days off to recharge. Or your immune system becomes weaker, you are at more risk of being ill, and in an under resourced project that is a disaster.
Work 8 hours a day, review properly and I _guarentee_ that from my experience after three months you will be better off than if you work 15 hour days and weekends for those three months.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
For a smaller company like yours, it could be worse. If the mgmt doesn't enunciate a plan for eventually backing off the hours, they're either looking to skim short term profits, and/or are desperate to keep their heads above water long enough to ship something that'll pay the bills. Unless you're deeply in love with your projects, it's time to move on. Otherwise, you've just accepted a 50% paycut... provided the checks are still good.
When I worked in aerospace, the embedded s/w effort was habittually in crisis management mode. It was obvious that a previously h/w design centric culture hadn't yet come to grips with managing s/w.
Shortly after GM bought us, they decreed a mandatory extra hour a day from the engineering staff... to which most of the staff replied: Good, I can go home early. Mgmt backed off from the plan before it even went into effect.
Luke, help me take this mask off
...and not going back, ever again. I've spent the last year recovering from the last company I worked for. 12 to 15 hour days, every weekend, midnight phone calls from sales people, unreleastic project timelines, salary cuts... and then after a year, the board realised no one had a made a single sale. And as George Thorogood put it: "out the door I went."
I'll never put in a 12 hour day again. Somehow IT and coders got the reputation for working long hours and weekends... and liking it. Not me.
My priorities are much different now. And after a year, I found an employer who feels the same way. No weekends. 8 hour days. All holidays off. 4 weeks vacation. No stock options. No egos.
My advice: network your talents and find a new job. Then take a week off, fly to a tropical climate. Leave your cell phone, PDA, and laptops at home and consume vast quantities of umbrella-laden drinks.
The productivitiy will go down. I don't know about quality, but after unrealistic, and sexist and illegal demands, from management your co-workers will be spending their days going to interviews, and submitting their resume to job boards and handing cvs to anyone on the street in a suit.
Let the managers pay for their own mismanagement. Get a job elsewhere.
Good luck.
Time has to be provided for adequate rest (sleep), and also some form of exercise needs to be done, walking, bicycling, not just pumping iron, or working out with an exercise machine. A lunch hour, actually about an hour and 20 minutes, spent walking will improve the overall health of the person. Remember, we are a human animal, and not a machine. The health of the circulatory system, lungs, needs to be maintained. Sure, if one is on a roll as far as coding goes, then spend the time working, then rest. Otherwise, the health of the individual will eventually suffer, and the employer will only get new employees to replace those who come down sick. Bicycling is dangerous, but gives enormous benefits. When you go up that first long hill, you'll spout cuss-words, etc. as you work to get up there on that bike. When you get to the top, and you back off, and start to yawn, that's when you know that you have done all you can for your heart, lungs, and circulatory system. Coast for a while, then go after another hill. Be sure and get a reliable bike, one that the gears and transmission won't slip when you press it hard. These cost several hundred, but you'll love the thing. Watch what you eat, and you'll soon begin to lose weight. It's your health, not your employers. Eventually, you'll be replaced in your job, and you want to have your health when you leave there.
Oh, btw, hope you don't smoke, or all bets are off.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
It's just a friggin' job. Tell your boss that you will work 40 hours a week (or thereabouts.) If he wants more that that, tell him that you are willing to renegotiate your pay rate for longer hours, but you are not going to give up your friends, family, and social life just so he doesn't have to hire enough people to do the job. If you are hourly and renegotiate pay, tell him time-and-a-half for overtime between 40 and 60 hours and double-time for hours above 60. If he won't go for that, then tell him that you want comp-time for all of the overtime: If you work 60 hours in a week and you get 20 hours of comp time to take when you want.
One question that sticks in my mind:
Are they offering to pay you for those hours, and if so, at an overtime rate, or are they expecting hours like that from salaried employees?
If it's the latter, tell me something: Would you quit if your boss announced that he was cutting your pay in half? If you answered "yes", why would you consider doubling your hours for the same pay?
I often find the key to fast development is having key insights into the problem, picking simple solutions, and avoiding programming down the wrong path. All those things require being fresh. I'm positive that I'm more productive in 6 hour blocks than 12 hour blocks.
The problem is that managers take the "Building Software" metaphor literally. If we were laying bricks, sure, we could get more done in 15 hours than 8. But we're not, we're trying to solve problems. Tired, stressed programmers make bad decisions and those bad decisions take longer to code. (Not to mention test and debug).
Would you want a pacemaker installed that was done on "balls-to-the-walls" design time?
I have to ask - how are you being compensated for the additional time spent working? Are you getting overtime pay? Do you have equity in the company? Profit sharing or royalties for the project you are working on? a big bonus? extra time off in proportion to overtime given?
And the kicker: What does the owner of the company, who is issuing this order, get out of it? Does he get richer while you get nothing? Is he going to take a bunch of personal time off when it's done while expecting you to continue working normally?
I think where I am going with this is obvious: Can you tell if you are being exploited or working in your own best interests?
If you and your team reasonably share in the rewards of the project being successful, then that is a very different situation than if you are giving up part of your life (which you can never get back) to your detrament for the sole purpose of rewarding someone else. Given the nature of employment in this modern era, there is no 2-way street or life-long contract anymore, so you have to be looking out for your own best interests as nobody else is going to.
I've worked in such situations in the past. When I was young, I felt I needed to do whatever it took to keep my job. I was afraid. I'm older now, and I've developed some common sense and a spine. I won't let my self be exploited. Since the original poster didn't elaborate as to the circumstances, I can't say if the situation is exploitave. But if it is, I say leave, and leave now. Your sanity, health, peace of mind, and precious moments of life are worth too much.
I work in a situation in which we are quite understaffed, and without an "operations staff", I'll typically log close to 270-280 hrs/month.
Typically, after "long" sessions, My boss allows me to work from home, or take a recovery day without a vaction penalty. Not only for my own personal recovery, but to ensure I'm not killing anyone on the road during the 40 min trek to/from work.
The long hours also afford me some additional flexibility in my schedule other IT personell don't typically have. (If I'm up until 2am working, no one better bitch if I come in at 9:30-10).
Personally, I've also accepted long hours as part of the job, part of the personna (sp?) you undertake when you become a programmer. However, if I wasn't being appropriately compensated for my time, things would probably be different.
All this being said, you'll right better code if you're in the right state of mind. I find that errors become harder to find, and easier to make during these long sessions. Of course, your mileage may vary.
If working a 14-15 hour day results in you actually producing code for only 8 hours, it may make sense. Personally, I'd rather work straight through 8 hours and have the other 7 to myself.
Of course, management will never believe that we don't all work like you, so long hours will continue to be demanded.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
talking about the first computer they got at Los Alamos. Before that they used a room full of "girls" at Marchant adding machines to do the calculations. Feynman had figured out a way to maximize the output of the human workers and he tested them against the computer, they were just as fast, but. . .
The computer didn't get tired and start making mistakes. The "girls" did.
Do long hours effect the quality of code? Well Duh! Does the Pope shit on a bear in the Vatican woods?
Will anything in this thread help convince your boss the whole thing is a bad idea? Nope.
Is it time to bail? Yup. Do it now. The people telling you you're just going to end up fired anyway know of what they speak.
KFG
I was in exactly your situation. I spent 10 months working 60-80 houre weeks with the other programmer trying to get the project done on time. It wasnt even Softwares fault for the project being late. It dependend on some hardware which was late getting done. We did end up finishing it, albiet late. That was about a year ago. I'm still suffering the consequences. I got burnt out, and management did not help in the slightest. They resented the fact that the two of us took so long to write around 500K lines of code (the project was quite involved and we had to skip over many things that could have made it more usefull). I grew to hate my job, then I got layed off because I wasnt performing how they expected me to. I'm still unemployed, but my life is much better than it was when I was working for that place.
I will never put out that much effort unless I have appropriate monetary compensation and a ironclad definition of exactly how long I will be working beyond the normal 8 hour day effort, and all of this in writing. I dont expect to ever have this, so I expect I'll never be working this hard again. But this okay with me. At least I'll have my sanity.
Anyways, you can bet my quality of work suffered from this. It takes concentration and creative thinking to program well. If you are so stressed out that life has no joy anymore, you sure as hell wont be able to code well.
Dont let the managers sucker you into working like that, unless they make it worth your effort. And if its a matter of keeping your job, I wouldnt let that drive me to work myself to death. I'd rather be trimming grass on some lawn crew than driving myself insane.
RedShodan --------- Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=38981&cid=4169 745
Is it me or are U.S. employers really turning up the heat on their IT staffers because they know that the current economic conditions are unfavorable??
I've been feeling it lately too.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Of your 8 hour days, how much of that do you spend actually working? Do you come to work at 7am or whenever, and actually *work* for 8 hours a day. Of course you probably have your 1 hour lunch and two 15 minute breaks, but besides that, do you actually sit down and put every hour that you are paid for to the good of the company?
Yeah really? Whats your slashdot karma at? How does a term like NSFW become standard if everyone is working so hard? Get back to work!
My boss works insane hours, and I think to some degree he expects that of us sometimes. I don't mind, if we're under a deadline to deliver to a customer, I'll happily work extra hours to help pull a project through, but otherwise I work 40 hour weeks.
For years, working overtime was just part of the job. I then started suffering from severe stress related problems. I have a new policy. I don't work extra hours for the sake of working extra hours. Period. As other intelligent people pointed out, life is too short.
If your manager can't handle that, find a new job, unless you want to do it. Yes, your productivity will go to hell, yes, code quality will sucks, but who cares. Your life will suck, that's what matters. No job is more important than your happiness.
Either your company hires more people or they can shove it. If your company is like mine you are getting paid less, have a smaller (if any) share of company options, and at the same time produce more for the company than your managers. This seems to be a symptom of companies managed by non technical people.
When you burn out you are no good to yourself or the company, and besides, making you work more than 40 hours a week IS ILLEGAL! We've heard so much about criminal corporate behaviour, and ignoring a 40 hour work week is just that. If they caculate that they need you to work 15 hours a week, they should double the engineering staff. Otherwise, they should push the deadline back. It's as simple as that.
One thing we've done to counter such absurd demands is simply let the deadline fail. There is no way for them to force you to do that.
Seriously, work is a necessity. If you had a choice I'm sure you'd be doing other things. Tell your boss to go fuck himself.
Angry X.
6/8 = 0.75
0.75 * 14 = 10.5
can you say algebra?
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
http://www.web.net/32hours/Health%20Effects%20v2.
My guess is that the impact of long work days on the quality of the finished product varies from person to person. I have colleagues who can pull 12 hour, 6 day workweeks for a few months and deliver code that still passes rigorous peer reviews with flying colors. As for myself, I am able to work very fast and deliver quality code, but only for 6 hours a day. After that, quality definitely declines.
As for your boss... If my boss would use such language, I'd suggest he speak for his own balls and I'd give him the finger instead. I'll work such ridiculous hours for pay, or if a critical project that is running late requires it. I do have that much loyalty for the company. But I'll be damned to work harder for better profit margins, bigger paychecks for company presidents or increased shareholder value, of which I can expect to see exactly zilch.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Unless you love this project to death, and can't imagine not sticking around for its completion, leave now. It is not worth it to stay. Your boss is an inconsiderate ogre. You'll be happier EVEN IF it takes you a while to find another job.
I know whereof I speak. I was laid off from a similar position earlier this year; the boss had no respect for employees, demanding ridiculous hours and 24/7 cell phone access (which she used frequently, for often trivial reasons). It wasn't worth it, but for some reason I thought it was, and I stuck around until I got laid off. NOT ONLY have I been deleriously happy since leaving that pit, I have more time to be with my wife, I make less money but feel better about it, AND with hindsight I can't believe I stuck around that place for as long as I did. I should have turned around and left the very first week I was there.
If we all respected ourselves enough to demand proper treatment from our employers, we'd all have better jobs for it. But, of course, not all of us can afford to quit bad jobs, and I understand that. I certainly thought I couldn't. But you might be able to afford more than you think. Sit down and draw up a budget: how much $$ do you spend simply because you work for a jerk? Dinners and lunches out, processed food, gas, increased shopping to make up for lassitude -- it adds up.
In answer to your primary question: Of course coding suffers from long work hours; how could it not? Do you honestly believe the Slashdot party line that caffeine is the answer? Caffiene is a crutch that will bite you in the ass sooner or later.
-Anaphilius
one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. E Pluribus Unum.
Just reading the section on "Classic Mistakes" is enlightening enough (to develop efficiently, you have to avoid all the classic mistakes).
The author also points out that when workers do more than 40 hrs/wk, they do more personal stuff at work, and tend to decrease their productivity. You can't dispense with life just by wishing it away.
We ahve the very bes tcode here and we are only having to put in 90 hours/ week.
... if our schedules weren't defined by trade shows.
The most productive coders in my experience of managing are the ones who are at work fewer hours. I have had my share of reports who consistently work sixteen hour days but are also consistently late on their work once the QA cycle kicks in. A fully rested well balanced programmer makes better decisions and fewer mistakes.
Some of the comments imply that management is making the schedule to tight; thats just nuts. If the schedule isnt made by the programmers themselves, the project is doomed to be late. Managers should always get the programmers to give estimates on the schedule, and then encourage them to meet that schedule. This is far more reliable than arbitrary dates with fancy names.
Finally, programmers should train themselves to 'aim for the target' [not aim low, not aim high] when making schedules, refining their ability after each project. Doing this the programmer will learn how to meet schedules without having to pull all nighters to get it done on time.
And in answer to your question, of course continuous long hours are going to affect code quality. After your nth continuous 15hr day, are you going to be thinking "I'd better add a buffer overrun test in case the file is corrupted" or are you thinking "fuck it, it compiles. I'm going home"? A tired programmer is not a conscientious programmer. You may ship this release quickly, but all you are doing is building up bugs for the next version, which will then also require stupidly long hours to remove the crap that you put in at 2am one morning on this version.
Chapter (cached) from Steve McConnell's book, Rapid Development
"Chapter 43: Voluntary Overtime: Too much overtime and schedule pressure can damage a development schedule, but a little overtime can increase the amount of work accomplished each week and improve motivation. An extra four to eight hours a week increases output by 10 to 20 percent or more. A light-handed request to work a little overtime emphasizes that a project is important. Developers, like other people, want to feel important, and they work harder when they do."
"Use a developer-pull approach rather than a leader-push approach.... Gerald Weinberg points out that one of the best known results of motivation research is that increasing the driving force first increases performance to a maximum, and then drives it to zero (Weinberg 1971). He says that the rapid fall-off in performance is especially observable in complex tasks like software development: 'Pressing the programmer for rapid elimination of a bug may turn out to be the worst possible strategy-but it is by far the most common.'"
"Don't use overtime to try to bring a project under control.... Ask for an amount of overtime that you can actually get.... Beware of too much overtime, regardless of the reason."
Slashdot discussion of [Philip] "Greenspun on Managing Software Engineers"
The original is lost, but I squirrelled away some choice quotes:
"From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. A programmer probably needs to spend 25 hours per week getting coordinated with other programmers and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Thus a programmer who works 55 hours per week is twice as productive as one who works 40 hours per week.... A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week)...."
"If you see one of your best people walking out the door at 6:00 pm, try to think why you haven't challenged that person with an interesting project. If you see one of your average programmers walking out the door at 6:00 pm, recognize that this person is not developing into a good programmer...."
Greenspun said the following in the Slashdot discussion:
"Most of the people at ArsDigita are young. They have no families. They have no personal reputation. Find me a 35-year-old who has accomplished a lot IN ANY FIELD, who has changed the world in some positive way, and who has never worked long hours. The articles I put on my various Web sites are not intended to help people who just want to live a quiet comfortable life (I'm not an expert on this). They are intended to help young people turn into Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman or Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston (Visicalc)."
"At ArsDigita we do tend to get fairly young people who are very bright. They want to do something that will impress their classmates from MIT or UCLA or Caltech or wherever. The key to successful management is to provide an inspiring goal that these guys and gals can buy into and then a working environment that lets them achieve the goal. It does result in some long hours but [at ArsDigita, at Greenspun's insistence] they have 5 weeks/year to recover. If they get sick of it they can always join a slacker company and work 40 hours/week."
"Let me say that I did not intend "Managing Software Engineers" to be the last word on the subject.... I don't want to be remembered for advocating a long work week. There is a lot more to the article and I certainly wouldn't advocate long hours to anyone who didn't love his or her job and wasn't learning every day."
(The banner ad for this page says, "Find a better job, NOW!" I tend to agree.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Several studies have shown that lack of sleep can be just as bad (if not worse) on reaction-time and attention-span than moderate quantities of alcohol. Driving while chronically tired is basically as dangerous as DUI.
Now, if I worked 15 hours a day, that's a minimum of 17 hours that I'm not at home (1 hr commute each way). Add 1 hour to eat a meal twice a day , and I'm down to 5 hours of sleep. That assumes perfect time-allocation, no spin-down time to unwind, no time for showers, etc..
When someone gets killed because one of these workers falls asleep at the wheel after a week of this schedule, guess who is going to get slammed with the lawsuit.
I went to school for 4 years only to end up collating papers and stuffing envelopes. I don't give a fuck what happens to me or my employer.
I hope you all die for competing against me for jobs.
FUCK THIS NATION IN ITS ASS.
... This article popped up about 30 seconds after my manager called a meeting asking if we can work over the weekend.
It was funny as hell when I turned my laptop around right after she asked that heh.
This is funny - I just had a similar discussion with a coworker when I said that I was going home after catching myself making a really stupid mistake.
I explained that long, hard, bitter experience had shown that I still make plenty of mistakes, but my coding practices allow me to catch almost all of them immediately. But when I'm tired I'm much more likely to screw up on some subtle interaction that the compiler or testing framework can't catch, and it will take people weeks of hard work to find that mistake. Few projects can afford this type of tradeoff for long. (It's not that I'm so clever or they're so smart, but a reflection of the fact that anything that can be easily checked *is* easily checked, so by the time you need a person to figure out what went wrong it's gonna be nasty.)
Bottom line: I don't mind occasional long hours to meet a deadline, as long as I have the final say on whether I'm competent to work. If you make me continue working even when I know I'm making a lot of stupid errors due to fatigue or simply trying to do too much at once, you'll pay. You'll pay in ways you can't imagine. If you don't believe me, look at projects that Microsoft and others have had to abandon - ABANDON - because of runaway bug lists caused by trying to push their programmers too hard.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Six hours was your tally before your "hourly break" and your "meetings". Try using a stop-watch from the time you actually start coding until you stop. Starting up your computer doesn't count. Standing up and walking outside doesn't count. Chatting with your co-workers doesn't count. Only actual coding counts. And you wonder why management thinks we don't do anything.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Bad management NEVER improves without some radical changes from the top, or outside. Ask yourself this - if things are this badly screwed up in your area, what makes you think they are any better with the rest of the company?
Do you really want to be risking your stock, your cash flow, your reputation, your mental/physical health and your time working in a place with bad management?
Get out while you can! There ARE great places out there with enlightened managemet.
Peter Gibbons: He's going to ask me to work on Sunday and I'm going to do it, because I'm a pussy, which is why I work at Initech in the first place.
Michael Bolton: Hey, I work at Initech and I don't consider myself a pussy.
Samir: Yes, I am also not a pussy.
Bob Slydell: If you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door--that way Lumberg can't see me, heh--after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
> Do Long Work Hours Affect Code Quality?
Hmmm... I'm a self-employed code-writer, and my first thought when I saw that question was "Yes! It makes for better code!"
When I spend long hours at the keyboard I stay focused on my project. When I finally quit for the day I make a few quick notes about what I am working on, but the next day I still can't pick up where I left off. It takes a certain amount of time to get back into the groove.
So I wonder how much people's perspective about this issue is based on who benefits from the long hours?
Are you pissed off because long hours make for poor quality work, or because you are being asked to work harder for somebody else's benefit? That's not a criticism, I'd feel the same way.
Self Employed:
Longer hours > higher productivity per week > more money > more motivation > recurse
Employed by others:
Longer hours > reduced motivation > lower productivity > resume'
in the book RAPID DEVELOPMENT (unfortunately a Microsoft Press book), they say:
- asking people to work long hours does not work. It always backfires
- telling people there's a crunch, "can you temporarily work a little harder?" usually does work.
unfortunately, I don't remember the exact words, but it was interesting reading.
I must preface this by saying..my take on this is backed up by email and other documentation and reflects my expert view on this situation...
Last year I was asked to head up a Mobile Webservices Project using Open Standards and Java...
THe CEO dreamed of being the project manager and dreamed of being a skilled CEO..
I ended up working 145 hour weeks with no end in sight, loss and unrecoverable feees, and a strong distaste for www.ecorp.com
If you enter a project where you are coding more than 5 hours per day, 5 days a week leave!
Why? Becasue even under the best conditions the person acting as a Project Manager will have no experience in your language or project management...in which case you will need that 3 hours per day to straighten out the proejct management effort.
Oh and yes this individual managed by having 8 hour meetings..run if you have that!
A well run meeting is one hour..no more no less..
Ways to avoid this, ask alot of specific questiosn up front about proejct management and project specs...and walk away from a project when you need to..
I hope that the people reading this can learn from this to avoid situations like this..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Do you know how many people actually DIED fighting for labour rights so we can have a 40 hour work week?
Tell that pig he can kiss your ass.
We need a tech union now.
Since when does working for a company equate to being a slave for the company?
I, personally, would rather make $40k a year and work 8 hours a day than make $85k a year and have NO life outside work.
You WORK so that you can fulfill your basic needs (food, shelter) and maybe transportation. Beyond that, it's all gravy. You do NOT need two $40k cars and a $350k house. If you have to work 80 hour weeks to pay for it, when are you planning to enjoy the house and cars?
I owe 8 hours a day to my employer, period, unless there are extenuating circumstances.
Stock options, IPO, percentage of profits. Those kinds of things are incentives to work overtime and "balls against the wall" 12 and 15-hour days.
Work that much, just earning a paycheck with no extras? C'mon; you're not doing humanitarian work where you can save a child's life or cure cancer -- you're putting money into the stockholders' and executives' pockets, and putting a serious stranglehold on your own personal life.
Wake the hell up, people. The trend towards longer work hours and more money up at the top is bullshit. Look at all the executives being caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They give themselves multi million dollar bonuses just for staying alive another year.
My opinion, when it comes to working with code or any such mind bending piece of work is that it should more or less be done on the workers standards. The employer should force a bare minimum (in most cases 8 hour days) and the extra time put in should be determined by the worker. Let's face it, when dealing with anything that requires massive ammounts of thought, there are just somedays when you've gone as far as you can, and you can't think of anything else. You need the downtime to clear your mind and do other things. However, there are also days when you get on a roll, where the code and ideas are just spewing forth left and right and your putting them down as fast as you can type. Those days more often then not in order to avoid breaking the thought train, the worker would voluntarily work late hours, just to get it done.
There was a great book written called "The Hacker Ethic" by Pekka Himanen. In this book there is a wonderful section on how much we've destroyed liesure and ignored how useful it is to us. Case in point, when you have books on "Managing your free time" you know something is wrong with society. The problem seems to be this ever increasing belief that the only thing that matters is work and productivity. There is no room in the digital age for liesure. For kicking back and taking things slowly. What was once lunch hour is now lunch break. The 9 to 5 work day is seemingly unexistant, and anyone who just wants to sit down and listen to music for a bit, or type on slashdot is considered lazy. We're heading down a sad road, and I don't want to be there when we hit the end.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Repeat after me:
"Poor planning on your part does not imply any urgency on my part."
I've done my fair share of balls-to-the-wall coding, and invariably, without exception, it's turned out to be a synthetic emergency. Either the customer was prepared to wait for a solid piece of code, or the other parts of engineering didn't need the thing until well after I shipped it. This was compounded, in one particularly egregious example, by a dimwitted manager who promised a six week task to be handed over to a third party in eighteen days. The vast importance of meeting the date was underscored by the careful scrutiny given the output: none. I almost quit on the spot - homie doesn't do 100 hour weeks on a whim.
More to the point, delivery schedules are determined far more by proper design instead of engineering death marches. Anyone who tries telling you differently should remove their copy of "Soul of a New Machine" from their ass and consider the fate of Data General. Another point to consider: who's gonna maintain the code base when everyone quits out of disgust at being squeezed like so many lemons?
tooTired writes: Are there ways of communicating to management that long hours to rush a project to completion is not the way to complete a successful project?
) Maybe your managers are panicing because you're not providing enough feedback that you know what you're doing and that you can provide results on a predictable basis. If so, you might be able to negotiate something a bit more reasonable with them.
Nope. From the information you've provided, your managers are in full-blown panic. They won't listen to reason. Time for you to fly.
On the outside chance that you've overstated things a bit, putting out an extra effort from time-to-time doesn't hurt code quality, and there are times when an extended hacking session can be useful. Sometimes you know what the code needs to do, and it's just a matter of writing it down as quickly as you can. No disrupting context switches. Just put the pedal to the metal.
But you can burn out quickly doing that. It's not advised for prolonged periods.
40-hour work weeks with the occasional super-human effort is a hallmark of Extreme Programming (XP). Check it out. (and see http://extremeprogramming.org/rules/overtime.html
Perhaps the book "Death March -- The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects" (by Edward Yourdon) is more appropriate. See esp. "The 'Marine Corps' Mentality: Real Programmers Don't Need Sleep!".
And good luck. Sounds like you'll need it.
I have to disagree.
I do see that fatigue effects work performance, but the trade-off of the solution in the question above is even worse- that is, getting more resources (developers).
We all know that intimate familiarity with an application is vital to a speedy deployment. When you get too many hands working on the same area it gets muddled up.
Many coders I know (including myself) code for 6 good hours in a 10-12 hour work day. Like others, we do longer days as well and cannot attribute any code quality differences to the time spent.
The better ratio instead of quality/time is quality/coffee.
Long working hours don't only influence source quality, but also:
quality of documentation
overall motivation
illness days
future salary discussions
credibility of management
occurences of eastereggs and stuff
fluctuation (bye bye knowledge)
need for redesigns
acceptance of the resulting program
Just remember -- working long hours doesn't necessarily get you any more $$ (welcome to being a salaried employee/slave). The people making the money off of your hard labor are the people at the top who (typically) are going home early, showing up late, and taking the weekends off (aside from stopping in to make sure you really are their working your butt off). The same people who (probably) got you into the long-hour crunch in the first place.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Most managers are incompetent, selfish, bumbling, office-politics-obsessed morons. And no, this isn't just an opinion. I watched it my entire "career," such as the managers allowed it to be.
Management is the number one issue in the workplace right now: because there is none.
This is a fact. Be an apologist if you want, but don't complain when the project and company are hosed.
are YOU at work now?
/.?
are YOU being productive reading
==
and as an aside... here's an intersting thought: food grows on trees.
You simply MUST forward your owner this URL, or have it printed out and magically appear on his keyboard one morning before he gets to work:
. ht ml
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff
This talks about the shuttle software team which has had 0 bugs from inception of code. All Shuttle probelms so far have been harware, but none have been software.
You and your boss really should read it.
Thanks!
Chris
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
YES...
Coding is a form of art. It requires inspiration... not in the degree of a design artist, but a good quantity of it, specially if one is programming new features or improving dramaticly the performance and functionality of existing ones (normally by re-factoring). So... too much work and too little rest will hamper your capability of producing creative code...
arg... i don't know what more to say... i'm too tired... working too much myself...
Cheers...
"... half a day. Is that too much to ask?"
:-)
-- an actual quote (made partly, but not totally in jest, i'm sure) by our CEO, in which he suggested that, a day being 24 hours, a half day would be 12. Yeah -- we thought it was funny, too
Tell him you'll gladly work half a day. A work day here is eight hours, so working four is more than fair!
Most countries have laws that legislate things like maximum work hours, workplace safety,
minimum hourly wage and so forth -- it's likely there's something like that in the USA, as well. Perhaps you should check into your local (state and federal) regulations?
Good luck!
--
AC
Where I worked went through the same things and trouble is we keep hittng their ridulous schedules. Then the short schedules became the norm, and they kept pushing for even shorter schedules. Trouble is there is always assholes who will kill themselves at work and management knows it. The managers I worked with kept saying "if you don't like working a 100 hours a week, go somewhere else." I finally did.
Managers don't care the quality if the quality of the work starts to suck, all they know is hitting deadlines. But typically they will come back saying the project sucked and have to do it over. but its a new project so clock is restarted. Real funny, there is never enough time to something right the first time, but there is time to do it over.
Google (which everyone seems to love around here for their good results) is legendary for it's long hours. The reason they have the cafeteria with the ex-"Grateful dead" cook (which IMO is not that great) is cos your going to be spending alot of time there...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Of course long hours affect code quality like long hours affect my driving. Sure, Jolt will hold ya, but the crash in both instances is something you'd rather not stick around for. Not to mention you should be seeing huge battleship sized red flags when an employer is willing to push you into overtime position to complete a project on a regular basis. Not that, "hey, it doesn't happen often, but we need you to take one for the team" sort of overtime. I'm talking about the "This is the 6th project in a row I need you to stay after hours on to complete." It's highly indicitive of a boss who:
A) Is out of touch with his actual position in the company, not realizing what it takes to get a project done.
B) Is unwilling to either outsource or bring new people in to help do the job.
With "A" you're simply dealing with a chump. Somebody who's sole purpose is to take up space. "B" is the more insiduous threat, who is not only a tight-wad, but has no consideration for the spot he's putting you in and it's doubtful you'll see any benefit for once again coming through in a clutch. Much like the Anal CFO who doesn't want to authorize the funding for anything. "A" you can explain things to in a non condisending manner. Your only option with "B" is to either stick it out or go above his head. Or quit, which you may have to do if you jump his authority. Use the chain of command just so you can CYA on all points. Ask your boss to change something (you deeming what that something is) and if that doesn't work, file your two weeks with his boss saying you can't work like this. You'll either get cooporation, or an explanation of why things are the way they are (which means nothing is going to change). On all points, unless the man is receptive, it's a lousy situation to be in...
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I was on a 4 year project a few years ago. Multiple releases, lots of iterations through the development lifecyle.
We did a test on one of the release developments. It was a bit behind, so putting a few hours in was reasonable. We logged what was achieved in each week, and tracked it through to the end of the release. Our standard week was 8 hour days, no week end work. This was solid programming - no meetings etc - the design arrived on your desk, and you coded it. The experiment went as follows:
Week 1: 14 hour days.
Week 2: 14 hour days
Week 3: 14 hour days
Week 4: 8 hour days
(we had no week-end work in any on these weeks).
OK - the results were:
Productivity Week 1 was 14/8 x normal. Great.
Productivity Week 2 was normal. Not great, because we had shelled out for overtime
Productivity Week 3 was worse than normal. Very bad - we were making worse progress than before, and we were paying for overtime
Productivity Week 4 was = normal. OK, happy with this
The main problems during weeks 2 & 3 showed up during later testing phases - basic testing was sloppy, and programmers had followed designs blindly, rather than questioning what they were told to do. However (and this is important) - the build phase was completed quickly during the overtime phase - the resulting code sucked, but no-one knew until later phases.
The moral of the story is that a dedicated team can bust themselves for a week or two. They can probably pull all-nighters, and still deliver good code. Beyond that, productivity sucks, and pushing a team to do this will hurt in the long run. People need to think, and question what they are doing - tired people don't do this.
Just FYI, I was one of the coders in this experiment, and as a PHB now, I use this example whenever I see a plan that assumes 12 hour days from the beginning. 12 hour planned days == 16 hour days in the real world.
I generally have two schedules throughout the year; a "big project" schedule and a "maintenance" schedule. The first involves 14 to 18 hours a day, six days a week (regardless of holidays), and tends to last a month or two at a time. The other one involves generally between 9 to 12 hours a day, five days a week (and actually staying home on holidays).
I typically do not have the big project schedule more than twice a year. I work for a small company (well, technically, a small division of a medium sized company) and am solely responsible for the development of our software. There's no COTS or open source software out there that meets our needs for functionality, ease-of-use and performance (at least not any that is less expensive, including whatever it would cost for 24/7 onsite service and support from the developers who wrote the software, than my salary and benefits), so it falls on me to write virtually all the software that runs our division (minus the operating systems, office suites and database servers, of course).
But, there are two main reasons why the difference in schedules and the very heavy loads that happen a couple times a year don't bother me.
The first reason is that project planning in our division is managed well, for the most part. I can think of a couple times where things did not go as planned, but they're in the minority. We also generally plan well in advance. I'm currently in the middle of a big project schedule right now, but I have known this was coming since the beginning of the year. Also, because we are a small group (less than a dozen people total for our division), I have a strong say in the project plans. If I mark something as unreasonable, we generally either don't do it, or we come up with an alternate version that is reasonable.
The second reason is that I *really* enjoy my work. If I'm not at work programming, chances are that I'm at home programming (usually for work) or sleeping. I do very little other than code. I enjoy having to solve difficult problems. You could certainly take the perspective that I simply have no personal life, and I would not argue one bit with that. I don't have any illusions of having a personal life -- but that doesn't bother me at all. I am a very dull person outside of work, anyway, because I tend to only think about work.
Supporting reasons for why I don't mind include the fact that I feel I am compensated well for my work and that I am valued by the other people in the company. I am also constantly learning -- especially when I am confronted with the more complex problems. Solving the really difficult problems may be painful while I'm doing it, but at the same time I consider it to be extremely rewarding because it gives me an excellent opportunity to expand my knowledge.
Like the saying goes, your finest teachers are your worst adversaries (in my case, the most complex problems). If everything is "point and click" easy, you are never challenged to think and confront problems head on and find their solutions. You have significantly reduced chances to grow or have the opportunity to expand yourself if you aren't challenged in some way.
Possibly just as important, psychologically, for my acceptance of, and willingness to commit to long work hours and tight deadlines is that I have a significant emotional/personal investment in the company, having been one of the people that started it. I still hold on to a lot of the "founder" and "startup" work ethic mentality from our company's early days, even though we have grown beyond those stages.
Will I burn out one day because of the long hours I work? Probably, but I hope that day is in the very distant future. And just to tie this post in with the original question, I do not believe that the long hours I put in negatively impact my productivity. I actually put in the long hours mainly because I work better that way.
However, were I not working for a company I cared deeply about, or were I not being challenged intellectually by my work, I would most likely burn out quickly and my productivity would suffer. I consider myself lucky to be in a position where I actually have some very significant and positive motivating factors.
When I first started 15 years ago 16 hour work days werent that unusual. There just werent enough people who could find the power switch on the computer to staff the jobs.
Fast forward to now. Employers wanting 15 hour days? 8 is standard. Ask them if they want to pay hourly plus overtime. The answer is no. If they want 15 (16 actually) they need to hire another worker. When i started that wasnt gonna happen but now out of work tech workers are easy to find and hire.
Your company is being cheap. If they want more productivity hire more staff.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
Not every software development effort has to be this startup company all-day all-night and weekends adventure.
One company I worked for actually had a development manager that told people to leave the office.
The cool solution I found was to become a contractor, in my contract it explicitly states that I cannot work more than 40 hours a week without approval from the VP of Engineering. I'm lovin' that!
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
I think you should tell your employer "Poor planning on your behalf does not constitute an emergency on my behalf." Unless you str getting significant stock options and/or comp time for those long hours, I'd start sending out resumes. You can force people to work long hours, but you can't force them to put out a quality product. Plus, the industry is full of stories of teams who busted their butts to get a product out the door, only to be told their services were no longer needed once the product shipped...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
that $80,000 a year job at 40 hours a week is $40 bucks an hour. That sounds pretty good, right?
Work _80_ hours a week and you're only making _$20_ an hour. You're getting robbed if you're really worth $40 per.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I think there's a level of creativity (inspiration?) that's long been ignored in the coding world, by which I mean that sometimes you're _on_, and sometimes you're not. Kinda like writer's block.
I'm a front-end web dev. There are days that I _cannot_ get netscape 4 (or ie4, or mozilla) to do what I need it to do, and there are days when I can make them all dance to my tune with no effort.
When they're dancing, I think that without his whole artificial you-will-stop-at-six mentality, I could happily sit and build pages until I get bored, and that usually takes hours. From that point of view, I think yeah, I DO work long hours compared to some of my friends, but hey, I'm getting really into this, and it''l be _cool_ when I'm done (tell me you haven't kept code snippets from previous projects).
I guess what I'm saying is that, as long as you set aside the specific times to meet with the rest of your team, and you're there to cover emergencies (being on-call isn't _that_ bad), wouldn't it be in everyone's best interest to work something out where the coder (or for that matter, the designer) does what they need to do at the time that's best for them, provided that this satisfies the needs of the rest of the project team? Get in early, or stay late on a whim without having to get sign-off on overtime?
Views from PM's, designers, coders, business people etc. very welcome. You know that most of the time, we don't all need to be there. Haven't you got stuff to be getting on with that you don't need the coders for? Single those things out, and think of things they don't need you for, dude...
For me, it does still have some passion. I don't work places that demand you work overtime, but most of them ask nicely, and I do it anyway, 'cos I still like doing it. But it'd be nice if I could do it when it was convenient for me.
Long hours aren't a problem. Just let me tell you when they'll help.
Warning: May contain nuts
And say N.O. (you know like those rape-stopping chicks)
He's askin for it. I am sure he will rethink his request.
Without question, long hours don't help. If your suffering from missed deadlines, you need to look elsewhere for the cure. Take a look into XP, it works and also preaches against more than a 40 hour week.
Mars Climate Orbiter (destroyed) and Mars Polar Lander (destroyed) had problems with employees making disasterous mistakes (plugging power lines into data lines, etc) and hired an expensive quality consultant to come in and find ways to improve the teams efficiency. The answer was "after people work 80 hours a week for a few months they start to make mistakes. For best results I'd prohibit anyone, no matter how important, from working more than 60 hours a week." Since people were working in excess of 100 hours a week at the time it was useful advice.
The trick to getting other people to do what you want is to be able to see things from their viewpoint.
You don't want to be overworked, or lose your weekends. A reasonable request in 2002. Now what does management want? They want more sales, more profits. So your goal should be to show them (in a very simple way, because they are simple people) that long workdays results in reduced sales.
If you can drive this point home to them, they will take your side because they don't want to lose money. Perhaps make a pretty presentation with Power Point (management people like Power Point). Something like:
Well yikes. I'm nervous to post what could be an unpopular view. But here goes. I do not believe in a mandate of 15-hour days or 7-day work weeks. But I also do not believe in missing deadlines that I took good care and due diligence to plan for. If a developer tells me it'll take a week, and he's buffering for everything he thinks could go wrong, I go back to the CEO and give a commitment that is two or even three times farther out than what the developer estimated. When the developer misses his own target, I get upset but I do not raise hell. However, when the developer doesn't even meet my "padded" deadline, that developer ought to realize some hard work better happen, and fast. I never force or mandate anything, and I do not give impossible deadlines that would cause a developer to constantly be overworked. But if a developer cannot work extra at least short-term to "save face" -- as if they don't care about quality or commitment -- that developer ain't going to last long.
So the question is, does the OP think the boss wants this as a permanent situation? If so, bail and bail fast. That's bad management and no, you won't be able to reform a management team that has such a toxic view of its employees. Just get out. But if the case is that deadlines have been missed, and developers are only being asked to do this short-term, then it may be that the developers need to respond to management with a can-do attitude. Especially if not responding with a can-do attitude is what caused the problems in the first place.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
15hrs/day? Weekends too?
Compute your hourly rate. Unless your making very good money, that figure should be pretty sobering. Hell with those hours, working behind the counter at a Starbucks might even be competitive. And if they ask you to work long hours, at least you get free coffee...
Seriously though, I actually just rejected an offer for a job with similar hours that worked out to about $10hr. The yearly figure was good, but the ridiculous workload made the pay not worth my time.
Unless you absolutely love what you are doing AND there is nothing else you'd rather do or you are making a ridiculous amount of money, look for another job. It sounds like your manager is managing machines, not humans. Remember humans don't have a very large uptime. These days I need to sleep 9hrs a night in order to feel good the next day.
15 hour days doens't even leave much time to sleep, yet alone eat, shower, etc. And forget having a life, but that doesn't apply for all of us.
Managers get to choose one:
1) completion of a set of features
2) completion by a specific date
In my practical experience, you can never choose both. Something will always come up such that you cannot complete the features on schedule. Or you set a date and code what you can by that date.
It is a simple fact, and a good manager will understand this and ask for one or the other. You can ask for a set of features and guess at the end date, but you cannot rely on that date.
Many people believe that software engineering "techniques" can solve the planning problem. Nope. They don't work in the real world. Most of those techniques came from the industrial era, and manufacturing processes. They simply don't apply to programming.
The issue is that programming is almost always a research endeavor. You never know exactly what is going to be coded and how they will fit together. You can plan and plan and plan, but when the bits come together... it will be different.
Keep the mantra in mind: Choose One.
(well, strictly, there are three options and you choose two; the third is size of the staff, but that is usually fixed, so the problem always comes down to choose one of two)
For the original poster's problem, his manager is asking for more dev time. Will this solve the problem of getting more done? It is impossible to say. Again: you never know how long a single feature is going to take. Sure, you'll get it done a bit faster on average, but hoo... the team morale will suck.
Does that affect code quality? Absolutely. What you'll see is developers cutting corners to complete a feature by a given date. People aren't going to be working 15 hour days for the sake of it. It will always be to meet some kind of goal. And because people want lives, they'll try to meet that goal with as little impact on themselves as possible. The manager has chosen time, the developers will cut features to fit that time. In this case, it will be boundary conditions, test suites, nice UIs, logging, or what have you. Those edge bits that turn okay software into great software will be dropped on the floor.
Choose One. It'll make your life hella better.
When forced to work long hours though, it may be counter-productive.
We have learnt over centuries (including the episodes of slavery) that free and happy labor will always produce better quality goods than forced and bound labor. This is especially true of something like software which not "manufactured" and whose productivity cannot be easily measured.
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In the short term you can do long hours, but, over time you get tired out and the number of errors climb up and the lines of code per hour drops.
At the end of the project the boss and her boss took the complete team out for lunch and invited our spouses and children to thank them for putting up with our long hours.
Make a hint to your boss that the stick approach may work.... just not for very long... maybe five minutes. Then everyone will say 'f' it and do only what is required without getting fired while doing a job search at another saner company that treats the employees as a valuable & scarce resource.
Panic now, beat the rush!
Here is something that I believe more programmers (myself included :/) should do more: when asked to work ridiculous hours (due to poor project management and/or unrealistic promises to the client etc), JUST SAY NO. When you've done your 8 hours for the day, GO HOME.
Employer/employee relations are a lot like any other human relationship - people will get away with whatever they are ALLOWED to get away with, and will take advantage of you wherever they can. If you keep saying "yes" to your boss, and working 15-hour days, he will keep on doing this, simply because he will quickly learn that it *works*.
Don't let your boss steamroll all over you, because that is what he is doing. He is taking advantage of you.
If you keep telling him "no", he will soon learn that he can't keep doing this. When the project runs late (which it *will* the first few times you try this :), explain that it wasn't your fault, you did all you reasonably could. Explain to your boss why the project ran late (poor project management, ignoring estimates, promising ridiculous deadlines to the client etc etc). Explain it to him again and again, because he will not listen the first time you do so, but if you explain it often enough, he will start to learn. Also, don't wait until after the deadline to explain it. Start talking about it from the moment you realise you cannot make a project deadline, and keep discussing it again and again. Discuss the reasons why you aren't going to make the deadline. Eventually, your employer will start to learn.
Just start saying "no". You don't need to be rude about it, just be calmly and reasonably assertive. You won't get fired (*). (Probably not, anyway, unless your boss is a real dick, in which case you should get another job anyway). Its often not as easy as it sounds, but I'm sure you'll find that you'll feel better afterwards than if you allowed yourself to be walked all over yet again.
I'm not saying that you should *never* work hard hours. I think there will always be "crunch times", where you have to put in a few extra hours a day. But thats what they should be and remain, "crunch times". If they become an almost-permanent part of the way your company operates, something is wrong.
(*) Disclaimer: if you do get fired, its your own responsibility, not mine :)
Long hours are a management problem, not a person problem? http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?userid=0GI9JMII4B&isbn=0130146595 -- Death March (Richard Yourdon).
o oks/booksea rch/isbninquiry.asp?userid=0GI9JMII4B&isbn=0201616 416 -- Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck).
a rch/isbninquiry.asp?userid=0GI9JMII4B&isbn=0201616 416 -- Mythical Man Month (Fred Brooks)
Developers shouldn't be buring their creative juices with relentless overtime?
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/textb
But, on balance, adding people to a late project makes it later. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/textbooks/bookse
The short of it is that the manager has overcommitted you and needs to stop it. Nothing less than decommitting and backing away from some of the work is going to save the release. (Either that or drop the deadline, but businesses tend to hate it when that happens -- even though it's usually the right thing to do.)
Good luck, I know the feeling.
Run, don't walk, away from that place. Anyone even considering increasing hours to 15 is nuts. I have not worked more than 40 hours for the past 6-7 years except on very limited occasions, and every time I was "asked" to work overtime in that time I was getting an hourly rate, and annoyed with the foolish project management. Even getting paid hourly, I make a conscious effort to have a LIFE. Anyone asking you to work overtime is might as well tell you they failed, because it's their job to do timelines, and having their team work overtime is an obvious failure on the MANAGER'S part.
Oh, and on your way out hand that dickhead a copy of Peopleware, and dog-ear the section dealing with Teamicide, because that's what he's doing. The only way to improve situations is try to get these types of "managers" either fired or removed to some other industry. And the best way to do that is to go to their manager and complain and back up your complaints, or else make the companies they own fail - by leaving.
I personally experimented that, and its really not the best thing to do, u arent at your best. Your boss should remove a couple hours in your time-frames
I have worked everywhere from shops where I was the only tech to Fortune 100 companies. This is not an accident. If it was really an accident, you would be a consultant who would be getting paid time and a half for sloppy management - e.g. your manager and his managers and the company would be losing money because of a mistake. That's a mistake from the manager's perspective. If you are on salary, which I'm sure you are, what the manager is doing makes a lot of sense from a managerial perspective. This idea that there is a rational, non-confrontational way to reason with managers over this is inane. "They should realize that long hours might put a crimp in that high quality code I write - I might get burned out after a few months". They are not stupid - they realize this. They think they will look better if they can burn you out on the next few projects so that's what they're doing.
At Fortune 100 companies, at big law firms, consulting companies down to small companies, many of them run their little flunkies around ragged. Whether you consider this good management or bad management is immaterial - you're not a manager. This is just the way it is, if you're at a salaried job that just requires you to work 9 to 5, you've lucked out. Also, there are plenty of college students looking for a job, H1-Bs and so forth who will not mind working long hours without pay. In terms of business, not necessarily IT, if a manager told other managers that he managed to sucker a bunch of salaried workers to work 15 hours a day, usually he'd be considered a GOOD manager. It does not matter if running you ragged is logical good or bad management or not, that's just the way it is. One reason for this is the ITAA, since there is no IT worker organization with any political clout to speka of, pushed a law through Congress a few years ago repealing (for IT workers only) the FLSA law that said overtime has to be paid.
Every worker is selling his labor time for money. When you give lots more labor time to your employer for free, he's getting over on you. Do you think you could hire a plumber or whatever who charges by the hour and have him fix a sink and then spend another 8 hours fixing all your pipes for free? If you were charging by the hour, your boss would not want you to work 15 hours - if he's paying for your time, all of a sudden he gets some consideration with regards to wasting your time.
I realize a lot of you are starry-eyed out of college Linux hackers buying a lot of BS in your early 20's, but after a while, many of you will gain this perspective, and the sooner you realize it the better. It is strategic thinking, not tactical - knowing this doesn't mean you fight tooth and nail on every thing like this. But it's the realization that if you're paid on salary, not wage - and ESPECIALLY with the laws the ITAA passed through for IT workers in the past few years regarding wages, overtime and salaries - laws financed by Microsoft, Intel, IBM and so forth specifically so they can do the kind of screwing over that you're getting now. You've had some realization about this, that's why you sent to Slashdot.
So strategically you have to realize that if you are being paid salary instead of per hour wage, you are at the mercy of your boss, in fact many, many bosses will push you to work as much as you can without dropping the ball. Very common, they pile on work, pile on work and your hours expand and eventually you start letting things slip - that's a sign to them that you have too much to do and then maybe they give you less work or hire someone else. If they pay you by the hour suddenly they have a lot more respect for your time.
Also, the laws changed by the ITAA were done by the employers (IBM, Intel, Microsoft...go check out the ITAA's sponsors) getting together and changing the law so that you get screwed on overtime, as well as other things. The solution is for more IT workers to join the efforts to organize together to counter what the ITAA is doing. They collectively spend millions to try and screw us, and we try to block them - nascent efforts are making only a small dent but as we get bigger we'll become more powerful. Anyone calling themselves a "professional" in this profession is insane. REAL professionals like doctors, lawyers, dentists have professional associations like the AMA, ABA and ADA fighting for them in Washington among other things. Or they're in unions like SAG, IBEW and whatnot. Or whatever - they organize in the way they want to organize. What do we have? The IEEE-USA? Don't make me laugh - they're sponsored by the same corporate sponsors who fund the ITAA, and these sponsors have threatened the IEEE-USA, and the IEEE-USA has rolled over when the membership has tried to do something, time and time again. Only a reform movement would fix them, if it's even worth it. There are organizations out there doing good stuff - the Programmers Guild, Washtech/CWA, CESO and so forth. Find one you like and join their organization, get active - because the ITAA sure as hell is active screwing us over. Why else have wages fallen for the first time in a decade? Anyone who thinks the ITAA's Washington lobbying to change the laws had nothing to do with it is a fool - are Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. pissing away all that money for lobbyists and lawyers for nothing? The monetary returns come back to them in spades. And half the IT workers out there don't even know any of this is going on. But the nascent organizations coming up are beginning to change that, so check some of them out. I'm not saying all of this for my health, it's because I want to make nice money at a good job for years to come, just like you. You can come to your own opinions, and decide whether it's worth it to spend the time joining one of these organizations, but you should definitely find out about the ITAA, what they've been up to, how salaries have fallen and all of this stuff anyhow. There's not enough awareness amongst IT workers yet. Here's my web page on this - On call guild
whether long hours are so important to the company that they'll pay extra for them.
You'll find out pretty quick whether they're squeezing resources to be "competitive" or setting unrealistic schedules out of incompetence.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Any reputable book on project or software team management will point this practice out as one of the worst classic mistakes. Other list toppers include adding new team members, feature creep and silver bullet tools. The best thing to do right now is examine the requirements document to reschedule functionality to come out in a later or maintenancec release and develop solid estimates for a likely release date. Proper communication of this information across the company is essential. Death marches that devolve into "code and fix" methodology do nothing but produce low quality code and malcontent developers.
Your employer needs to attend some IT management courses if they do not understand this.
If a deadline desperately needs to be met, the end customer needs to be made aware of additional costs involved and the project manager/leader needs to outsource for more programmers/developers.
It seems apparent to me that some bullshit is trickling down to whoever informed you that you will be working those ridiculous hours, 15 hrs/day, 6 days/wk hahahah, and that he made this decision out of his ass.
There are tons of resources on systems analysis and project development on the Internet and information regarding what can be expected in your role throughout the process. The timelines and assignments for the project you are working on should have been worked out prior to the development stage of what you are working.
All I can say is good luck with whatever you decide is right in this situation.
~Recently Laid Off Disgruntled Tech
Yes, and no.
Yes, it affects code quality if you're disgruntled and not really enjoying what you're doing (ie: when you have to be forced or somehow coerced to work long hours).
No, it doesn't affect code quality if you're doing it for fun, and working on something that you genuinely believe in.
A little historical perspective on time management of subordinates.
This is from "My Three Years with Eisenhower" (pp. 247-248) by Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, Eisenhower's personal aide and diarist during WWII. It begins with a quote from General Marshall, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff during WWII, regarding Dwight D. Eisenhower during his stint as C-in-C for the North African campaign. This was told to Eisenhower's personal aide:
<citation>
[General Marshall said,] "When I brought him [Eisenhower] to head the Operations Division after Pearl Harbor, I put him in the place of a good officer who had been in that job two years. I felt he [the previous officer] was growing stale from overwork and I don't like to keep any man on a job so long that his ideas and forethoughts go no further than mine. When I find an officer isn't fresh, he doesn't add much to my fund of knowledge, and, worst of all, doesn't contribute to the the ideas and enterprising push that are so essential to winning the war. General Eisenhower had a refreshing approach to problems. He was most helpful. But he began to work sixteen or eighteen hours a day and before he left, I was beginning to worry about him, just as I did his predecessor. You must keep him refreshed, but knowing him as we do, it will take ingenuity. It is your job in the war to make him take care of his health and keep that alert brain from overworking, particularly on things his staff can do for him. You must get a masseur. That will give him exercise and, most of all, relaxation"
So today I [Butcher, the aide] have found a masseur of four years' experience, whom I am taking to the house tonight, only Ike doesn't know it.
Have just told Ike it's time to go home - 5:15 - that the masseur is waiting to accompany him.
"Holy smoke," he said, "a masseur?"
"Yes, sir, my orders from your superior, sir, General Marshall."
"Well," said Ike, "send a message to McCarthy for the Big Boss [meaning Marshall] that the masseur has been obtained by you as per instructions and is already at work.
</citation>
I guess it just goes to show that not all management, especially the successful ones, are slave-driving buffoons.
evanchik.net
The long and short of it is, your employer is suffering from entrepreneur's disease. Because he himself is willing to work fifteen hour days, he thinks that you should, too.
The fact that he, not you, is the one who stands to get rich by these extraordinary efforts doesn't register.
If I were you, I would work no more than eight hours a day, unless he offered to pay you for the overtime. You signed up for forty-hour weeks, and he's trying to change the deal on you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
next, realize that the role your boss plays is akin to being a parent (guess who's the child). do you think can be a better parent than your parents? sure, and same goes with being a better boss than your boss. this means whatever the root issues (sounds like ego) that are plaguing the system, you can play a role at changing them by learning to manage yourself. the upshot of all this is that you won't need the boss.
lastly, take heed of some of the trite but true words of the parent post. realize you have to grow your life, not just "get one". spend the time understanding the people and they will help your head in the long run, much more so than these n-ary machines, no matter what the n.
If you are, work as many hours as you can, you lazy bastard! If you're not, tell em to get fucked, this isn't what you signed on for! And tell em if you work long hours, you reserve the right to call in "sick of working" when you need to. Its possible to sustain long hours for long periods, as long when your body tells you that you've hit the wall, you listen. If you don't listen, you fall apart/go nuts.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Like tele-commuting.
Boss: you workin'?
You: YEAH... working on that driver bug as we speak (NASCAR TV noise gets muted); will have that to you in a day.
but seriously though -- i know a lot of people who would be more productive at home, and then it relieves you of the commuting time that would be otherwise wasted.
And if you can get the project defined not in "hours" but in, say, "features," you may well be finishing the "15 hours" of work within a couple long-hauls M,T,W and have yourself a 4-day weekend.
and from my experience, ppl can pull 15 hours much more easily when in their underwear at home, rather than in cubes.
just a suggesting.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Yep. Some might even consider you LAZY for spending all our time at home watching TV instead of work.
Yes, people have families - but a lot of geeks do not.
Have people lost the love of their work? If you like long hours - go work for yourself! At least you get the payback.
We all go through our periods.
Personally, I find that programming benefits from long hours... I keep it all in my head, little details aren't forgotten. For about 10% of a project, I work 90 hour weeks. Those 10% is where I get _most_ of the core work done. Code reuse and other things benefit when it is fresh on your mind. I'm not saying work that long MOST of the time, but I find it beneficial to get into it!
Haven't people heard of book writers locking themselves in a cabin in the woods? Same principal... and I find it works for me. YMMV.
And they're more productive for it.
One of my employees is Japanese, from the parent company. Most of the Japanese at our company worked twelve or fourteen hours days habitually; it's just what's done at the parent company. I told Yuichi to start leaving an hour earlier, until he'd worked himself down to a roughly normal workday. The first thing he told me once he was doing it was that he had more energy, and seemed to be getting more done. He was less scatterbrained from tiredness, he could concentrate more, and he looks forward to coming to work now because it isn't a grind.
Here's another thing: he works harder now. People who work fifteen hour days get less done because there's actually less time pressure. It's easier to procrastinate when you know, at four in the afternoon, that you've got six hours left in the office. When you're leaving at five or six, there's a more immediate motivation to wrap something up. Generally, when you feel time is limited, you're more careful about scheduling.
When they do stay late, they're rewarded with flex-time off, and they can buy flex-time by staying late. All of them make use of it for doctor's appointments and such, or to leave early for the weekend. My systems administrator decides to come in at one a.m. to upgrade a server, and tells me about it the next day. More responsibility for their own schedules has made them more willing to contribute beyond the minimum 40 hour week.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
All your hours are belong to us!
Why work for a moronic boss? 15 hours/6 days a week, my ass!
sPh
my response to such a request would be something along the lines of:
"I'm sorry, but that's simply not realistic. The programmers, designers, and other employees of this company have families and lives outside of their job. The project schedule is set up assuming no more than 5.5 hours of work per day, if the employees are soley dedicated to this one project. The rest of the time in the employee's day is taken up in administrative time.
"If you wish this project to be completed sooner, then you need to increase resources, and funds. But I must warn you that crashing a project (that is, reducing the scheduled completion date by radically increasing resource loading) is highly risky and will negatively impact your chances of successful completion within your budget and schedule.
"I wish to further point out that I will need several [days, weeks months depends on the complexity] to reschedule and rebudget this project. I will expect the resulting new project plan to be signed off by you, with you taking responsibility for the heavily increased risk.
"Morevoer, I wish to make clear that there will be a risk statement produced for this project, and I will certainly make reference to numerous case studies that indicate that fast tracking a project can reduce chances of success to next to zero. I wish it to be absolutely clear that you are ordering these changes, will fund the changes, and will take sole responsibilty for the decission to engage in this highly risky behavior."
Of course, I doubt I would have ever become a project manager for that type of management in the first place . . .
But I'm sure they're getting what they're paying for . . .
It probably improves code quality tremendously.
"The beatings will contine until morale improves."
Anyone who thinks that "working more hours" will provide better output ought to read the Mythical Man Month. I think it should be a prerequisite to any managerial position.
8 hour days are so because that's the maximum point of output.. anything more than that and quality starts to go down. Of course it's different for different people, but 6 - 8 hours is an average.
You should never feel the need to work more than 40 hours a week unless the slip in schedule is your fault or the company has been treating you very well. This doesn't sound like the case.
Also, read through terms of your employment again. Most companies have some clause that allows them to claim ownership to any ideas you get while on the job. If your on the job for most of your waking hours, they could claim to own everything and anything you think up.
I remember a project I worked on a few years ago while I worked for a consulting/contract company. It started out 8 to 10 hour days with everyone happy to work on the project. After a while it became 10 to 12 hour days with weekends and some grunting here and there but still happieness prevailed. After another while, the customer (who was in LA while we were in San Jose) demanded that we move our entire devlopment team down to LA until the project was complete. That started the downward spiral. I was the youngest member and was still new to California and didn't have any real ties to San Jose, i.e. family, lots of friends, a house, etc. so I didn't mind going but everyone else on the team had ties and minded bigtime. When we got there we were expected to work 14 to 18 hours a day and all-nighters were common. As "management" keep ramping up, the development the schedule kept getting pushed out farther and farther. The idiots never saw the correlation.
Because I was the young one I didn't really mind the whole thing. I loved coding and just went with the flow (sometimes working on stuff I should not have) but everyone else was more experienced and had lives and a bit more disipline. "Management" just counted bodies working at a given time, not code quality or unit deliverables, and complained about how we were way behind schedule. There was no one looking over my shoulder smacking the back of my head and telling me what I should be doing. The person who was charged with doing that also had to write tons of code and manage five other programmers and have constant meetings with "management" and hold his marrage together from 500 miles away. Soon everyone practically hated me (I would have hated me if I was in their situation now). One person quit, one was fired, one almost lost his marrage, one completely burned out and the rest just became plain ugly. We were pulled out after two months in order to prevent mass resignations or murder (seriously) and brought back home but the schedule remained the same (18 hour days with many all-nighters). This lasted for three more months.
After the project ended everyone quit. The sad thing about that is, the company we worked for (the consulting company) had, in all honesty, one of THE best development teams in Silicon Valley. Two of the guys went on the Netscape and early retirment, three went on to start a sucessfull software company (me included) and the rest all ended up being sucessful in some way. The company soon after closed thier Silicon Valley office. If they just realized what they had and treated their people better they could have been a great company. Oh well, it worked out well for the Netscape boys and the others.
I completely agree with other posters and feel that ...
... this indicates your manager is
a wanker and making serious mistakes in estimates or he is under pressure
from top management. Working more than 8 hours is *not a solution* to the
problem.
... your company might be in financial
difficulty. You need to start looking for a new job.
"These 8 hour days have to stop, we need to be working 15 hours a day and weekends, balls to the wall."
"We are heavily under-staffed"
I was in a similar situation a month ago and now I'm laid off, unemployed and looking for a job.
After eight hours, you start making mistakes that will have to be fixed because they aren't the subtle kind that will only get angry call from your users to tech support once you manage to sell this stinkin' turkey.
The guy is an ass-hole.
Ask him how fast a woman can deliver a baby if she can skip some parts and cut some corners? Your kid won't need legs, will he? And it would really save time if we could omit the immune system. The user will just have to keep him in a bubble. (That'll be in the small print.)
Tell HIS boss that he's an idiot and that the results will be garbage that might very well get the company sued.
If you have no recourse, fill out your resume and start shopping it around because its only a matter of time.
Scum like that are why MIT's Technology Review have articles entitled "Why Software Is So Bad." Throw it on his desk on your way out.
And tell him that a "failure to design, analyse and plan on his part does NOT constitute an emergency on your part."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
On the other hand, if we assume that you and I will live well past 60, and that with inputs from a modest career, allowing for things like two or three college tuitions for the kids, neither 401(k) nor social security will likely provide for a few decades of idleness.
Thus, we should expect to be working hard into our seventies, if not into our eighties. Presumably we would like better options than working at McDonalds at that point, and the willingness of 20-somethings to work 100-hour weeks may well cut into our option of a modest programming career.
The real world tends to be up-or-out, which can be a great frustration for those who seek a life outside the workplace.
Wow. People in technology are working 8 hour days? I thought everyone put in extra time every week.
Vote for Pedro
I'm an out of work developer in Atlanta. The job market here is terrible. I'm not super experienced, but I know how to learn what I need to know and I always get the job done.
But, my guess is that the company you are working for will be broke before long. I doubt that your management would be asking this of you unless they had hit the point where they could fund development for only a short time. Their tactic of flat out demanding you work more (with no additional compensation mentioned) shows a towering lack of respect for their employees. These two issues, financial trouble, and poor employee treatment are a spectacular way to fan the flames of apathy and diloyalty. I'm sure some of the developers will find other places to work, and a few others will be asked to leave as "we tighten the belt a little" in response to the dwindling money.
I worked at that company last year, but I'll work there now, just to alleviate the dull daily routine of unemployment and poverty.
a horse can produce ten horse power but can only sustain one horse power
We are heavily under-staffed even with my multiple attempts to show the owner that we need more resources. . . . .A large reason why many in this industry find themselves working long hours and weekends is that management makes unreasonable expectations and deadlines.
Maybe yes, and maybe no. But be very careful how you whine. It is not so simple as increasing staff and insisting on 40-hour weeks for everyone. That strategy can be as losing as the brain-dead whines of management.
Do NOT suggest that instead of doubling hours you should double staff to double productivity. The linear arithmetic of the mythical man-month is a disaster however you argue. Count on this -- be certain of it: doubling staff will not double productivity, probably not close to that. If you don't get this -- read Brooks. If you do, read it again anyway.
I think there are many reasonable views and unreasonable views on the time/productivity thing. In my experience, it is not the number of programmer hours, but rather the number of programmer hours "in the zone" that is the credible measure of productivity. Once I am "in the zone," it is a horrific waste of me to let me go home -- I for one am far better off hacking till I drop "out of zone," and then taking some recovery time, than coming in and leaving at any schedule. Everyone's (and every project's and every group's) rhythms are different.
But this is difficult to measure and understand -- part of the goal here is to recognize that it is not for management to MAKE ONE DO ONE'S JOB, but rather to MAKE IT POSSIBLE to do one's job.
I have no problem when management sets tough-to-meet, even unrealistic goals, so long as they permit engineers to do the engineering right. They cannot simultaneously control scope, resources and time allotted-- fixing two of these means the third must give. I have discovered that it is possible to explain and sell this to management -- and indeed other, more sophisticated ideas as well.
But if you try to sell the idea that increasing staff will get more productivity by itself, you are the one who has committed malpractice -- because you should know better. A bit more time than an 8-hour day may well improve productivity significantly. Much more than a 40-hour work week over an extended period of time may significantly decrease it. A few weeks at 80 hours or more may generate breakthroughs. But all these must be carefully managed and motivated, and combined with a sense of mission and purpose.
In short, the devil is in the details. It all depends on the project, the team, the requirements and the resources. More time may be reasonable, and for short spurts may not only be necessary but best. Weigh all the options intelligently -- consider reducing project scope or time expectations and weigh them against increases in staff or draw from present staff. The costs and benefits are tricky to weigh.
But quite frankly, if you are just there to sell the idea of shorter work weeks and larger staff as a panacea -- you are selling as much of a fantasy and bill of goods as was management.
The book is more about the people aspect of creating NT than the software itself. The personal relationships of many of the developers were ripped apart.
It all depends what is important to you.
Random is the New Order.
I recommend these books wholeheartedly; they are both worth their weight in Gold Pressed Latinum[1]!
Good Luck,
Arjen
[1] - The XP Book is quite thin and therefore light. It is actually worth ten times its weight in Latinum.
My personal experience is, when designing code, I prefer to work 6 or 7 hour days. When debugging new code I prefer to work 12 hour days. I never work weekends; working weekends burns me out by Tuesday and I get nothing done Wednesday through Sunday.
I've never succeeded in doing 15 hour days for any length of time. I spend at least 8 hours sleeping (9 or 10 when designing something hard) and 2 hours eating every day. That rules out 15 hours days right there. (I do a lot of design work in my sleep or half-sleep. I often wake up at 4am to do algebra on paper when I realize I can't handle the math in my head.)
You didn't mention what sort of job this is, which has a *lot* to do with work expectations. Is it a startup? A service business? A bank?
In startups and small services businesses the resources (money / time) are often fixed, and the effort is variable. Sometimes you bust butt, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's worth it (you succeed), and sometimes you don't (the product flops, the client walks, etc.). That's the nature of the biz.
If you're a cog in a large corporation, then odds are somebody above you messed up. Good luck.
Be careful of the "evil management" syndrome - it's a sign that (a) you don't really understand the business that you're in, and (b) you don't trust the folks who are supposed to know. Why the hell work for somebody who you don't trust? I worked with a guy who insisted that the "evil owners" should just suck it up and put more money in the company to hire extra resources, when in fact the owner had already put in over $1M - essentially all of his net worth - and was holding a full-time job someplace else to pay his bills. He was tapped out, and the banana head employee refused to see it. In the end, the team couldn't find a way to finish the project sooner and cheaper, and the owner threw in the towel, and everybody lost their jobs. This guy was like a deer in the headlights - he still did not understand why the "evil owner" would kill such a kick-ass project over a little money.
Most project plans are optimistic, and programmers drive themselves hard, working overtime without being asked, in order to make their commitments despite the inevitable "unexpected problems." Actually planning on people working overtime eliminates the "invisible buffer" and pretty much guarantees project failure. Refusing to plan for overtime isn't "refusing to be a team player," it's reserving the extra effort for emergencies.
That being said, if engineers are working 8 hour days, there's something wrong. Either they don't believe in the project, or they're just not enjoying programming and should be doing something else. I've had a lot of engineers working for me, and I've never had any of them work a 40 hour week unless they were planning to quit, or knew they were going to be fired -- it's simply not in a good engineer's nature to stop when the clock says to, rather than when the problem's solved.
A more mature approach to project management is to scale project functionality down to something reasonably implementable. Leave all the extra stuff out there are opportunities for engineers to excel, and make it clear that you'd like to see the engineers "beat the plan" and squeeze in additional functionality, but don't plan on it, and don't let your business users expect anything above the baseline.
This takes a lot of credibility to make work. The argument I've used (successfully) is that they can choose between a 95% confidence getting 80% of the business value (i.e. the "best" 50% of the system), or a 50% confidence in getting 100% of what they want. Any sane business man will choose to reduce risk. If it comes down to it, get an external consultant to do a project plan review to validate your work estimates, and to confirm that doubling work hours reduces productivity. Managers always trust consultants (who are nominaly objective) more than their staff.
I'm sorry, but your rant represents a lot that is wrong with mankind. A passive approach to living that can barely be called living.
Thoreau wrote:
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.
Why must we take this "If you have the talent to work on class projects, then fine. If you don't, then just let it go." Bull shit. Why not just extend that to, "If you have no talent, just kill yourself right now."
I say, instead of just refusing to work 60 hours, go find a job where you'll demand to work 80 hours. Live life for god sakes.
Do not ever justify just working 40 hours a week because other things are important. If they are so important, then why are you working those 40 hours to begin with? Are your material possessions truely that necessary?
Please, don't preach passivism. It's morally revolting.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
You can't be serious!
15 hour days?
How's a guy supposed to have enough energy to
shoot his nerf-gun while rollerblading for even a ten hour day?
In California, there are only two exceptions to overtime pay. 1. You require a license to be able to legally have your job, e.g. doctor. 2. You are a manager of at least two people. There are no other exceptions. Thus, if he wants you to work 15 hours a day, he must pay overtime. Laws in other states vary.
BTW, saying John is manager of Joe and Bill, and Joe is manager of John and Bill, and Bill is manager of John and Joe (you get the idea) would not be a legal loophole to get out of the overtime pay requirement.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Steve Toll?
Steve worked at a company where I used to work. He made all his developers work "all nighters" and weekend just because. He would leave at 5 everyday and would come by at 11:00 pm to check on everybody. Some of the developers were from out of town. One guy flew in from out of town for one week. Steve wouldn't let him go home for over a month and wouldn't let the guy even get a rent a car. He also filled the time cards for his coders and only marked down 8 hours for each day when in fact they were doing 18 hours. Hardly any work was getting done because the moral of everyone was so bad. All the code was total crap too. Steve was just on a power try and trying to look good for his management. Anyways....if you are in a bad situation like this you need to go over your bosses head and let people know what's going on or leave. It's not worth it. If you run into steve RUN!
I'm a physician (in addition to being a part owner of tech company) - the average working hours for a young MD is 90-100. A number of studies have shown that concentration and performance decline appreciably. One study show a positive relationship between number of hours of work and number of automobile accidents.
Whether this is applicable to other fields is debatable - but if you were to apply it anywhere, programming would probably be a good place to start. That said, most of my employees work 60-70 hours a week. The difference is they pick their hours, and obviously infrequently work more that 15 in a row (during training, physicians routinely work 36+ hours in the hospital.)
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
Every time I was involved in a project whose management chose to increase working hours instead of getting the appropriate number of resources, and I mean EVERY time, the product ended up being a complete crap.
Your company is going to throw away its credibility just to complete a project milestone. Usually at this point things can only get worse. In my opinion you're better find a new job.
And... no, there are no ways to communicate to the management about their wrong decisions. At least if the crappy product is still marketable.
Why don't you go into management? That way if you ever get some degenerative brain disease, you will get promoted and a raise to boot.
You could work the tails off your subordinates, play some golf, buy a boat, and talk on your cell phone to other managers urging them to "do whatever it takes" to make the unreasonable deadlines.
... look at the older Silicon Valley companies that did make it. How many of those were born from huge efforts by their staff? Apple. Cisco. Palm. Intel. HP. Sun. The list goes on; all companies that were and/or still are legendary for the long hours they expected of their employees.
They were also legendary for the amenities they provided their employees, so they COULD work long hours.
For starters: Free food. Good, solid, delicious meals. (This is a simple equation: Put on a good dinner feed - like a banquet from a different high-quality restaurant's catering operation - every evening - and the engineers stay to eat. Then some of them stay on for several more hours on that hot project. Even if most of 'em eat and run you get several extra hours from your most fanatic personnel and/or those with a hot project or not yet at a good stopping place for the day. It's a LOT cheaper than hiring enough extra people to get a similar amount of added work out, and more manhours by your core team is a LOT more productive than a similar number of hours divided among extra staff.
I've watched more than one company decide that the dinners were an extravagence and cut them - resulting in the loss of about a third of their manhours (and a drop in efficiency of the rest, due to fewer working hours between mental "state reloads") as people left for dinner each night and didn't return. It's like cutting a third of your workforce but still paying their salaries. All but one of those companies went belly-up. (The remaining one is still running, but it delivered products late and its stock is now at 1/200th of its peak.)
But two things to note about the long hours:
- The people had mucho stock options at pennies - like founders' cuts or early-hire cuts. Say a tenth of a percent of the company, each, minimum, for the latter, MUCH more for the former. They were working for "THEIR company", not "THE company".
- You can only do this for a little while. Then you have to back off or you burn out. Long hours for part of a week is more efficient than shorter hours over more days. Long hours for weekdays AND weekends breaks the body and the mind - two weeks tops just before a deadline or when getting a design together, then a week off for recovery and don't do it again for at least a half-year and preferably a year.
15 hour days AND weekends is insane, even for "startup mode". This administrator obviously has a project in trouble and he's trying to set things up to blame the staff - like by setting up impossible conditions then accusing anybody who doesn't leave on his own of "insubordination".
Either he's in CYA mode for a doomed project or he's trying to reduce staff without incuring unemployment-related costs by getting everybody to quit or firing them "for cause".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Projects going past deadline and requiring overtime happen, but that is an exception, not the rule. If projects are constantly missing deadlines, then whomever is setting the timetable is incompetent and should be fired.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Hi,
This *may* be illegal. Different states have different laws. In most states, the company can require you to work upto 50 hours/week anything after that can only be requested by the employer. Note that in California & Illinois (the only two states that I've checked that have this), computer professionals are exempt from the law meaning you are pretty much a hired slave.
In most states, any time after a certain limit is 1 1/2 times your hourly rate (as if you were hourly)
Again, check with your state department of labor.
jason
No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil
Long hours are common in Japan, but it's not about working. At quitting time, the businessmen are supposed to brown-nose the boss by going out drinking and singing karaoke. They might be going home at 10PM, but an American wouldn't call it "work".
What you need is a union. In canada, you could join the CEP(Communications, Energy and Paperworkers).
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
"I'm not saying 15 hours days is intelligent or respectable, but if one isn't smart enough to go find work elsewhere, then why does Uncle Sam have to come in and beat down the "evil oppressors"?"
Because employers have power, and employees do not. Given the chance, the boss of this story would probably have the poor bastard working 20 hours a day.
In the past, if there was a major deadline, then I'd up the hours for a couple of days to get the application presentable, or at least mostly functional.
The only time I really pushed the hours is when I had a good group of programmers, who had the same commitement level as I did. Then working until 2am wasn't bad. But thats making the workplace fun and having fun while doing it.
In situations like that we knew we needed to take a mental break, so we'd take a few minutes to do something that had nothing to do with work, usually toss around a football, get the blood flowing again. Going back to the code wasn't too painful. Also improved my spiral.
It really boiled down to the personalities involved. Unfortunately when one of the group left, it left a void and things went downhill quickly.
When I was working long hours like that, I'd lose sleep, become caffeine dependant, and just be a total mess. The stress wasn't worth it.
If the boss don't get it at this point, its time to get out. Nothing is going to change until a more serious cost comes up, like an accident, or you shave your head and move to Tibet.
Any software release can be either feature-driven _OR_ date-driven. Not only will adding more resources (staff) NOT help your team to meet the deadline, it will probably delay it further.
I suggest giving "the owner" a copy of "The Mythical Man Month" to read.
I have worked 18 hour days for weeks at a time and the software, in the end, worked. Unfortunately, it's hard to say how much time, if any, would have been added to the project deadline for 8 hour days.
What the hell?
Where did he say anything about passivism?
He said to spend your time working on a relationship. If you've ever been involved in a relationship, you've got to know that it's not even close to passive.
He said to spend your time raising your children. You must have been a child at one point... Perhaps you've forgotten it? A passive parent is NOT a parent raising his/her child.
He said to spend your time caring for your parents when they become elderly. You also think that's passive?
He didn't tell people to spend their time watching TV. He told them to remember what's really important.
If making that one last software package work perfectly is what's important to you, so be it. But don't blame him when you look back at your life and realize you haven't lived it at all.
We were told pretty much this as well. Although I was in at 6:30AM and left at 4PM, I was also told that enough hours were not being dedicated. So I cut back on lunch and stuff. When teh lay offs came. I was in that group. A guy who had to ask what a varible was ( yeah he was a programmer too) worked 8Am to 8PM almost consistently (due to his not understanding, oh say WinRunner) and he's still got a job. I am realizing it's not what you know, it's how many hours you work and how much you make. Perhaps I should have worked 12 hour days and been palced on suspension twice and kept my salary at what it was when I was hired. but in the end I blame the government and it's shitty PPS regs.
first question should be "Why are we falling behind the schedule".
"The employees aren't working 80 hour weeks" is not an acceptable answer.
I bet you'll find many coders goofing off half the day, or otherwise being unproductive.
Re-evaluate how code is produced, find those who can't seem to get their shit together and HELP them focus and get going.
Don't play quake in the office.
That's probably the most egocentric rant/troll I EVER saw on slashdot! Squeezing your whole polemic into a single sentence you're essentially saying this: "I myself am the only and utmost important being on this planet, I shall strive solely for my own good inside the small sphere in which I live my daily life, the rest of the planet and all of the universe around it be damned."
This mentality, which I probably exaggerated a bit here but that's to prove a point, is the main cause for regulation to have been instated long ago when the USA industrialized. Anti-trust laws are there in fact to keep a democratic society from morphing into essentially a communist model. If General Motors, Microsoft, Bell, Enron etc were not checked the US would soon end up with a small set of huge megacorps that run the whole show. How is that different from the state owned manufacturing facilities that were set up in communist countries? Yeah so your megacorps are privately owned.. by a lucky few, just as the communist party consisted of a lucky few who essentially owned the big plants in their countries.
There is indeed no one person to figure this all out, and neither is there one system that will work properly at all times. Communism, if executed by a non-corrupt team of coordinators, would work great in times of crisis. Whereas liberalism, if executed by non-corrupt executives, works great during prosperous times to drive innovation.
You have a wave in economics that cycles approximately every 10 years or so. I'm not an economist so don't shoot me if I'm a few years off here, but the wave motion certainly is there. My guess is that this is caused by political rigidness and the natural inertia of policy creation and implementation.
The current 1st world (where you get the idea behind the USA's "vast lead" from is a mistery to me), is about as ideal as it gets.. considering human nature and our inclination towards greed. I don't believe in Utopia, but I try to do some good for myself as well as for other people in my direct surroundings every day. I'm not going to change the world, but at least I can keep a tiny little patch of it clean and make a miniscule number of people in it happy from time to time. The rest is up to the gods, but I don't expect to hear from them anytime soon.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I was working at company...we put in the long hours, some all nighters. My boss used to work 3 days in a row with no sleep. Now he is dead. Heart Attack. He was 38. He looked at least 50. Sort of puts things in perspective.
Check out the labor laws in your state. Some are also federal, but the bottom line is that you can't be fired simply because the boss found someone who will do your job for less pay.
Now do the math - 18 hours a day for the same price as 8 is LESS PAY. If you get replaced after documenting an attempt to lower wages by increasing hours - you will probably own more of the company than your boss after a brief stint in court.
IANAL but i would just recommend getting as much documentation as possible, make daily notes as to what was said in a paper bound journal. Get a small tape recorder and catch impromtu speaches. Get Addresses of co-workers who might be hard to reach if you get axed. Then hold you're ground and play for the big payoff.
AIK
Ive' b een wrkiing for 60 sxty hors strait my cod e is purfEctly find and cleeR is ever .
Table-ized A.I.
Why does the owner need the development staff to work 15 hour days and weekends? I bet it's because the business plan or market position sucks and the owner is a stubborn brick who cannot accept his failures and shortcomings. He "needs" you to do the impossible because if you don't then his failure at business planning will be on display for all to see. Of course, he won't see that his stupid plan failed. He will see that his development staff failed him, and he will fire them in disgust. Do yourself a huge favor and find something better to do.
That's why all respectable businesses have switched from child labor to third-world labor.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
Management knows very well that their schedules are false. They are squeezing free time out of you , that's all. They don't care about quality, so why would they listen to arguments about quality being hurt by long hours? They believe you are more productive when they light a fire under you. It's all a game to them. Unfortunately, the game is rigged so management always wins and the programmers always lose. You might wise up and start looking for a real career. Programming is not a career, it is slave labor.
The early employees of the companies you named all made their early employees very wealthy. Anyone who is working such gruelling hours at a mature company with no bonus associated with the extra work is an idiot, but then again, the world is full of idiots.
As a young man, my uncle fought for, and helped win the 12 hour day and the 6 day week in the hospitality industry. He died a few years ago at age 88.
...
Hotel and restaurant managers argued that they'd go out of business if they allowed such a short work week.
I've done the 24 hour programming days. And years later I managed the production of defect-free code. We know how to do it right. But too many people don't want it done right. They want
Your boss is clearly evil, psycotic, or both. Quit now, and get as many of your fellow employees as possible to do so, as well.
If you really want to make the world a better place, have your boss have an 'accident'. prefferably fatal, debilitating, painful, or all 3.
Personally, I'd tell your boss to go fuck his job. Long hours, constant work including weekends, lack of sleep - do it long enough and you'll head right along down to RSI-city with the rest of us poor sods with painful wrist/finger/arm problems.
Use your head, your arms are not designed to bash out code 15 hours a day - change your career while you still have one[1].
james
[1] Mine was only partially fucked - I got lucky with a slight case of pain for the rest of my life , with a matching set of muscle relaxant pills and anti inflammatories. Nice.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
For all the stupid silly stunts my company pulls, we at least have the policy of "Management by Objective". In a nutshell, this means that as long as we meet our objective nobody (except the numbnuts in HR) is going to care about how many hours we worked. Along with this are a whole bunch of status reports we have to submit. It's a pain, but it allows management to know way in advance if we are on target, giving them time to hire contractors and get them up to speed so they can actually help.
I work eight to ten hour days. If I ever go longer than that, or have to work a weekend, it's only a temporary thing and it earns you comp time. That's only happened once in four years.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I had a similar request from my boss ( I was already working a 50 hour week- 50 solid hours, no browsing / ballscratching).
Boss: "We need to get this done faster! Everyone has to work at least 12 hours a day, six days a week!"
To put that in perspective, that's 8am to 8pm, Monday - Saturday. 72 hours.
Me: "So, you're going to give everyone a fifty percent raise?"
Boss: "No. Why?"
Me: "Because we're working half again as many hours, give or take."
Boss: "No! This is for the good of the company!"
Me: "No. I'll be at my desk."
Of course, I had a year's worth of salary in my bank account...
I've worked 48 hours straight with no sleep and just got a 12 hour break before I go back. I'm programming and admining for a major project that needs to be done ASAP. Just had enough time to catch up on web while a box is being staged.
Things I do get though is free lunches and dinners. A great atmosphere and great co-workers (and a great boss too!)
Also I get to come in late and don't really have any fixed hours. When things are slow I just take days off randomly.
It's great when you enjoy it. Otherwise leave.
I work for a big company as a Software Architect/Engineer and I basically come and go whenever I want (within limits).
On average I end up working about 7 hours a day, I never work on weekends, and sometimes I work from home (and these are the most productive days).
I get more stuff done than some of my colleagous who work 12 hours or more plus weekends.
In these 6-7 hours however, I work very concentrated without any distractions.
Actually it has been shown (although I have no reference right now to back this) that humans can work focused for only about 6 hours a day and after that productivity tapers of dramatically.
Now, of course I sometimes put in 16 hours or more a day, mainly to meet deadlines, but I always make sure that this is limited to one or two days.
I think companies that make their employees work long hours on a continuing basis -- especially in the software business -- are extremely short sighted. Nobody in his/her right mind wants burned out, unmotivated software engineers. Humans aren't robots and should not be treated as such.
If I were you, I'd tell him I wasn't going to, even if it meant getting fired. No one has sat in their deathbed wishing they worked longer hours.
Rapid Development by Steve McConnell ISBN: 1-55615-900-5
Amazon.com link
It's a Microsoft book, but the guy sure knows what he's talking about. If nothing else, Microsoft has had a whole lot of practice with regards to project management of large software projects. A good read for both you and your boss.
In other words, is your lunatic boss expecting you to effectively take half pay or less, or is he going to pay the same hourly rate for the extra time?
If he's going to pay the extra, why not just use that money to buy extra employees. If he's not going to pay extra, then he's probably proposing breach of contract - you did sign a contract stating 40-hour weeks @ $xxx per hour/week/month, right? Tell me you did, please?
I think this question is especially apropos given that a few articles down is the announcement for the 72 hour ICFP programming contest.
Just wait until Tuesday and check _that_ code quality.
Will working 15 hours a day affect the quality of code?
Who cares your boss is an asshole, quit and move on. Don't be like the rest of the country and fear the bad economy. You have to live your life right now, not a year from now. You could be dead tomorrow so charish your life and the little time we get on earth.
LoRider
I can usually crank stuff out pretty quick such that long hours will not be needed for an extended periods. However, a couple of conditions must be met:
1. Give me tools and languages that I like instead of the ones you see most often in the trade rags.
2. Agree to stick to a certain consistent look and feel WRT UI design instead of reinventing the wheel for every single form/page and cutesy trinkets that look cool but don't really improve user productivity by much. (Add the trinkets later, after the deadline is met.)
3. Let me do my job instead of sticking your grubby PHB fingers into the mix just because you want to put your "personal touch" on it. Most likely your personal touch will not be very compatible with mine and mixing will just slow things down. This does not necessarily mean that your vision is "wrong", just that mixing philosophies slows things down.
4. Have the user ranks things so that time and complexity is not spent on low-ranking options. Often decent compromizes can be made with a little negotiation. For example, "we can give you something 80 percent as effect as feature X, but do in 30 percent the time as you original plan.
Of course I can give up any of the 4, but you will be incrimentally giving up productivity from
me.
Table-ized A.I.
fuck you.
or, more precisely, fuck them.
Asking an employee to wok a 15 hour day is ludicrous. Hell- eight hours seems like too many, somedays.
I swear, I think some people think that all we (computer techs, etc) have to do is just push a few buttons and the project is done! Do they even realize how difficult it is to make a computer dance? Next, they'll want us to be more efficient to reduce debugging efforts.
The job sure might not be physically demanding, but the mental tax is just as grating on the body. The brain needs rest no matter what job you do.
Reminds me of what happened last year when I had to keep checking the prices of the GMD department where I work (grocery store). I would take the Telxon, a handheld transciever that scans barcodes and give the price, and check to make sure that teh shelf tag and ring up price match. One of the upper management couldn't understand (and getting mad to boot) why it was taking so long and why I kept finding problems, despite a week and a half and several attempts through the department.
So, on a Thursday, he took the Telxon to do it his self. ofc, I was more than happy to let him give it a try. It was my half-day, so I went home when he started. The next day, he came to me and said "i'm sorry, i had no idea it was that hard." DUH!!!
"Before humanity, the stars shone throughout the heavens. After humanity [has gone], the stars will continue to shine"
So you can't quit the evil employter and go find better work for yourself? What indication that the complaint above was about a megacorp?
You would impose mediocrity on use all to make a pack of simpletons happy?
Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects by Ed Yourdon.
Buy, borrow, or spend a few minutes in a bookstore reading the first 2-3 chapters, where Yourdon describes the four different type of death march projects, the prersonalities and politics surrounding them, and what your options are.
What you'll read there will likely be the same sort of advice you're getting here. Yourdon's presentation is a bit clearer, though, and he raises a lot of good points about how to make a decision with regards to whether or not you'll buy into a death march project. The middle section of the book details how to survive on such a project if you do, indeed, decide you're going to take it on.
At the end of the book is "Death March as a Way of Life." The long and the short of it is that these type of projects are increasingly common. If the project fails, then then it's your fault - you didn't work hard enough; the next batch of folks will no doubt be harder workers than you were. If you succeed, and ship on time, you'll just show management that death march projects work. Either way, you'll be in a job where every project requires increasingly superhuman efforts.
Better to decide if you want to deal with that now, instead of trying to do so after a few years of insane workloads have destroyed your marriage, health, and/or mental faculties.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
I'm currently (well, not at the moment) in the middle of a rather insane implementation of an ERP for a large midwestern university.
Yeah, it can suck to be blasting away for hours and hours and hours.
Last month I pulled a 28 hour shift to recover a number of items that one of our developers blew away. (note, he didn't misfunction because he is working long hours, he's just a fucking moron)
I don't work long hours because anyone demands me. I do it because this project is important to me. This project is directly and indirectly going to make more than 20,000 people smile.
I think a better Ask Slashdot question is this:
I'm a geek with good communication skills (no, this ramble isn't the best example of my writing abilities) but don't have a mind for politics -- how do I help coworkers (who suck) find a new place of employment?
If you would learn to read through I am all for anti-trust. You didnt read the whole treatment, as I did, most of your rebuttal is not relavent when the whole "rant" is read through.
And he gets marked a troll because people refuse to read. This is the state of slashdot. And here we have an on topic, insightful talk of why the person who complained should quit his job to better the situation for himself.
If big companies didnt exist, most of what people rely on wouldnt exist in the same capcity as they do today, but thats the beauty of a free market. If they didnt do it, someone else will.
At the end of the document, the author goes through great trouble to ask for the gauruntee of freedom before economic freedom, something you werent able to do, allo the author to speak before you passed judgement on him
Pathetic, you really are. And you actually suggest that communism will work. You speak for yourself. I would not opt for forced mediocrity versus a free market which scales out over time to being the best meritocracy.
You need to find another job NOW. I recently went through the same thing, with my employer demanding we work long hours and refused to hire more people, when it was obvious we needed them. So when projects fell behind, people got fired, which made it worse and increased the rate at which people were being fired.
:)
I was the last person to go, because people who don't know anything about technology ran the company and don't realize that it was just too much work for the number of people they have. Now they're screwed. With the elimination of my job, the threw away 90% of their knowledge of what was going on. Word is that several clients are now trying to back out of their contracts. Fuck em, that's what they get. I wouldn't go back for any amount of money. Maybe I should post some info on fuckedcompany.com.
So when I call Japan on a weekday in the US and get them on the weekend, thats them faking overtime?
if you are just writing easy stuff you dont need to really think about it you just code it,
like if you were going ot write an ftp program. a web browser etc they are all written the same way and theres mozillas gecko engine.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The project you are working on is doomed. What you are in effect saying is that the people in charge of planning this project stuffed up, the sales people promised a unrealistic timeframe, and now - as usual - the developers are on a death march which will very probably - say 95% certain or better - result in total failure.
I'm assuming we are talking about a late project because if we are talking about working 15 hour days just because the boss wants to screw more work out of you all for the same money they are either in a very seriously bad financial situation or the boss is just plain greedy bastard (or the stockholder).
If you read all the bibles on project management of software you will find the one thing that you can't do is simply increase hours worked. My policy as a software development manager is to only allow 8 hour days. I actually told one employee to stop working 10-12 hour days, since there was no need to. In this case we had to keep repairing his work because he wasn't on the ball.
There was only one occation where overtime was warrented, and that was only for a couple of weeks. Bottom line is that regardless of the quality of work issues, this is simple abuse. We are not living in the industrial revolution, people shouldn't be expected to sacrifice their social life and their relationships with their family to their job.
"Save the planet, by George Carlin.
most coding you are just following the script or plan.
Now if you are lead programmer or something maybe but usually programs are designed first then coded
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This sounds like a cause of poor project management. Your work must be setting unrealistic deadlines and takeing on projects which are not in the capacity of the orgainisation. You should not work longer hours you should work more effeicently with the aid of better project management.
Me? My answer would be 'fuck no', but I do realize not everyone is a position to say that.
In a global economy the guys in india who will work for 18-20 hours a day will be hired and you will be fired.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
ArsDigita, ah yes, wasn't that a great success story :)
development.lombardi.com
Which is why THAT particular department in a company is called HUMAN RESOURCES. Lovely, eh?
In any case: try not to do the ridiculously long hours, they burn you out, and make your loved ones believe that you don't want them around. Destruction all-round.
NetNewsWire into Yojimbo!
But the problem is that this manager is requiring (or strongly suggesting) employees do that when it sounds like at least the poster doesn't want to. Also, JWZ had good stock options and it payed off for him. The poster might be getting a relatively mediocre salary and no or few options. This company sounds like it won't succeed, where Mosaic Communications did.
I have been at companies where I we had to write code 12+ hour days for weeks on end to meet customer deadlines. I got paid for a 40 hour week. But, I owned a chunk of the company so it all worked out when we sold the company. In other circumstances I would have probably told the boss to go to hell.
The job market isn't what it used to be but I think a programmer with a good skill set should still be able to find some other work.
If you really like the company or think that there is some value in what they are doing you should try to discuss some compensation options. For example, a bonus if you meet the deadlines, overtime pay, or some kind of equity in the company might be an option. I tend to like the last option since it builds trust and gets everyone motivated.
The reason the tech industry has been immune to unions is that we have brains and therefore don't need to be treated as wards of the state like some 80 IQ coal digger. (No offense to coal miners)
The correct response to a company treating you like shit is to get out, not bring in the govt to beat them into submission and allow the employees to rewrite the rules until until they destroy the company. (See the Boeing machinists pending strike and the UAW's results with the US automakers.)
So long as there are insecure techs fresh out of college willing to work insane hours for no pay increase companies will get away with it for a while. But of course when all you have on a project is kids like that your company is going to end up on F---edcompany.com.
Democrat delenda est
What I remember from the few studies done on programmer and other mental labor (like adding columns of numbers by hand, etc.) is that over forty hours is fine. Up to a point, around 60 hours is the breakeven point (varies by individual). Between 60 and 80 you catch about as many errors as you make for pretty much wasted effort. Above 80 hours and you make more mistakes than you catch. And, above 60 hours a week continuously drops the break even point as the weeks drag on. Again, these are individual figures. Everyone is different, I generally sleep only 3-4 hours a night and I did three months of 120-130 hours work weeks to get a project out for my previous company. I took a week off and then worked only 10-15 hours a week (bug fixes (only two were my code!) and feature creep, adding gen 2 features to gen one of the framework we created). Would I do it again? Maybe once a year for big bucks and a month paid vacation.
:-)
The important thing is management needs to understand that everyone is different, and the longer you burn the candle at both ends, the faster to burnout. But if he is looking for 105 hour weeks, some people will just get sick (physically) from the stress and then you'll lose more cogs. Overall it is cheaper to add more staff. Did I mention I am available
And one last note. I did this and they are basing their product on my work, and I got laid off. Companies have no morals or sense of honor, they are in it for the bottom line; post our completion of the deliverables, our entire team was "cut".
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
You can change your organization, or ... You can change your organization.
The simplest and most eloquent way to convince such a manager that this is a bad idea is to get another job.
1) It conveys the depth of your feelings in no uncertain terms.
2) It educates the offending manager that his heavy-handed, short-sighted, $#%!@^# style is counter-productive.
3) It removes you from an abusive situation.
Your career is too short, vote with your feet.
But then, if you live in Seattle with top o' the nation unemployment, what choice would you have?
There are companies like Real Networks who are laying people off and enforcing overtime on the rest.
Employers get away with what they can, for as long as they can. These days, why not over-work your employees and then get more? (I'm describing their thinking - I fully feel this is insane given the need to maintain and continue projects).
So then you have the construction worker. Over 8 hours? Time and a half. Over 10? Double-time. Work on Sunday? Double-time. There is still overtime in the construction industry, but the employer has an economic incentive to use it wisely, if at all.
But then, here in Washington, the Washington Software Alliance gets laws past to exempt tech workers from overtime!
Result - no disincentive on the part of employers to not use overtime.
If construction workers are smart enough to read the writing on the wall, how come tech workers aren't?
Those employers didn't change their overtime policies because they wanted to - the workers forced the employers to sign a contract.
So why don't tech workers do the same?
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
After about 15 hours of coding, I seem to forget a lot of ";". Nothing worse than trying compile a huge project and finding you missed a ";" somewhere. The frustration only makes it worse when your on your 8th Mountain Dew of the night.
:/
Compilers need to realize when your tired, lol....I guess were getting into AI(props to those guys) stuff now, which has it's own problems
Enjoy the long weekend for those not debugging stupid human error because of exhaustion....
Unless the guys in India who work 18 hours a day write shitty code, which is kind of the point of this whole discussion!
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
If long hours, and lots of forced overtime cause sloppy, poorly written code, I guess those poor bastards at Micro$oft must have been putting in some 20 hour days for the last several years.
From What's Wrong With Management Practices in Silicon Valley? A Lot.
"More fundamentally, there is a confused notion that being productive is the same thing as working long hours. It isn't. As Jim Goodnight, the wise co-founder and CEO of SAS Institute, has said, "If you've put in a full day, by 6 o'clock, you shouldn't have anything left, so go home." Amazingly for the software industry, SAS thrives on a 35-hour work week. Long hours also are partly responsible for the defect-filled products we have come to expect and accept. People who work when they are exhausted make mistakes. And as the quality movement taught us, it is more expensive to find and correct errors than it is to prevent them."
(Coming from someone who's done 10-15 hour days, for 12 months and then had his program sh*tcanned...)
/dev/monkey begins to fray around the edges
My 2c would be to tell your boss that if he wants you to work more than 8 hours a day, then after this project(before the "patching"/updating phase) you're going to leave.
In the process spend about 2 hours every 2 days actively seeking new employment.
After my stint of programming that hard for that long I began to look ill, feel ill, be a practical walking zombie and my boss kept pushing me because he wanted to boost his own ego/standing. It was GROSS mismanagement putting a "green" coder behind the wheel of a new project without proper guidence let alone, him (the boss) having no firm idea about what he wanted out of the project in the first place.
The time was intensely stressful for me, and as such I've made the decision to change my profession. I don't want to be in any circumstances where I have to work that long and that hard for that period of time. Granted there is always pressure in most jobs to work hard for short amounts of time, but continual pressure to keep up the "pace"(10-12 hour) just simply isn't worth it in the long run.
I used to love coding, I loved the kick I'd get out of writing an algo from scratch that was faster than anything else out there. Hell when I was at university I did 72 hour stints just because I was driven and the code just evolved in that time. But these were STINTS, not continuous pressure. It worked beautifully too, got high marks.
My opinion is simple: it's not difficult to deal with large amounts of pressure for a short amount of time (2 weeks) beyond that,
quit
I have been observing the trend of companies pushing for longer and longer work days in the past few years, and I hate it. You work for a living, but you don't live to work. Management is so entrenched in its numbers that it doesn't see employees as people with families and lives, but as resources that are used to generate revenue.
Of course, when management proposes longer work days, it doesn't apply to them, only their "resources". I would tell your boss to stop being such a fucking cheapskate and hire more help if he wants things to get done faster. The eight hour work day was instituted for a reason, and it wasn't because somebody wanted to watch businesses lose money needlessly in the maintenance of humane working environments.
quit, quit, quit if you can afford it in any way, shape, or form.
I was trapped in a job by the first George Bush recession (91-92) and fooled myself into thinking that working long hours with mandatory overtime would be OK.
It cost me my arms. I have permanently lost about 30 percent of my arm function and live with chronic pain because of this self-delusion.
No job is worth it.
I'm sick of programmers being treated like slaves.
My ex-boss used to give me so much work. He'd give me a new project to start before i was even half way through the other one. then he complains how it's not complete, when he's even adding more stuff to it every week and seems to have no real direction for the project. Now it's this huge bloated beast which will probably never work.
I referred to my job as 'code slave'.
Programmers are not like a light which you can turn on and off at will. We need breaks like everyone else.
Oh really?
Our job conditions suck. Our pay is not really all that great except for a few of us, we don't have decent healthcare or retirement, we have to continually learn new shit on our own time/money.
When the company is through with us, what few benefits that we have leave with our job and we don't know when we'll find work again.
I've worked union - and I know the difference.
Yeah, if I dislike it so much, then why don't I find another job? That's why I'm an electrician and an admin. Course, right now there aren't jobs for either here in Seattle....
So yeah, I'm in www.washtech.org. When we finally get the overtime laws changed so that they apply to techworkers, will you continue to work at straight-time past eight hours? Or will you benefit from what you criticize?
Sure, some unions suck. But so often its because the workers have let the bureacrats run the show, instead of getting off their asses. You can vote in a union - unlike in a company.
As for Boeing - if it hadn't been for the machinists union, all those planes would be built in China by now and Seattle would look like all those closed steel mills in PA. The issues they might be striking over (and they have a vote) is Boeing sending the jobs overseas.
. This sig unintentionally left blank. I meant to put something here, but I'm busy.
tighten your belt and quit
This, of course, is in the absence of any kind of lighting cues, which seem to affect hormone changes in the body, so it may not apply to most people living in a normal environment. Although I recall hearing of one study in my Intro to Psych class that had subjects follow Leonardo DaVinci's sleeping pattern of 4 hours of wakefulness followed by a 15 minute nap with much success after an initial 2 weeks of extreme crankiness caused by disrupted sleeping patterns.
I have been through this grinder before. If they are asking for 15 hour days, the project is totally, and I mean totally screwed up. Bail right now. Run, don't walk, to the exit. It doesn't matter if you think you're productive, you're not. Good, creative code comes from getting regular sleep. Sleep deprivation generates only crap, which has to be recoded, fixed, redesigned, the whole kit and kaboodle. If they have this mindset they have probably f**ked everything else up too, so even by some chance you actually are productive and produce something, they will nullify your efforts. I have seen THIS more times than I can count. If they can't plan well, they won't do anything else well, and it's a wasted effort. They WILL screw up the marketing, get the requirements wrong, piss off the client, promise what can't possibly be supplied or whatever. Consistently good software comes from developing software using good processes and techniques, not beating the programmers until they're productive. Did anyone learn ANYTHING from the CMM?
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. --Thomas Jefferson
Hey -
:)
Having worked in the Amusement Ride industry for several years as a CAD drafter, we were often behind schedule and asked to work longer to produce more drawings. On the downside, by looking at the same drawing (or, in your case, code) for hours on end, you naturally start to miss more and more "details" about the work. On a 300+ ft. tall roller coaster, this can be costly and dangerous. On a piece of code, depending on its application, it can also be costly and dangerous.
Fortunately, my boss figured out that if we were going to work longer, we also had to check (or, in your case, debug) our stuff more often and multiple times to get the same quality of work. This, in the end, proved to take just as much time as not working longer hours.
On the other hand, working over 8 hours a day did make for some large paychecks.
peace, spudwrench
In the United States, you can file a complaint with your local labour board. Refuse to work these hours. You cannot produce quality code working these kinds of hours over a long period; hell, even a short interval.
Bunny World is a three week project and is done in groups of three. It is due on a Thursday at 2 pm. On the Sunday prior to the due date one of the guys in the group says, "Hey, I have two other projects and they are both more important to me than this one, so I'm sorry." So me and the remaining guy figure out that there is no way that we can complete his code as well as our own in time.
I go to bed Sunday night and wake up Monday morning and begin to code in the "Yost Code Loft", which I was the proud owner of that year after lusting after it the previous year. By continually consuming Dr. Pepper, Starbursts, and Led Zeppelin bootlegs I coded like never before.
Hours flew by and soon it was Thursday and I hadn't slept since Monday morning. The code was flowing from me. We got mostly done, but not all. B+
What made me mad was that the guy who dumped on us got the B+ too.
In college I could do that. Not anymore. I can put in 15 hour days here and there, and feel like I enter a state of coding clarity, but maybe my mind is just cloded.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Yeah, great suggestion for an economy that's all messed up. Did it ever occur to you that maybe jobs are sometimes scarce? It's not necessarily the case that you can just waltz from one job straight into another one, and over the job-hunting period... well, some people have more than one mouth to feed.
And what the fuck does the company's megacorp status have to do with anything? Fuck, engage brain before posting.
The proper response to "These 8 hour days have to stop, we need to be working 15 hours a day and weekends, balls to the wall." is "And how many hours on weekends? 15 on saturday and Sunday also? Lets see, that's 105 hours per week, right? Okay, I'm willing to consider your proposal, but there seems to be something missing. This is the point where you tell me what I get in exchange for working more than two and half times as many hours as you are currently paying me for."
First, any such agreement should have a strictly defined time frame.
Second, realize that you know they need you to work on the project, so you have a very strong bargaining position. You hold all the card. If they fire you for refusing the project fails and you can sue them. If they don't offer you a deal you like, you can keep working 40 hours a week and let them know that the project will succeed or fail based on the realism built into the project schedule. Tell them you're commited to helping insure the project succeeds, but you cannot give away your labor.
Point out that it is customary to pay time and half for hours beyond 40 and double or tripple time for hours beyond 60 or 80. Help them out with the math, show them exactly how much free labor they are asking you to perform using your base salary divided by 2000 as your hourly wage, and point out that you aren't even factoring in the extra portions they have to pay like social security tax, unemployment insurance, and any other employer paid items like health benifits if you have them.
Of course they will question your loyalty and do whatever they can think of to make you feel guilty, but remember that they are already treating you badly, using a scorched earth policy, and you will probably be discarded once the project is over anyway. More importantly, they have already demonstrated a failure to properly manage projects, and unless that is corrected the company will fail.
If they cannot offer you a cash bonus or overtime or a salary increase (effective immediately, remember you might not be there long) suggest paid time off afterwards, with at least a one-for-one comp time ratio (preferably time and a half, doube time, triple time).
If you think that the company will still be there in year and it is already publically traded you might accept some stocks in exchange for some portion of your labor, but you should get a good price on those stocks, at an equitable price based on the real value of your overtime work.
If none of those are an option, ask for a lean on some hardware they have and you'd like when their company folds. Make sure they really own the hardware and nobody else already has a lean.
I'm sure someone is going to ask me why I think my opinion matters, and how I can hold such an unrealistic viewpoint, so I'll go ahead and answer now.
I worked for a Fucked Company called Open Sales and then Zelerate which tried the same stunts. I was one of a group of programmers told to put in overtime, and I made a point of taking a hardline stance that was successful and wound up getting an agreement from management to pay comp-time for myself and the rest of the programming group.
This agreement was made after many email exchanges with upper management and several pointed questions and long distance phone calls (We were in Albuquerque, they were in CA). The agreement was made during a crunch time. If we had waited it would never have happened.
The rest of the programming team applauded my efforts, but they all thought it was a waste of time until I was successful.
After the crunch, when the deadline was met, we were all called into the office on Friday, Jan 5, 2001 so they could tell us what our next project would be. Instead, they announced that the entire office was being eliminated.
The severance packages included pay for three weeks plus each programmers accrued comp-time which in some cases was quite large.
Of course, the company folded several months later and anyone who had accepted stock options in lue of cash (not me) lost.
Excellent transcription of the raw text. Now you just need to learn a little punctuation. You hear when George Carlin's voice goes up at the end of a sentence? A question mark generally goes there.
I have worked at two places where I had insane hours with no end in sight.
it was so frustrating to see the idiot managers screwing things up over and over again and then having to work the hours to cover for them being morons, and they could go home.
I just figured that was how things were - but now I am lucky and at a new place that has amazing hours. strict 8:30-5, and I've once had to stay "late" (which was until 6pm instead of 5pm).
I get so much more done now. I am blown away - it is like a whole 'nother world. the owner of the company is very into a strong process and not needing to put in hours like that to burn out everyone - and it is really impressive in how well it works.
at other jobs there would be days on end where I did nothing, and then would have to work non-stop for two weeks later on.
now I just work steadily all week and have easy hours.
I will never go back to another place poorly managed like before.
that said, I then tend to get home and program some more on my own, but on my own projects.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
"Check out the labor laws in your state. Some are also federal, but the bottom line is that you can't be fired simply because the boss found someone who will do your job for less pay."
You would be hard-pressed to find a state where this is prohibited. In most states, the baseline law is "at will" employment...you can quit whenever you want, for whatever reason, and you can get fired for any reason the boss likes. The major exception are anti-discrimination laws. But assuming that isn't going on, the boss could ask you to stand on your head all day for half your salary, and get the hell out if you don't like it. And s/he'd be well within their rights to do it, in most states.
The major limits on "at will" employment are anti-discrimination laws, and labor unions/collective bargaining agreements. The presumption that there's some "good cause" standard for employment decisions is just not the case....
When I go to sleep after a long day at work, I can't count sheep. IP addresses and ipchains don't let them even appear.
The right question is: why is my boos talking about long hours?
The answer: Because the company made commitments that it can't meet, and you are being asked to make up the difference.
My experience with companies that think you should be working that kind of schedule, is that they are staying afloat by the proverbial skin on their teeth, and they need your help to keep from going under. Usually it takes several years for a company to really go down the tube, so the management knows that things are going bad well before the normal worker does.
Sometimes the company can stay in business by burning up developers and throwing them away when they can't handle it any more. You don't want to be one of the cast outs, because your attitude towards work will be altered for years by the experience. Someone else was saying the same thing, get out while you can, while you still like your chosen career.
Under Communism, there is no reason to work hard. There is no incentive to work more than the absolute minimum to keep from being noticed. Being noticed is not necessarily considered a good thing.
Socialism isn't quite as bad as Communism, but it still fails to recognize the basic human driving force is greed.
On the other hand, Capitalism is not entirely a bed of roses. Unless watched, corporate greed can get out of control to the detriment of society. Enron being a perfect example of this in action.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Most of the people I see out of work right now aren't worth hiring. Why does a megacorp owe a crap human being a job just being that person exists?
Heres a tip: School, professional certifications, and experience. Oh, you are 22 years old and can't rake in 80K, oh, the humanity.
About your engage brain comment, at least I can read, you twit. You didnt read the ask slashdot question, to which the orginal post answered reasonably well. You cant even read. Sad. I suppose I owe you a job or youll get mad at me.
The 500 lines of code I produce in 8 hours is the same quality as the 500 lines of code I produce in 15 hours.
I got this transcription from somewhere else. I own the DVD, it didnt come with a PDF or and HTML of the properly inflected punctuated version with it. Sorry. SHEESH.
It strikes me that if the management of this company are so unskilled as to allow a situation like this to develop, they're probably also so unskilled that the company's future must surely be in doubt.
I'd say that you should get out while you can -- or you may find that you'll turn up one morning (not too far from now) and find the boss gone and the doors locked.
Once things get to that stage you'll find it very difficult to extract any money owed and you'll be looking for another job.
Pre-empt this situation by starting that job-hunt now and bailing as soon as another option appears.
I've seen this scenario happen even when times are good -- and right now, times are anything but good in the tech sector.
I've read much good input on this issue, have experienced some similar situations, and feel moved to contributed my $0.02...
.5hrs for each hour of overtime. If you don't know, that's a bad sign, but you can still ask. Furthermore, is this compensation plan documented any where ? Get it in writing.
I can't/won't say you should work the overtime. nor will I say you shouldn't work the overtime, but I will provide some insight into my experience. It's worth what you are paying for it.
1. What is the compesation plan for the overtime worked ? For example, will there be a bonus paid if the deadline is met ? Or will you be given a similar amount of comp time for hours worked. Generally, comp time is provided at about
2. Do you enjoy what you do and your working environment ? Yeah, I've gathered you think the boss/owner/PM is a complete imbicile, but what about your peers ? Is this particular project challenging, or tedious ? Is what you are doing here increasing your value, or consuming and eroding your skill set ?
3. What are the long term growth/survival prospects for this organization ? From the way you've described the management, obviously you think they're bozos, but is this an emotional/subjective view ? We all can get caught up in that. Should you last 10 years with this organization, would there be any benefit to doing so ?
4. What kind of hours does your boss put in ? Is he willing to put in 15 hour days side-by-side with the staff ? From what I gathered, the answer to this is no.
5. Are you in a steady relationship, or do you have other interests outside of work ? Is your significant other willing to accept you putting in these types of hours ? Are you willing to make that sacrafice ?
6. What is the duration of the project ? Or are the additional hours an open-ended expectation ?
7. What effect would your leaving have on the project, and on the organization as a whole ? It doesn't sound that this organization believes in making an investment in its work force, treating it more like a disposable commodity, but then that is based upon your initial post.
Studies have well established that at some point beyond 8 hours in a 24 hour period, productivity tends toward decline, but exactly where the decline starts, and the slope of that decline are subject of many studies and debate.
Personally, I think the above issues are just as pertinent to productivity as the number of hours worked. The questions of your suitability to the task, mutual respect, resonable compensation, enjoyable work environment, skills development, personal sacrifice, feeling like part of a winning team/ organization are just as vital to productivty, if not more so. Some of my co-workers have told me they can eliminate all these factors, and work at a steady state, but my observations indicate the contrary.
If you can honestly say that you've accurately described the environment, I'd begin seeking other employment immediately. Let this become someone elses issue. If you're carrying the weight of the project, but stand nothing to gain from its success, the owner requires not only a lesson in economics, but in psychology, human dynamics, inter-personal skills, and morality as well.
Show that people who work long hours often spend an enormous amount of their work 'day' fixing errors. Overall it has been found that workaholics are rarely very productive. Their demonstrable output is rarely greater than other experienced workers working regular hours. These studies tie in well with the Air Force Human Resources Laboratory and nuclear industry (DoE) studies that describe long hours as a self fulfilling prophecy. Simply put, the more hours you work beyond 9-10 hours / day, the more errors you make and the more hours you MUST work to fix them. One thing that is often hard to convince employers is that they must develop a work environment that provides workers with a solid 8 hours of undisturbed or rarely-disturbed work. You have only so many 'fresh' hours in a worker every day, you should not squander them. Having workers dealing with customers, working in open 'cubicled' environments that lack quite and privacy, WASTES valuable developer time. It never ceases to amaze me how many companies will try to save $100K on build-out and as a result jeopardize their $1M annual development budget.
From personal experience, anecdotal for sure, I've written code during an all-nighter, which after a few hours sleep, was obviously not just wrong, but not even code, although it seemed perfectly fine at the time.
I left a job I had worked for 15 years because I was pulling 16-18 hour days for the last two years and, I was just discussing this with a friend a couple hours ago, didn't even realize it had happened. I was chugging extreme amounts of caffeine, going through a pound of Kona a week, and doing some serious damage to my own health with lack of exercise and fast food diet. If this is your manager's idea of how to _regularly_ accomplish things, then get the hell out. I mean it. Once managers realize they can pull shit like this all the time, they will! And guess who gets fair compensation for this, not you!
It is the result of poor management, particularly very bad planning. If there's some advantage your employer can gain by pulling all the strings, once, ok, particularly if it means you get compensated fairly or your employer stays in business, I can see it. But if they're doing this as habit, you seriousl are doing yourself harm by remaining staying and becoming a victim.
When I started my next job, after the one which nearly burned me out, I was shocked when my manager asked me why I was staying 10 minutes after five, "just a few things", his response was, "they'll be there tomorrow, go home, get!" It really was a different world, where work got done in 8 hour days, and planning made it work. Too bad new management came in and fouled it up and sunk it, but that's another story.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-- Will program for bandwidth
Well, the post above tried to make a clear, intellgent point about this and other things, pointing out in summation that economic freedom must not supercede freedom.
It got marked as a troll, 2 times, shows you the thinking of the idiots on slashdot.
andrew w.k., is that you? party hard?
Damn itd be good to get a job in IT. :\
Pixels keep you awake!
Stalin killed more people that Hitler ever did. Not that I like Hitler, but its funny how would be communists paint him as the primary evil of te 20th cenctury, but they like to let Stalin off the hook, who is responsible for 22 million deaths outside the conext of war, because communism is an ideal, and its for the good of the people. YEAH RIGHT.
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic. - Josef Stalin, a communist.
We ended up testing in production (TIPP. Since I was the only one who could do maintenance, I was the one who got the call at oh-dark-thirty (usually 2 or 3 times a night). Of course I was salaried. After almost three years of that I got fired for making a comment about the system was a "piece of s***", plus doing real serious coding when the developers were in bed sleeping (I guess) was getting to be a drag.
I now do tech support, I get paid by the hour and I work two miles from home. I ahve alos discovered that more people need PCs repaired than need COBOL/DB2/CICS programs written. I have no desire to go back to mainframes, even tho the yearly (and not, perhaps, hourly) pay is better.
Swedish Meatball
I own my own company in a highly competitive IT field. Our company is surrounded in our regional market alone by many other small businesses who provide a similar service, at a cost that we've found is typically more expensive to the end customer than us. Given that I'm the owner of my company, I suspect you might take the following with a grain of salt - I'm biased... =)
Still, we have recently hired a number of employees and many of the potential candidates were from those same competitors. Often, they were being paid less than we were offering, and worked long hours without much reward for those hours. Two of our first employees were from a direct competitor who sounded almost identical to the environment you describe.
In our company, staff get all stat holidays, one full week from Dec 24th to Jan 1st, with regular hours (regular being approximately 8 hours with most people starting anywhere between 8am and 10pm and finishing anywhere from 3pm to 6pm) and usually a couple of weeks holiday through the year.
So what makes our company able to do this when theoretically our competitors are twice as productive because of the extra hours they work employees? Our employees LIKE coming to work. We're a community and people want to be there. We involve people in decisions about how they do their work, and we insist that people take time off. Yes, occasionally we ask staff to work long hours - and a long day for us is 10 hours - but I then insist they take a long weekend or some other time immediately to reflect that extra effort. Not six months down the line when the manager has forgotten the extra time and gives it out begrudgingly, but when it will be felt and appreciated most.
We also practice continuous improvement. If we do the same thing over and over, we look for ways to improve the process so that we can do it in half the time so that those who are working don't get bored, and can finish off monotonous tasks more quickly. We encourage staff to take courses to further their skills and allow them to move around in their jobs.
By no means do I think we're perfect - there are lots of things that we do poorly. But for the most part, we know what they are and we focus on them. And I don't think we're alone in our business philosophy. There are companies out there that don't treat employees like cattle but they're not always easy to find as so many companies sound perfect during the interview. See if you can interview the company employees before you're hired and ask them to be frank with you. Sometimes even that doesn't help if the company preps their employees, but it might give you some idea of the mentality of the company. If possible, always get to your interview at least 10 minutes early so you can watch the dynamic of the office that you're looking at. It will tell you a lot. I still do this when sizing up potential clients because it will help me determine what kind of client I'll be dealing with.
Anyway, good luck with your job, whatever you decide to do! But whatever you look for, to me the best way to a good comfort zone is always creating the right balance both mentally and physically. Without balance, something invariably begins to break down.
Where is Mr. Holy Workaholic Philip Greenspun now?
He is, in his own words, "Philip Greenspun, 38 years old, retired...", and he's travelling in Alaska. He must be pretty damn disgusted by those "slackers" who work a mere forty hours a week.
Erlang.org: wow
My response:
"Excuse me, sir, but I have ovaries, thanks very much.
And I have a life, too, portions of which you get to rent for the very reasonable fee of $x-thousands/year.
Anything more than that is slavery... which is illegal, last time I checked."
cheers,
Technowitch
"Overtime doesn't help. Although in the very short term it does speed up the team, if you do it for any length of time you will get bitten badly. The big killer is motivation. It's much better to have a motivated programmer work seven hours a day than a tired, distracted programmer work ten. Even if the programmers want to work long hours it's not a good idea. Long hours make people tired, tired people make mistakes, and mistakes take time to fix. [...] If they [the programmers] really have no life, get them to play computer games in the evening instead. It's much more productive to have castles mown down by trebuchets than it is to slip bugs into complicated software."
I will also add my humble argument: even if the team was able to cope with the 15 hours day work, they will become used to it. Then demands on the team will rise accordingly. Then when you have a hard deadline, because you will still, how to you cope with the increasing demand?
- 18 hours / day? No way
- bring more people in? I advice you (or your boss) to read 'Mythical Man Month'
There's no single silver bullet in software, never ever forget it.BTW, I found it fun to get a Microsoft
PS: sorry for the typos, it's 6 am, and I'm just tired ;)
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
A Month ago I was reading an article in a newspaper talking about a research from Harvard University stating that waking-up late in the morning favorise learning of new elements and that taking a nap after six hours of study boosts the amount of knowledge you can acquire... This study can easily been applied to the context of producing work. It was pinpointing the fact that the brain activity is better functioning when the sleep cycle is completely ended, instead of breaking it - waking-up early. And that this brain activity progressively slow down after 6 hours of strait work. Taking a nap was helping people to return to a normal state and continue to stimulate brain activity. I know my english isn't good today... I've been working 24 hours in the past 2 days... Really, in my own opinion... working more than 10 hours a day slow my performance... going over that limit more than 2 days in a row and your work output will be less in a week (I mean good work output) than if you have made a regular 10 hours a day 5 days a week. And Btw, working on weekends destroy people moral.... ! Here are some references : "Power Nap" Prevents Burnout; Morning Sleep Perfects a Skill, Snooze Power: Midday nap may awaken learning potential... anyway I have to sleep... good reading !!! peace... and continue to tell you boss that more resources make better software and that later or sooner he will face problems in the code that will cost him much more than spending a little bit more earlier !!!
-I swear by my life-and my love of it-that I'll never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine
This gets marked troll, yet the SAME IDEA gets a +5.
= 4173725
Interesting, slashdot moderators, how horribly unfair you are to worthy posts. I find you lack of respect for intelligent posters offensive.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=39015&cid
Walking Papers (Score:5, Insightful)
by forkboy ({moc.ibtta} {ta} {orevagomtj}) on Friday August 30, @03:57PM (#4173725)
(User #8644 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
If the unemployment rate isn't too bad in your area, I'd be telling them to suck your balls.
There's no excuse for an employer to consistently demand 15+ hour days and weekends. Once in a great while, when an important deadline is coming, sure it's a reasonable request, but a consistent basis? No way man...don't let yourself get trapped into that. You'll burn out and find yourself embittered against working at all. (I'm speaking from experience)
It sounds like this company is a poorly managed failing startup and probably isn't long for the world anyway. Quit while you're ahead.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Funny, this got moderated down. I serves to the original poster's argument that it was.
Only a fucking communist would down mod censorship an intelligent discourse such as this.
What is sad about slashdot is that moderation is used to supress ideas.
Life is too short to invest more than that amount of time into somebody else's cash cow. ;-) )
Unless you have a personal stake/interest in the project beyond keeping your job, tell that mFer to Foff (only do it nicely trying not to burn any bridges
If however you are generating something residual for yourself, work while the workin is good, then retire, work is work, do something fun with your time while you are still here (becuase you're going to die someday).
ZillaVilla.com for Mozilla profile roaming.
We go through the very same thing at my company.
My advice is to stay slow. If they force you to work longer hours work slower, don't make the deadlines. It's not your fault you are heavily under staffed. It's not your fault you didn't make the deadline its the manager's fault by not hiring enough resources. plain and simple.
This is an industry FACT: The more you work the more they'll squeeze!
You shouldn't work yourself to death just for some bonehead manager. Programmers have a life outside of work too. Make it so clear that its more cost effective to get more resources. don't take any s h i t!
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
Also note the Japan works 6 days a week, long hours, and has a GDP that is one third lower than USA.
Which is fairly impressive, given they have about a third the population and a land mass roughly equivalent to California.
ye rest. Not just a good idea, it's the Law.
And you need one day a week just to do the stuff around the house and yard. And your family is the whole reason you are working, you need time with them.
A 40 hour week is fairly appropriate, although in pre-industrial and traditional cultures, work was over more time, but at a slower pace. Far less stress, most probably a higher quality of work, not to mention a far higher quality of life.
Why are you working there? Not as a surface level question, but think about it philosophically. Think about what is truly important in your life, and how you might possibly better order things. As Socrates said "the unexamined life is not worth living"
Haven't we learned from Loki Games? If all of
you decide to work 12 -15 hour days to catch the
project up, once it's on track, more of you would
be let go, with nothing to show for it. I don't
know, I would never work like that again. Life is
too short. Don't rely on promises from this company. I don't know about you but I like my time off. Sure I have some projects here.. like the robots I build. But I also like to hang around with my wife and kids, go driving my Truck, fly model rockets with the kids, and working on the house.
Are you going to get paid overtime?
Good luck! I wouldn't do it.
Troll? I think not. Its on topic. It treats the original story and its parent.
Flamebait? Maybe. But that term is so loose and subjective, anything could be considered flamebait. This is far to intelligent to be run of the mill flamebait.
So, its not offtopic, not a troll, not flamebait and certainly not overrated, why did the complete fuck who moderated this down in the first place get away with it?
Can you say Chernobyl? That is what happens when you sufer from lack of sleep.
Any software company which gets itself into this mess is SERIOUSLY SCREWED. If they were that far off on their software estimates, there have to be LOTS of other places where they have no clue. Like their current financial position go work for someone with a clue.
Where would you rather work? Considering the fact I have done expatriate work in the USA and I am Japanese, I plan to move my family there as soon as possible.
"Fucked" and "Company". Get out.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
It gave some perspective on things. I didn't want to be like the 20-somethings we heard about on the news. The ones that went back to their desks to finish work.
I have a small business. A year ago, we did it, we worked just about every weekend of the summer, worked until midnight, etc. Now, we work 50 hour weeks, plus whatever we want from home on the weekends. Sure we still work hard, but it is more reasonable. I'm in the office 60 hours, but I doubt that I work more than 40. I need my team to work hard, so I make certain that I'm the first in, and usually the first out.
At the same time, I no longer demand insanity. OTOH, slackers that don't work hard wion't find themselves there for long. Sorry, you can talk here about how entitled you are to jobs, you aren't. If you can produce in 40 hours, great. Work 45 and produce more and I'm impressed. Just do 40 and I won't be thrilled. Work 40 and don't produce, and I will likely can you. Work 60 and have trouble, I'll work with you because you're putting forth the effort.
However, this Slashdot 40 is enough garbage is just that, garbage. Sorry, if you want to work short hours, move to Europe and be useless like the French. People that make an impact on the world work hard, REALLY hard.
You're not going to change the world working 40 hours/week. You're not going to have an impact on the world working 40 hours/week. Don't want to change the world? Don't want to have an impact? Don't work for a small company.
The owner that you're all deriding, its HIS money on the line. He's paying you. If you fail, he loses money. You get unemployment and another job in a few weeks. You don't know what the owner has on the line. The utter contempt here for the people that put it all on the line is a little disgusting.
Alex
What's funny is that these guys who demand to suck the life force out of their employees for nothing in return don't realize that paying completion bonuses is better economic sense and employee motivation. If you have a 6 month project, with 5 programmers and a $20K on-time bonus split between them, you can get *a lot* more out of people than just cracking the whip, even if you are an unpleasant person to work for. As for long hours, and people *will* figure out how to evade it.
My recommendation is: quit. Look for another job. If you can cause enough turnover in the company, they will fail, and they deserve to.
'These 8 hour days have to stop, we need to be working 15 hours a day and weekends, balls to the wall.'
I would reply with "No way." Here's why:
I have several friends who code or produce other computer output for thier income. Lets call them Mark and Jason.
Mark is 32 - produces computer artwork and does computer imaging and interactive systems. He's 33 right now. Two years ago, this time I was helping him recover from Quadruple heart bypass sugery. Yes, at 31. Now, he may have been predisposed, genetics, etc etc. However, when you work *double* or almost double the hours that everyone else regularly does, you end up with a life style that puts your health at serious risk.
This request to work alot more will undoubtedly increase your stress - another factor in heart disease. I cannot say how much the "go-go-go and everything is on your shoulders" lifestyle has hurt my friends.
Jason is a systems manager, Email, web, DB, whatever - he's your guy. He is the proud father of twin boys, just a year old. Know where Jason is, this very very moment? ICU. No, not ICQ. ICU. He came through his *double* bypass surgery early yesterday evening.
There is no amount of money or anything else that is worth your health and your familys son/daughter/wife/husband/father/mother.
There has been talk of IT unions. Maybe its a good idea... Maybe we'd better think about this before its (almost) too late for more of us.
I don't think code quality is even a concern. For SaG (sh**** and giggles) I watch the customer service department stats at my company, and even the folks just answer the phones suffer after 6 hours. It's probably time we re-think the work week in corporate america, but it'll never happen.
-- Will program for bandwidth
some people might disagree, but if the incentives are lucrative enough, i'll put my heart and soul into my work.
quality work also comes from passion. if you have the right mindset, and a great deal of passion for the field of work that you're in, there's nothing that should stop you from working more than normal hours while getting quality results.
i'm not quite done my degree but my goal at whatever job i get is to work for money AND enjoyment. not just prostituting myself to some capital fiend. the employee has to remember he is there to be paid by an employer and the employer does not own they're slav^h^h^h^h employee's. (sp)
"The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering" [Fred Brooks] describes in little more than 1/4" of paperback why it is impossible to exchange bodies for time in large development projects. My copy says Second Printing, July 1978, but it's still on amazon.
Give it to your boss as a present and look for different work.
" An extra four to eight hours a week increases output by 10 to 20 percent or more" Wow, 10 to 20 percent extra time equates with 10 to 20 percent of results? Whoda thunk it.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
For companies working Time and Material contracts to complete projects, TIME and MONEY/PRODUCTIVITY are related.
Many large consulting companies working these projects want to maximize MONEY/HOURS. In other words, hours are the product. The application is just a side effect. They don't care about completing the project.
Heh, I remember reading those words as the exact moment I lost respect for Greenspun.
Longer hours are a way to complete
a project successfully only if you
give us all substantial raises.
Considered harmful.
If you are going to work long hours. Make sure you are working for yourself.
The crazy(long) schedule I've been working lately certainly doesn't appear to be affecting the quality of my paycheck. Only thing missing from the workplace is the buff dude pounding out the beat on a drum while we oarsmen continue to toil mightily. IMO the government should be taxing the employer at a higher rate for overtime rather than the poor overworked employee.
Karma: Anything remotely associated with Boy George I have no interest in.
Your employment contract probably says you should work 40 hours a week for x amount of dollars. That's a contract that works both ways.
When you buy a house, do you give the seller 500k if the contract says 350k?
When you rent a car, do you give the company twice the money that the contract says, just because you feel you should?
Like hell you do.
So why do you feel obliged to give more than agreed in writing in the work contract? The employer isn't going to give you any more than what's written down. It's just stupid to give your time away for free. Your employer is just a business partner, and you shouldn't give them the most valuable thing you have - your time - for free.
Always take care of yourself first, because no one else is.
For a while I worked four twelve hour days a week. It was great. I think there is some advantage to keepin' groovin' when your in the groove. But I wouldnt play without some arrangement to give you party time.
The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It chronicles the development of Data General's 32 bit architecture circa 1980. They were chasing DEC's tail and things were pretty intense.
My favorite quote from the book was the resignation letter of an engineer who burned-out dealing with nanosecond timing issues. He said he was going to Vermont where he would not deal with any unit of time shorter than a season.
Spend that first long day polishing up your resume, and then submit it everywhere you can.
If your employer fires you, claim unemployment (which they hav to pay for). Either way, they pay for your search for a new employer.
Or talk it over with the rest of the team, and if you're all agreed, say "No". If your employer starts firing people over insane hours, you're certainly not going to want to hang around, and if you have a good team, firing someone for such a thing is likely to start an exodus.
(I left my previous company over this category of management insanity that resulted in one person walking, so I followed -- getting out before it all went to hell. Within a year, 70% of the talent had walked, and within three, 90% had walked.)
In emergencies, you can get away with insane hours. (Catnaps while the database is rebuilt, etc.) In development, there are no actual emergencies. Management incompetence does not constitute an emergency.
Oh, and go talk to a shark. Take their advice about documenting things... it may be that if your manager is that incompetent, (s)he'll screw up something serious and do something illegal.
Maybe your best bet is to renegoiate your (the team's) employment contract: double you base wage for being _asked_ to do such a thing, and get an hour of vacation for every hour over 8 you work _in addition_ to your usual vacation rate. And ask for a free massuese on-site, to help deal with the stress.
I'm a recent quitter (smoking, that is) and I find /work/ matters 90% of the time. The /know/ there is a limited
I get all the benefit of "smoking" w/o actually
smoking. In an office where 75% of the tech staff
smokes, the "yo, let's smoke" thing is really about
discussing
difference is that the discussion is happening in
a relaxed (and outside) atmosphere. You( the non-smoker)'d be amazed at how much more efficient
discussions are when you
time (say, 7-8 mins) in which to have them. Anyway,
your point about taking up smoking is not all
wrong -- just do everything you'd do while
smoking, but don't smoke. Aside from the obvious
physical benefits, you'll have more scratch at
the end of the month to blow on booze and wild
$other_sex....
Yeah but you use their code when you run Microsoft windows.
No one cares about optimised high quality code, they just want it written on time for release date.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The small companies I've worked for seem to make a number of fundamental mistakes. The number one of them being that practices that applies to their larger competitors do not apply to them.
Having worked for both large (160,000+ employees) and small (10 employees); I've gotten to see the differences up close. Just so there's no question about where I'm coming from, I'm currently employed by a very small company (I'm employee #12 of 13).
You'r boss' request sounds like those endemic to small co.s; the rationale seems to be that "since we're a small company we have to work harder and with fewer resources to compete and survive." This is not a theory to which I subscribe, and to my experience, all of the smaller companies I've worked at who followed this doctrine have folded or been swallowed by a competitor.
The fact is, small companies need to work more efficiently, not just harder than larger companies. With limited resources, efficiency is crucial; waste is not just detrimental, but life-threatening for a small company - it simply doesn't have the margins to support it.
The problem, I think, stems usually from the person who had founded a small company. They've typically worked their butts off and invested countless hours and long beyond belief day after day in the start-up process. This action carried them to the point where they were able to hire others to grow the business outward, but the attitude and expectations remain that longer hours and more work will yield more success (it has up to now, so why should that change, right?). Add to that their perceived need to make certain goals on less manpower, and the usual conclusion is a deluded justification for expecting massive hours from people.
Well, the facts of the matter (as prerviously pointed out by multiple posts) are that such a rule is rarely true, and pushing employees for long hours erodes efficiency greatly, and increases exponentially the chance that they'll incurr the huge cost of replacing an employee (and I'd argue that the cost of replacing and retraining an employee in a small business is 4 times that of a larger business, because in a small outfit, everyone seems to be doing 4 different jobs at once).
Well, now, not that any of this directly helps your case, but it never hurts to think a little about what makes an otherwise rational human being expect that another person would be perfectly happy sitting in a cube for 15 hours a day under flourescent lighting, tapping away at a keyboard performing mentally tedious tasks.
Need a simple, easy to use data tier generator? http://www.gryphinsoftware.com/
I'm more on the IT side of things than development, but at my company we had a big project to get out the door by Jan. 1st of last year and we had a senior project guy that practically killed himself getting it done. We were under resourced, there was a hiring freeze, and eventually he quit in a huff due to the stress and the hours and almost managed to screw the project completely. I wouldn't work the 15 hour days (unless it were for a short stretch and I knew I was getting fairly compensated for it). I know it's especially tough in this market, but I'd start looking elsewhere immediately - this is a recipe for disaster and a foreshadowing of a management style that's petty and short-sighted. It sounds to me like this idiot just does NOT have the best interests of the employees in mind and will have no compunctions to screw you the first chance they get. Life is just way too short to be unhappy and in a situation that sucks. I wish you the best of luck, man...
Damn Strait
Only yesterday, I was talking to someone who'd spotted a problem during a code review in some code written by a "cheap" outsourcing company. If he hadn't added an error handler to cope with there being multiple files in a location that expected only one, the program would have overwritten a paymemt file and cost his company $2M when it ran yesterday morning.
On a less dramatic level, most of the cost of typical software comes in support and maintenance. Our department was basically unable to deliver any new functionality to the business last year as we spent it fixing bugs and rewriting software that didn't do the job that it was intended to do.
Yeah but you use their code when you run Microsoft windows.Which is why no-one in their right mind uses Microsoft software for business-critical systems.
Code quality actually improves with longer hours. It was recently proven that:
cq = hw * k
where cq is code quality, hw is hours worked, and k is a constant which is roughly equal to pi/e.
Recent papers in related fields definitively shows that late hours and working long weekends maintains productivity, and, in fact, can actually increase the value of k in the above equation.
For crying out loud, doesn't anyone do their research before posting on Slashdot?!
Oh, yeah, and you spelled "affect" wrong, in case nobody mentioned it.
-_-_-
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Productivity is defined as output per unit of time. Increasing the work period does not affect productivity.
This reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw once:
The American Labor Movement --- the people who brought you the weekend
This is the part that has always amazed me. How can they ask you to do something this stupid with a straight face?
My last boss caused me great pain with such stupidity. One of my Debian buddies sent me a good explanation after I spent the afternoon complaining about it. That PHB did not even understand that laying me off was actually a reward. My nerves are finally starting to recover and I should be able to kick-ass on my next job ;-)
Having just recently gone through one of those "fundamentals of project management" one of the very first things that was drilled into our head was that hiding work hours by 1) not tracking hours and 2) by working excessive hours in a day does nothing to get your project done any faster (200 hours takes 200 hours regardless of whether you do it in 25 days or in 18 days).
Bottom line was that fooling yourself into thinking that making your project teams work longer hours somehow equated faster project completion was a falacy. Quality suffers and you make extra work for the project in the end.
I fully agree with our instructor when he said most managers manage via the magic 8 ball method.
To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system (FreeBSD) used by so many been administered by so few. - NetCraft
Working long hours may or may not get you there on time, may or may not actually be more productive. The question you really have to ask yourself though is: "How many workers will I have left after the project is over?".
:-)
Your boss might think that this is not important because he can get new programers. Your boss is wrong. Getting mnew programers costs (and big time!) in productivity because the new ones have to learn everything from scratch.
In short, do your boss a favour and buy him a book named "peopleware". Tell him to read it or you and your entire stff will resign
Gilad.
As stated in Peopleware, after a (long) period of overwork, employees tend to underwork for quite a while. For each overworked hour there can be one or more underworked hours.
Underwork means being present at your job, but not being much productive due to exhaustion or demotivation after quite some long days.
- For every winner, there are dozens of losers. Odds are you're one of them -
Feh.
People are greedy, fine.
Let's think about what greed is for a second. When does simple self-interest cross into greed?
when you work hard for something? - probably not
when you hurt someone else to get something - probably.
There's no reason people living in a capitalist society can't do fine without stealing from/stabbing/shooting someone. Most of us don't do those things.
Now, if you had a system where you got a nice basic labor/money bargain, and could live comfortably, and didn't have advertising manipulating your desires at every turn, what would be wrong with socialism.
It's not like any socialist state pays doctors the same wage that it pays cashiers.
Some say soviet socialism is dumb because it tried to comprimise too much. Tried to appeal to the worker's self interest, using capital (wages).
Look at a Maoist like Che. He thought about "the revolution" in social (not socialist) terms. He realized that while weath was in people's self interest, it's not the sole item. A feeling of self-worth is worth more than gold. Che worked two jobs for fidel's government, and did volunteer labor on Saturdays, and refused any more than his meager military salary. (His other job (some bank or economic development post) would have paid about 4x that).
Don't forget that even though people always say "the USSR proves socialism doesn't work", it's not true. The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US) was trying to kick them in the eye the whole time. Hardly ideal circumstances to establish a utopia.
In short, greed motivates me personally, but it's usually mitigated by a moral conscience and a desire to feel good about myself. Ayn Rand would think that is greed, but she's full of shit.
Do you really think greed is so much more nature than nurture?
A couple years ago - during the tech boom - our groups spend at least 12 to 14 hours at work. Now that high tech crash and burn, is it all worth it? NO.
One small side effect (that will definitely affect you): your work hours will go out the window -- 15 hour days will be normal and 18 hour days common. Sad thing about being in business for yourself--your boss will be a real prick.
Second option: ask your boss/owner (strange that you call him the 'owner') to set a tangible goal to work 15 hour days towards. Set an endpoint for the excess work. If it's indefinite, find another job. But if there are push periods and then relative slack periods you'd be more motivated...
Personally, when I've had 8 hour/day jobs I hated them and would spend 8 hours (outside of the 8 work hours) picking up other skills to advance my career/marketability. Now I'm the boss over technology for my company but I still put in more than 12 hours per day, six days a week. I just like it.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Why don't you get rid of your 2 SUVs, your boat, and your 3000 square foot house so that you don't have to put up with shit like this from your employer? Learn to live with less, and you can work fewer hours doing something you enjoy more. Voluntary simplicity is the way to go.
Put on BNL and tell your boss to stuff it. I've worked on & managed hard up against the deadline projects: always a sign of poor planning on mine or my managers part. But I've _never_ been told or even asked to work longer than 8 hours, the times I've done it is because I cared about the project and getting it done. The times my team has done it has been for the same reasons: loyalty-if I'm not quitting early, they won't. If your boss is actually requesting this of you, he has obviously failed to win your loyalty to the project. The only way I would work longer in such a situtation (where my boss is demanding it rather than my being inspired to volunteer) is for double overtime & I wouldn't feel bad at all demanding it. Such a demand is a sign of poor project planning _and_ poor leadership and the guy should be made to pay for his mistake. If you won't do it for yourself, do it for the other workers & projects he will mess up until he learns his lesson!
The owner wants you to work 15 hours/day, 7 days/week? That's 105 hours per week. That leaves only 9 hours/day to eat and sleep, which means you'd be sleep-deprived and have zero free time. That's a ridiculous expectation. (And is he offering to pay over 2.5 times your normal salary for these marathons?)
However, even setting aside that patent inequity of the proposal, it won't work. I forget where I was reading it, but some study concluded that productivity in software development should be measured in days rather than hours. This is because it takes just as many 15-hour days as 8-hour days to get the same amount of work done. You might spend twice as many hours working, but it won't get the job done sooner, which means you'll have given up your free time (and probably sleep) for nothing.
The reason why 15-hour days are no more productive than 8-hour days was that working so much makes you less efficient, so you end up working slower. Worse yet, you're also more prone to error, so the software you write in those 15-hour days will produce buggier, lower-quality code, without saving any time in the schedule! However, that lower quality will affect the customer, and lead to more debugging and support work, and create a reputation for low quality which is hard to live down. Also, the cost of supporting buggy software can easily drown a company, especially if salespeople continue selling full-tilt even when the software is clearly buggy.
Not to help matters any, but when management starts demanding such long hours, employees start polishing their resumes, and morale falls to the floor. There's a good chance that the best employees will be the most likely to leave. And bringing someone new up to speed can be a major delay.
People are the most valuable asset of most companies (especially a software house), yet management is often so shortsighted as to view people as fungible "human resources", which is one of the greatest fallacies management can fall prey to. They tend to view hours as fungible, linear and very mechanical in nature, which is far from true for knowledge workers -- even if it may be more valid with manual labor tasks. Context-switching is another overlooked cost, implicitly (and incorrectly) assumed to be zero. (Developers should never be expected to do support work and still accomplish any work.) Knowledge workers are not fungible, and they never were.
Smack that owner upside the head with a clue-by-four, but be prepared to go find another job, because this one will become your own personal hell if he follows through on this plan. (But beware, it's not so easy to find another job as it was a couple years ago...)
A truly Enlightened owner would have you work six hours a day (yes, 30 hours/week!) for full-time pay and benefits, and encourage you to get at least 9 hours of sleep per night. While this seems counter-intuitive to a manager with a "human resources" mindset, consider the results. He would have happy, well-rested, enthusiastic and energetic employees who would be alert and less prone to error. (This would pay dividends in reduced debugging time, reduced support work, and a higher quality product that engenders customer loyalty.) They'd be reluctant to leave, rather than biding their time waiting for a chance to jump ship. They could have a life, the software would probably be less buggy, and it'll probably take as long to finish as it would have with 15-hour days, but without burning people out in the process of creating crappy software...
Of course, an Enlightened owner would also develop realistic schedules, not arbitrary ones based on his fantasies of when he thinks the code should be ready. And project plans should devote extra time to creating a good design instead of plunging into coding, because it's very difficult and expensive to fix a bad design after the fact.
Of course, there's a 99.9% chance that this owner just won't get it anyhow. Fret not about his karma; he'll reap what he sows -- just be prepared to do what you must if he remains clueless.
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
> No one cares about optimised high quality code, they just want it written on time for release date.
I would have to take issue with this having just completed an options trading system. It would be no good to release on some artificial deadline, then have it lose the traders millions of dollars now, would it?
I would never farm this kind of system out to India, Romania, Russia, or the like [and in fact actively killed the idea].
Provided that your boss doubles your salary that's OK if you can handle the load (you probably won't : after 2-3 days at this regime you'll find yourself sleeping eyes wide open at 3PM).
Otherwise, quit.
Obviously
person at work doesn't always mean person working
I've been a software engineer for 17 years now. For probably 12 of those years I worked 10 to 20 hours of overtime per week. I know for a fact productivity decreases as you sit there spacing trying to figure out what you were doing 30 seconds ago before you took time to pour another cup of coffee.
If you are single AND your employer is paying you overtime AND you have nothing else to live for but accumulating money then work the overtime. If you have a family or either of the other conditions are false then leave this jag off as soon as you can find another job. Why work for someone who believes you to be a "cost" or looks to squeeze you dry? How loyal will he be to you when you burn out? If he talks about being a team player ask him why he wants to field a baseball team with only seven players.
One Time at Work Camp... I decited to go to school camp durring the day. I found that if I started programing in the morrning for an quite hour or two and then left for school for a few hours I could sit down and punch out a lot of code. Just becouse I wasn't sitting at the desk, didn't meen I wasn't thinking about it. Also, get some balls and tell your boss, hes an idiot, becouse he is. Thats inhumane to expect you to sacrifice your life so his project dosn't fail... Tell him to get the self confidence to be a leader and then he wouldn't have these problems.
Yeah, and tell my boss too!
-James
slashdot moderators cleary suck. this modded as a troll. i have seen several comments posted after this that ended up 4 or 5 that suck - especially when compared to this. this is truthful, insighful and largely correct. i encourage intelligent people to just tell this community to fuck off an go somewhere better. and believe me, there are lots of places.
i always suspected this place was overrun with commies, socialists and people under 20 who dont know shit about real life
my name is jeff and ive ben workeng 2 daze strate now an d i thin k no evry theng is fin im fine ther is no fiffrenc in my wrk..
this is a funny tire d boy. im fine. i lov u an d we all do. ok no sleep no w i go work more on do ing som e code
vec tor,vectr>string get_sleep(vedtor&&& pointy)
{{
includ #algorthmmllllam.fffffffff fd.....
]}
oh man, i cant believe the people who followed up on this. they make comments on the comment above that reveal something funny. they didnt read the entire comment. this place is a sandbox for half brained twits who contribute nothing to life that anyone cares about. its too bad that in thier sucktitude, that have to eclipse other brilliance.
What about RSI?! Here in the Netherlands you can only sit 6 hours a day after a computer, and you have to walk around for 10 minutes after 2 hours of sitting behind a computer. If you would work so much, then you will produce nothing but nonsense. You're company should hire more people, or use a different way of working (why use c++ when java can do exactly the same, in less time, ofcourse performance shouldn't be an issue if youre working with java). There are many things you could consider, but remember... there's money and there's you're body, and you only have one body... remember!
Sander
ps. Sorry for my bad grammar and spelling (Im still studying English...)
know the technology you're working with don't hack code with 'cut n paste' or rely on gui tools to code for you. i see pathetic people working long hours and weekends trying to debug a problem because they don't understand the tech their using.
work smart, not hard.
EVER? such a strong word. you either havent been reading slashdot very long or you are a fucking idiot. the latter more likely. if half the comments here were half as insightful, the comments might be worth reading, intently..
as it stands now, reposters , bullshit artists and formatters end up getting the props here.
whats not welcome on slashdot is an opinion, even when the FUCKING STORY ASKED FOR AN OPINION.
YOU DUMB FUCKS.
well obiviously!!!
If your company (and thus your management) does not have any detailed plans on what that needs to be done and how long it should take (max 20h blocks, preferable smaller), you are in for serious trouble. Failing to identify all neccessary tasks and planning them will surely make your project late, and most likely fail.
Pulling an all nighter the day before release to squash that last bug won't affect quality, but to constantly work more than 40h/weeks will affect you as a person. Your personal life will suffer greatly, you will get tense, you and your co-workers will start to go on each others nerves, you will most likely sleep bad and get a constant feeling that you are behind. The stress level will go up and affect you in so many way that a team of researchers would be neccessary to explain all the effects.
So, seriously, are you still caring that much about code quality? The quality of your life is in the drain after many weeks of constantly getting pushed around. And yes, the quality of the code is by now quite bad, quarrels and accusations are more common, no steps neccessary to keep up the quality are done, like reviews, proper testing and inspections, the only thing you have in your head is "how can I do this as quickly as possible so I can get out of this hell hole". Sell your stock, sell it now.
If you are interested in more about software engineering and reasons why your management is doing so horrible feel free to check out my webpage and send me an email. I have read a few good books (which I can't remember the titles of right now so you really do have to email;)) and I have experience working, both the good and the bad.
And as my last words, maybe it is time for you and the most talented people in your company to start your own business if possible. There are many reasons why it might not be possible, but if it is, it is a very good experience. You won't have to deal with incompetent management that doesn't know anything about how software development works.
But do remember that you can't start acting like them yourself, you are a software engineer, and most likely not the best person to do everything in a company. Hire people that are good at economics and a good president and all that. Remember that everybody in a company has to be competent at doing their job and that you have to listen to each other. See what happens when management is not listening to you...
(These things does not neccessary apply to personal projects, as you have an inner glow and will to finish the project, and you are most likely not sharing the code base with another 50 people. Just wanted to say that too;))
The very question itself is showing that someone along the line there lacks a proper understanding of software engineering process.
Why focus on code? It would affect the quality of requirements analysis (well, not like any customer's going to spend 15 hours a day with you to do that anyway)...of design likewise...If you had a good, detailed design to work from, then coding should be a pretty mindless activity anyway, and actually probably the least affected.
The underlying problem is, however, perhaps more interesting. What measurement systems are in place? Who estimated how long the project would take in the first place, what information did they base that estimate on, and why were they so far off?
I really think though, that until software engineers (or a team thereof) train themselves to measure enough of their processes that they can give realistic estimates with appropriate backup, they will be at the mercy of whatever their managers happen to expect that week.
I read a lot of comments that refered to the quantity of sleep. A few mentioned the quality of life of someone with little sleep. Since I work at night, I've learned that the quality can severly out weigh the quantity aspect of sleep/work ratio. Irregular sleep patterns as well as too little or too much sleep all lead to one thing, illness. I tell people I normally need about 8.5 to 9 hours of deep natural sleep, and that I hardly ever get sick. The one's that say that's too much say they only need 5 to 6 hours. They get sick all the time.
As far a managment mandated overtime to push a product out, as long as you get overtime or compensation, do what you can within reason. But sacrificing quantity of code for quality will give you some measure of job security when they roll out the quantity. You can put the quality back in, in the next release, and charge more money for the new and improved.
Someone hates these cans.
OK, let's face it this particular manager is an idiot, and will never get his product out of the door, but...
When you're working on a knotty programming problem, in my experience long uninterrupted hours do help. I find that it takes some considerable time at the start of a session to think myself into the problem, and that consequently the first two or three hours of a programming session aren't as productive. Consequently left to myself with a difficult problem I will choose to work sixteen or seventeen hours at a session.
So yes, in my opinion, long sessions improve code quality.
When I was younger and had no life I would work sixteen hours a day five days a week, every week, even though I didn't get any extra recognition for it. Nowadays I go sailing or messing about with friends three of four days a week, and rarely do sixteen hours on the trot.
The point is you burn out.
You can do a few months - or at a pinch a few years - of working very long hours every day, and then you burn out and are fit for nothing for months. If you earn enough in the time when you are doing the hard graft to take the next couple of years off recovering (and you actually save that money up and don't spend it on silly toys) then that is fine. But typically the employers who demand these ridiculous schedules are startups with no money, and just at the point when you are burned out and need to take time off your employer goes bust and doesn't pay you the salary and bonuses they've promised you.
So, some rules for those who are asked to work very long hours:
Start ups do fail, and fairly often it isn't anyone's fault that the startup fails. But too often I've seen situations where the principals have seen trouble coming and organised a soft landing for themselves. Meantime they miss salaries for the employees and promise that everything will be alright soon... until you get to work one morning and find the door lock or the kit being reposessed. What hurts most is that in very small businesses you feel you are a team and you feel that the people you are working for are friends. If the principals bail out and screw the workers not only are you jobless and broke but also feel betrayed. Do not allow yourself to be caught out that way.
I hate to say this, but look at what happened to the people who worked for Loki.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
if(longcodehours != NULL) { sleep(); return bed; } else { goto code; }
Do you really think greed is so much more nature than nurture?
interesting question. perhaps the answer is that nurture has no choice but to follow nature. evolution makes it pretty much obvious that long ago, living things had to develop a mindset (ok amoeba dont have a mindset but nevermind that) of pure greed. humans still have this. EVERYthing you do, by your own choice, is powered by greed. that's not saying it's a bad thing, greed is not necessarily evil, as long as it is not out of control. perhaps the only exception to this is instinctual behavior.
Don't forget that even though people always say "the USSR proves socialism doesn't work", it's not true. The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US) was trying to kick them in the eye the whole time. Hardly ideal circumstances to establish a utopia.
well its never surprising to see how ignorant or nationalistic people are, especially americans. the fact is, there will never be a perfect system. humans are diverse, unpredictable, and greedy. nothing can contain us, perhaps except for ourselves, and that is unintentional. how much longer will we be able to abuse this planet before there is nothing left to abuse? then what? move to mars?
i'm rambling again...
http://www.alpa.org/internet/projects/ftdt/backgr/ Daw_Lam.html
Basically, if you lose sleep, your response times for various tasks increase. This is why driving/piloting/etc. is dangerous when you are sleep-deprived. The accuracy of your responses, however, does not really change. Thus, although no one else seems to want to hear this, the quality of the code you write is unlikely to decrease.
All this is for short-term sleep deprivation. Longer term, things change. So maybe, for example, you could work 15-hour days, and then rest up on weekends. (Of course, you might not want to do so, but that's a separate issue.)
And before anyone tries to claim this is flamebait, please read the reference linked to above. I'm just a messenger.
"The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US)"
Military yes - but if you are talking standard of living you are way off base.
Just saying it like it are.
After having served in developer, project-management, and VP roles, consistantly putting in more hours is not the solution to the problem.
If your employer/owner is insisting that you need more hours and weekend times, you _*need*_ to tell him to:
1) Get better project management
2) Get more engineers or pay more (double?)
3) Expect worse quality
Frankly, your employer is being an ass. Be up front with him. If you're afraid of losing your job, you probably shouldn't be working for someone like that anyway.
Aurangzeb
I agree with the general thrust of a large number of the comments (i.e. you're being screwed, don't do it), but 'back in the day' I was working on a large FORTRAN system on MS-DOS and, for a number of reasons I set things up so that each source file contained one subroutine / function - thanks to FORTRAN's 6 character limit these fitted nicely into the 8.3 filenames.
Obviously this meant that the date and time of each source file reflected when it was last edited. Despite a number of people, including myself, working until quite late, there were very few files dated after 6 p.m., less than 1% which certainly didn't reflect the amount of work done after 6 p.m. Obviously some of the code survived but would have been bug-fixed whilst people were more with-it. The peak times seemed to be mid-morning and mid-afternoon (10-11 a.m. and 2-4 p.m.). I attribute these times to being the 'having woken up but not too close to lunch' and 'having recovered from lunch and not got too tired yet' zones.
I am certainly convinced in retrospect that much of the overtime was wasted, and although 'work smarter not harder' is one of the most annoying phrases in the english language, in this case I there was a degree of truth in it.
I remember a PC bursting into flames (literaly, i.e. smoke belching out the back of it) and our first thought was 'lets get it outside where there aren't any smoke alarms, otherwise the alarm will go off and we won't be able to do another 4 hours work'. I think this demonstrates how our judgement was impaired...
If you've been coding for six hours, I don't want to see your next line of code. Go read some mail, catch up on the news, have a chat with some of the others. 15 hour days are 9 hours wasted. Your product will suffer. Refer your boss to books like Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, or even Kent Beck's eXtreme Programming Explained.
So what his rant boils down to is..."You arn't caring about the same things I care about. You suck. Care about the same things as me!"
Yes, of course, its all so obvious.
Spare me the replies acusing me of not reading it all, or not "understanding" it in the same way that you understand it. Opinions are subjective, you know...
If you're making what the average programmer makes ... about $60K/year ... and you're not getting paid for this overtime, quit and get another job.
The economy sucks right now and it may not be easy to get another programming job, but who says it has to be a programming job? If you're making $60K and working 80 hours a week, there are a zillion other jobs where you'll make more money than $60K if you worked 80 hours.
In a job where you get paid hourly and 150% pay for overtime, if you're working 80 hour weeks you only need a $12.50/hour wage to make $60K/year (assuming 50 weeks of work per year). In your case, with 15x7 = 105 hours = 65 overtime hours per week, that is equivalent to $9.09/hour.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
if you want to produce 'real world solutions' it helps if the people creating them get to see some of the real world
b.t.w. all leave, the guy sounds like he wants to run his company into the ground. over promising not willing to get extra resources to deal with them, the company is going under. get out now
WTF are you talking about?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
More work does not get done in more hours... it is always quality vs. quantity and quality always wins. Take more days off... call in sick or take your vacation days as needed.
In the end it is the one day that you solve the problem that really counts, right? Not the umpteen days you put in to write up the reports on what you plan to solve in that one day?
that's it... add more details if you like.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
- 10 minutes walk from the beach.
- Work starts at 9 and ends at 5:30, no matter what you're doing (meeting, programming, whatever). Ends on the minute, that's the culture, so nobody gets pressured into doing free work.
- Project manager is an ex-programmer.
- Casual dress.
- Overtime (which is only requested by the programmer, never by management) paid at time-and-a-half.
Best company I've ever worked for. (Sorry to gloat people).We (programmers, sysadmins, computer scientists) all know, that programming and, in a more generic aspect, finding solutions for problems, is a creative task. You can't force a programmer to spit out working - I'm not even talking about "good" - code for 8h or the even mentioned 15h / day.
When being forced to solve that issue NOW, the mind usually goes blackout - you will do just something, but that doesn't get you any step ahead.
I did write my best code when getting in a good mood, thinking in a relaxed distance about the problem and most important - not dealing every single minute with this issue.
One data point - we've worked a month of 6-day weeks and will be working another before this project is out of the door. At that point I will be resigning (they're welcome to fire me before this - I'm only staying that long because I want to get my code done).
Any managers reading this - make sure that your employees are desperately in debt (actually quite common here in Chile) before pushing for this kind of thing, because that's the only reason I can think of that would stop me from walking out... (and I otherwise have a good relationship with my boss).
I'm lead programmer on this project - it's a small company, their future plans will be hosed when I leave...
(And a big thanks to my partner for providing the financial support that lets me do this!)
http://www.acooke.org
Long coding sessions will make your brain scream. The longest session for me was 28 hours and it felt like I aged a year. Driving required much concentration. With effort you might still be able to focus on the task at hand but you can't notice many little things, like the fact that you'll look and talk poorly.
I doubt you'll convince management to let you work at your own pace. I've seen many places hassle the developers as much as possible and fire them after the release is done.
Your best choices are:
1) Find another job you want before a change in job status finds you
2) Find a career you really enjoy (it sounds like you're currently in it for the paycheck)
Sooner or later age will catch up with you, and you'll have less patience for unpleasant things.
Henry Ford appears to have been a great proponent of the 40 hour work week. He actually looked at the economics of the work levels.
HENRY FORD: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay
Ford Timeline
American Labor Timeline This does say that the move towards 8 hour days started in the 1880's. Ford didn't go to 8 hour days until 1914. But his company wasn't started until 1903. The assembly line started only in 1913. It was the assembly line that increased production enough that it made sense for Ford enough clout to cut hours.
Not discounting the deaths/beatings/other stuff, Ford was a pioneer for the forty hour week.
I don't read AC A human right
I just wrapped up a project with 60+ hour weeks for two months. Two days ago they laid off one of the guys that did 60-80 hour weeks for 8 weeks. Nice reward huh? Damn glad I'm a contractor. Overtime? Hell yeah.
3 days in a row with no sleep
I would hazard a guess to say it wasn't the work that killed him, rather it was his extreme stimulant usage.
--- I do not moderate.
No, opinions here on slashdot are clearly trolls.
If you dont lick the boots of the parent story, and feel bad for the loser in question, you have no right to an opinion and it gets censored in a communistic way.
In most cases, as a programmer peon, you really don't know what's actually going on in your company. Oh, sure, you think you do, but you don't. Do you review the sales pipeline every week? Do you know the state of your company's balance sheet and financials? How about its credit facilities and payables? When's the last time you sat down with the bankers or the investors and heard the real story?
Do you really know what's going on with the competition, or do you just believe what the suits tell you? Is the pricing strategy correct, or are the Marketing people on drugs?
The problem we all face when we are in your situation is that we are operating in a vacuum. I've been a coder my whole life, spent the last 10 years in upper level management positions. Let me tell you something profound: You do not know what upper management knows. They will never tell you the whole truth. Therefore, you cannot make a rational determination as to whether this request to work overtime is reasonable and thoughtful, or whether it is just the last frantic thrashing of the whale's tail before death.
I've been coding for 32 years, I've started two companies, worked for many. Here are two general observations that may or may not apply to your specific situation:
1. If you are working massive overtime, do so because you are starting a company on the side, not because your current company has understaffed the department.
2. It is easy to believe in your own importance, and that you can make a difference by working OT. Sadly, you probably won't make any difference at all.
Hope this helps.
I went through something similar. The guy in charge wasn't pulling his weight, and because of it, I ended up working really long hours while he "caught up" to what I'd already done. I was outta there.
Tell the owner what he can do with his long hours and go work somewhere else.
During those 3 and 4 day "work days", where we slept under the desks for a couple of hours, our code sucked. Well, mine was mostly done; his sucked because it didn't meet the requirements he'd given me for my side of things, and his stuff was supposed to feed mine.
Nonsense.
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
Let's face it. The American programmer is dead. I work for one of the largest companies in the world, and I'm on a project like this. Luckily, my part in it is easy, so my part is done. But the poor shmucks in the other groups are working 16 hour days and weekends, which is kind of ironic on a weekend called "Labor Day Weekend". Here's why.
For those not in the US, "H1B" refers to a paragraph in the immigration law which allows people to live in the US if they have a desired technical skill. This opened the floodgates for "H1B Visas" which allows foreign programmers into the US.
1. Management sees dollar signs when they realize that you can pay H1B's next to nothing and they'll love it for the privilege of living and working in the US.
2. Management realizes that they can force H1B's to work as long as they want because they can always send the "defective" H1B back to India or whereever and get another one.
3. H1B's have no family in the US to get in the way of work.
4. H1B's are motivated, but not very experienced, so you need a lot of them. Actually, dollar-for-dollar, you need more H1B manpower than experienced American programmer manpower to accomplish the same task, but that doesn't matter because executives focus on "headcount expense". That is, if the cost of one headcount is low, they don't care how many headcount you have, since there is no objective way to argue that one H1B headcount equals some fraction of an American programmer headcount.
5. The focus of new development is NEVER excellence. It is always to be first-to-market. So if the thing doesn't crash very often, ship it. H1B's don't mind very much if their product doesn't work perfectly. I think American programmers strive for perfection... too much.
So quite frankly the American programmer doesn't have a future, unless programmers form a union to prevent foreign labor from entering the US. "Union" is a dirty word nowadays, and I think to programmers even more so, conjuring up images of workers dropping tools to go on coffee breaks and throwing bricks at scabs on strikes. So I doubt that a programmer's union is likely. So I'm moving into management, much as I dislike it. At least then I get to crack whips instead of having whips land on my back.
My suggestion is to think long and hard about what alternative career you should go for, because even if you leave, it will be the same everywhere else.
The Air Force has a strict limit of twelve hours on a shift, even in time of war. They understand that after twelve hours you're making more mistakes than you catch, and, since most high ranking AF officers are pilots, they really care about quality of aircraft maintanence.
Seems to me that there is only one reasonable solution for you to take, assuming that this 15hr/day policy is something your boss is looking to make permanent for the forseeable future:
1) work 15 hour days
2) actively pursue a new job somewhere else
3) once you find & accept your new job, give
your boss your 2 week notice.
If he manages to really piss you off during this time, give him a 15 minute notice of your departure.
I've done the software development pre-requisite weeks on end at more than 100hours a week.
I find the solutions that come out of over working are more "so I can go home" rather than what they should be, "this'd work really well".
From my past experiences I've learned that sometimes if something isn't showing signs of improvement, that I should just go home, get a good dinner, good nice sleep, wake up the next morning and then try again. This has almost always yielded a result the next day in an hour.
One of the most important things to keep in mind, it's only a job. Do you really want your life to be your job? If so, then vary your job activities. Continuously butting your head against the same problem can just make your head go numb.
-Sean
Choose no life. Choose coding. Choose no career.
Choose no family. Choose a shitty development workstation,
choose hard disks the size of walnuts, old cars, CDwriters
and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine,
15 hour days, and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest
car loans. Choose a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose
black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair
for your cubicle with a coffee stain from your ditz manager.
Choose Java and C and wondering why the fuck you're coding
judy arrays on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that chair
looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing device drivers,
stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting
away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable
undocumented API, nothing more than an embarrassment to the
selfish, fucked up lusers who don't care that the project
can't be finished by 3 developers in 2 weeks.
Choose your future.
Choose coding.
Fewer people, more work, less pay.
Welcome to the recession.
First off, I agree that piling on hours doesn't necessarily lead to more code written.
At the same time, you have to look at the business. The economy has slowed down and things are more competitive. You can't necessarily get the same price for a project that you could a year or two ago.
It sounds like there is an us vs. them dynamic going on. Something has to give or the company will self destruct.
You probably need to try to understand what is going on in the business that is causing these pressures. It's always easy to point to the manager and say that he is an idiot (sometimes he is) but many times there are external factors and pressures that make things unpleasant. The manager can't always make things perfect. There are a lot of hungry programmers out there right now.
Your manager probably needs to try to understand your work a little better. There are probably some things that can be done to make the coders more productive. Doing the wrong thing longer doesn't help.
In the end you may come to a mutual understanding. You may need to buck it up and work a little more to get by in these tight times. Your manager may need to work some more time to try to make the process more productive overall.
One thing to watch of is the fire fighters' habit. You may need to work hard short term to get a few projects off of your plate and make some money. If everything becomes a crisis and you are always having to work a lot of hours just to get by then there is something wrong.
I would think it's the age old concept that it's easier to leave than re-educate the management team. They often don't take well to criticism be that positive or negative. If they do take criticism, then stay with them, because they are rare and you have a good team.
A good team needs to be able to handle the truth in order to flourish, this does not seem to be the case here.
Out of curiosity, does the Project Manager also work the same hours he expects his staff to work? Did'nt think so.
A lack of planification on my side, does not means an emergency on my side
If they are not paying for the overtime, better start updating that resume.
The 'owner' has calculated that at the current money burn, you are not going to complete the project. It may be that the project was estimated poorly or the project was managed poorly - but it doesn't matter at this point does it? Asking for a couple hours here and there is no big deal, but they have pressed the panic button and they are very concerned. Perhaps its the owner's own money flying out the window, or that they are prediciting themselves out of work in a short while - again, doesn't matter now.
If this is a start-up I would be greatly concerned.
Look at Windows. Remember the discovery that the average MS coder was forced to work "often til completion"...case proved
Yes, you can do an all-nighter now and then if you really have to, and you're really into your work. You can get some fantastic amounts of stuff done this way, once in a while.
However, if you try to do this with too much regularity, it's consistently shown in objective tests that your work will suffer. Unfortunately, it's also consistently shown that you will not realise this at the time.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Old wisdom: "if you can't be good to yourself, you won't be good to anyone else."
Anyone who would purport to run a company like this has no business running a company. This is an attempt to cheat not only the employees out of their proper compensation, hell, their lives, it is an attempt to cheat reality itself, to get something for nothing, to get good code from bad practice.
Of course, code written on no sleep, no thought, no sleep-on-it-time is invariably crap. But it doesn't matter -- someone like this wouldn't think twice about exploiting his customers [if there are any, and I'll bet there aren't] just as badly.
I've seen this -- a couple guys at my last company worked 12-hour days and every weekend for two months getting a critical (but hopelessly flawed, thanks to the idiot CTO) project together. Instead of being compensated for their extraordinary efforts, they were laid off with the rest of the engineers.
Your company is probably already dead. Even if not, do you want to sacrifice this much to make him rich? The worst thing that can happen, unlikely as it is, is that you guys put in these hours and get a decent project out, which would only serve to prove that this is an acceptable practice.
Run. Now. And post the name of the company so the rest of us know not to work there.
In the global economy the guys in India who will work 8h a day for 1/3 your pay will be hired and you will be fired.
So.. recent college grad, no job, and you think programming is a creative process, like an artist, rather than a repetitive one.
You are a fair distance off base.
Although there IS a creative side to programming, the ability to simply sit down and CODE what you are supposed to be coding is what sells. "Sorry, I'm not feeling in the groove today, maybe I'll produce some code tomorrow" is no good.
You shouldn't have to be 'on a roll'. You should have properly planned out projects, and schedules, and go home when work is over, HAVE A LIFE.
Go look at experienced coders who program real serious stuff for a living.. they are methodical, repetitive, and use processes that work.
Actually, your boss doesn't expect 15 hours a day: he knows that's impossible, but it's his job to pretend that it is, and to shame you into doing ten or twelve hours instead.
The hidden agenda is that he expects you to fail doing ten/tweleve hours/day. His boss expects it, too.
The only way they'll be sure you're working at "peak efficiency" is if you miss some deadlines, and then they'll back off - to about 70% of the point where you failed.
There is nothing new here. It's as old as the hills.
Bellhead
For one account of the effect of coding long hours on a project check out The X-Files Game Postmortem
Are you and your colleagues going to get paid for this overtime? If not, just say no. If he insists, walk. Even if the boss agrees, state that 12 hours a day will be the limit, and it will be every third week.
qts
I was a coder for several years and then became a first level manager (on the IT side). As a manager I managed some but also wrote some of my own code. Most of that experience was at American Express, mostly in Minneapolis but with frequent trips to Phoenix. Amex definitely managed projects with the expectation of coders working ridiculous hours in the latter half of projects. This happened both on the business side and on the IT side. The business side would invariably miss all deadlines for coming up with specifications, requirements, etc. But launch deadlines were never moved. They used the pressure from the IT side to force themselves to come to consensus. This was ingrained in the culture. On the IT side everyone knew they'd just be signing over their lives to Amex for the second half of projects. So they paced themselves. Everybody goofed off until things really got down to the wire. And then when those fifteen hour days kicked in, people paced themselves throughout the day. Work never really started until noon or even 3pm. Of course, people were there, but nothing really got done. This, too, was cultural. Ultimately I left IT entirely because of frustration. The most productive period of my life was when I didn't have a car and *absolutely had to* catch the express commuter trains. I arrived every morning at 8:17 and left at 5:32. Now I work for myself in a completely different industry. Personally, I think unions are the only solution. If a few of the larger companies (like Amex) are unionized, then other companies will get the picture quickly -- be reasonable or suffer the added headache and inflexibility of a union.
I recently observed a "Forced Death March" to finish a project which involved working the development team 10 hours a day and Saturdays.
Some quit immediately and the ones that hung around did their best but, became very irrational and difficult to work with. The amount of stupid mistakes increased dramatically and after awhile they were just spinning their wheels due to fatigue.
Eventually, they had cobbled an application together which, sort of worked but needed nearly round the clock support, however they didn't have to work nights and weekends anymore as a team, just the oncall pager person.
After the "launch" many of them "quit" the company due to burnout and we are now left with only one developer that understands the system end to end.
So what has history taught us about forcing developers to go on a "Death March".
* Stupid Mistakes Increase
* Tempers Flare
* Developers Quit at the Onset of the March
* Developers Experience Burnoutn During the March
* Developers will exit the company at the end of the project with ill feelings and leave no one to support/cleanup whatever it was they created.
* In my case the final product is so bad, it will probably need to be rewritten in the not too distant future.
As you can see, it's a win/win/win situation.
In my opinion, the only way to prevent development disaster is to spend a lot of time in
* Requirements Gathering (Ask the user)
* Requirements Validation (Make sure the user isn't and idiot)
* Design (This starts before you code)
* Design Review (This is done before you code)
* Module Planning (Break the project into chunks)
* Module Testing (Test the thing before you slam it into production)
It may sound boring but it works........
Either you quit now or quit later... Might as well just quit now, unless of course you need to get kicked in the head to learn a lesson firsthand.
I have a 4 month old son I rarely see.
and that's where your priorities should be.
your son will change so much, every day. it's wonderful, you do not want to miss it.
the work will still be there.
go home right now, spend the weekend with your family.
1) Your manager and everyone above him up to the CEO are the first to go and last to leave (i.e. they are also working "balls to the wall", not just you)
AND/OR
2) they offer you at least 15/8ths of your regular weekly pay (some might say 20/8ths for time-and-a-half rate)
Then there's no problem. Theres only a problem if it's them telling you to commit such effort and they aren't, or if you're not compensated for it.
-Styopa
The real question should be, why are you even considering working hours like that, regardless of what it will do to the code.
Life is too short to be working those kind of hours to make somebody else rich. Really, unless the CEO is putting in 15 hour days and working weekends, then you shouldn't be either. Your personal life is far more important as in the long run, it's what will make you happy.
I'd just quit, and go work for a company that knows how to manage time and projects better.
I've worked as a programmer, tester, Quality Analyst, designer, etc. over a 20+ year career. What I can tell you for sure is that after about ten hours most programmers stop writing decent code and start making lots of mistakes.
There are exceptions. There are guys I know that purposely put off the really mindless tasks until the wee hours because they figure those are so easy they can't be screwed up. They seem to do better, but even they make lots of mistakes after ten hours.
If your boss wants to improve productivity, hire really experienced programmers. They are immeasurably better than newbies since they get the code right the first time. Pair up your best programmers with the promising newbies so they get trained up right.
Make sure the specifications you work from are complete and testable. Before making something a "requirement", make sure you can think of a test for it.
Those kinds of things aren't as easy, or as dramatic as making everyone work "balls to the wall", but they work better in my experience.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
To be honest no it dosent.
People seem to forget that while survival of the fitest is the basic tenent of evolution. Many sucessfull speices have survived by building a societal structure to look after there weaker members.
Humans are the best example of this. Early on we formed tribes. These tribes used to care for many of there weaker members
As we evolved this idea become stronger
Of course thios relates to greed
So now we move to a society that only values the intelegent
Poeple to some extent beleave the whole idea of evolution is now finished for the human race. because servival of the fitest is no longer a praticality. This is not true we have societal evolution
A group of people get together and say hey wouldnt it be great if we all lived like this
With phyisical evolution a few creatures grow a deformaty that works or dosent work and the rest follow.
We have pretty much proved that communisum dosent work (although I think it would have had a better chance if the rest of the world had not forced it to spend so much on defence.... that is the world we lived in at the time) capatilism seems better atm but has its own problems
The US and the USSR were the 2 big dinosours fighting to be the strongest and the fitest. The US won. Now the US is starting to see problems in its own system
I'm sure there have been a lot of studies on this, but similar occurences in my life have taught me this..
It's all about quality of life. Are you getting out of it more than what you are putting in?
High workload can be sustained with quality for short to medium durations if there is a driving force inside of the individuals doing the work. Do you feel like you are doing something really really important? [kissass]I'm sure the guys who started slashdot put in a lot of 15 hour days[/kissass] to get it up and running they way they wanted it. I doubt, however, they had a manager referring to balls to get them to stay and do more work.
While lack of sleep can be overcome in a relatively short amount of time, lack of motivation cannot. Lack of motivation is a virus that is not directly measurable, and has a long gestation period. It usually starts with one or two people suggesting the currrent situation now sucks, and how much better it was before. This is extremely infectious. Soon it is the manager that sucks, then the project itself, and then the whole company.
There are lots of running gags about how managers don't get IT employees (re: Office Space). These gags are only as funny as they are true. Hey, if you knew what code you were going to write beforehand, don't you think you could just sit down & type it out? Or even better, write a program that can write code for you based on feeding it business cases? Development is both left-brained and right-brained; both logical and creative. Lack of motivation affects both sides.
When you stop caring about the code you write, you start doing things in a way that will directly cost more. A problem that would have cost a penny to fix in business requirement stage costs more than a dollar in development. I'd further suggest that it will cost more than a hundred dollars in application sustainment over its lifespan.
Okay, I'm a hardcore leftie anyway. But this is the sort of situation that cries out for a little labor organizing. I bet *none* of the programmers are happy with this demand from management. If you got everyone (or even a significant chunk, say half) to agree to say so to the boss's face, and you went, en masse to him and said, "we will not work more than eight hour days, here's the rational basis for our argument but we're not arguing, take it or leave it"... what would boss do? Cave. Maybe the boss could afford to fire one programmer, or two, but gutting his IT staff will kill the project even quicker than fifteen-hour days. You don't have to quit, and you don't have to knuckle under. Just present a unified front. Or you could just kill and eat the boss. His wife probably wouldn't miss him either. (Joking! Murder is bad!)
Unless you are making 150k/year, you should quit. You would be better off going to med school for 4 years and coming out with a MD/CS combined background that will make you a very rare and desireable programmer. ['Doctor' and 'Highly Computer Literate' rarely combine in one person.] All for the same work hours.
I find I write the best code when working long hours (so my brain stays on subject) but easy hours (so I don't get tired). Basiclly I keep working but I get up and do other things as I feel the need including going places, watching tv, etc. The little touches of relaxation make it easier to think about the problem instead of thinking about thinking about the problem as is often the problem as you get tired.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US) was trying to kick them in the eye the whole time. Hardly ideal circumstances to establish a utopia." True. But don't forget to throw in murdering 10s of millions of your citizens, entrenching the elite governing party's power, getting rid of basic human rights and wasting their resources building cities on top of perma frost in the middle of nowhere. Too bad the U.S. forced them to do all that huh? They could of been an idyllic utopia, just like Cuba, China or North Korea.
From a project management perspective, the best estimate of time and resources needed for a project can be found by looking at previous projects. Time and resource tracking with reports to the management are the only reliable ways I know to predict the future.
I've seen projects that could be done in a weekend if the IT staff was willing to work a couple of twelve hour days. Since they were not, the project took several weeks done in phases. I've seen others that would take severl weeks of full time work to plan, test and implement, that were forced into production in a matter of days.
Software develepment is not a forgiving job.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
> Are there ways of communicating to management that long hours to rush a project to completion is not the way to complete a successful project?
Yes; most/all the developers resign. Immediate communication/negotiations result.
'Course, those developers will need to find new jobs after the project's over, as they'll be tainted as "disloyal" by the manager/owner/boss, but that's life.
What's interesting is that in Canada we specifically have exemptions for programmers and Engineering type-people. Apparently this was largely included because of support for this 'culture' in the programming community. Programmers WANTED to continue to have the option to stay in late and order pizza in dim lighting, this was just their style.
Be careful what you wish for....
Does Linus use Linux?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Some of my best work is done long after 8 (or 15) hours of work. But that is because the task is so fun and chalenging that I can't stop. Unfortunately, this happens with decreasing frequency as I grow older.
If I felt forced to work for long hours, it would seriously damage both code quality and productivity.
Bleugh ! I can't believe I said that. However, we work in an industry where 2 smart people can be worth a great deal more than any number of grunts, even if the grunts work 20 hour days.
Most software projects are actually overstaffed with programmers, and that the same amount of work could be done by substantially fewer people. Calls to work long hours often come about not because the amount of work to be done is large, but because the project is being constantly rewritten to accomodate changing requirements, or because there are fundamental technical flaws that there "isn't time" to fix.
Ultimately, the hard part of programming is not writing code, it is thinking, and thinking is better done by a small number of smart people who've had enough sleep, decent food, and some time with their families.
There was a whole hell of a fuss about this when the WTD came in. The British government in particular insisted that employees be allowed to voluntarily choose to work more than 48 hours per week.
I'm not sure it can be part of your contract of employment, because you're not allowed to hire or fire based on willingness to work overtime. However, in practice, such hiring and firing does actually take place.
Tell your manager to forget it.
It made sense in the 90s to work crazy hours because there were stock options and other incentives.
Why should computer engineers work more hours than anyone else?
And when is it going to stop? NEVER. The minute they get that kind of "commitment" from you, it won't even be acknowledged.
If working 40 hours results in your company closing, it's because it was a bad project/product to begin with.
Your health is more valuable to you than this company's project, trust me. After all, if you get very sick from working 15-hour days constantly, do you think your owner or manager will even visit you in the hospital? Or even take care of you? Nope, you'll be dropped like an old shoe.
Don't be a fool.
Give 40 EXCELLENT hours (or 35, or whatever your contract states) of your highest quality work, then go home.
Don't forget that even though people always say "the USSR proves socialism doesn't work", it's not true. The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US) was trying to kick them in the eye the whole time. Hardly ideal circumstances to establish a utopia.
Not to be disrespectful, but this argument is crap. Every unrepentent communist I know (and I know many) blames the failure of the USSR on (as you put it) "the U.S. trying to kick them in the eye". Tell me then, what exactly did the U.S. do that thwarted these otherwise effective plans towards utopia? The USSR was the largest country on earth, with the largest reserves of natural resources (oil, iron) some of the greatest farm land (Ukraine), yet the US had to sell them grain in their later years because they couldn't grow enough food, and what food they did produce frequently rotted in transit because they couldn't keep the railroads running. Was it the US going in and poisoning the grain fields? Did the US spike the tracks to make the trains derail? No, the problem with the USSR is that it was an evil dictatorship. For all the great idealism of Lenin, Trotsky, et.al, the country was essentially led by a coercive government which said "our way, or be buried by the highway". The notion of an "enlightened vanguard" leading the uneducated masses was the first step away from true communism and towards the evils of Stalin and his successors.
The reason the USSR failed wasn't because it wasn't "given a fair chance"; it was because the very idea that communism can be anything but totally voluntary leads eventually to dictatorship because, once you've pointed a gun at one person's head and said "you work for the good of all", all pretense of egalitarianism is right out the window. The truth is, real, honest to goodness communism must be totally voluntary, and that will never happen in groups larger than a community (hmmm....notice the similarity of the word?). Attempting to legislate an egalitarian society from On High is the worst sort of non-sequiter. In this way socialism is only a little better than soviet-style communism in that it simply doesn't pretend that those making the rules are "the same as everyone else". I would sooner choose the capitalist system which allows for individuals to cooperate with one another voluntarily than I would choose an enforced slavery to a mythical "common good" which often turns out to be "the good of the Party Leadership" (as it was in the USSR).
Real Communism(tm) can only happen in a truly free environment, which is something the ivory-tower academic communists you find in student unions everywhere will never be able to accept because it requires them to accept that the "uneducated" must be allowed to choose for themselves.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
" So when I call Japan on a weekday in the US and get them on the weekend, thats them faking overtime?"
its called 'the international date line', fucktard.
Stephen Hawking
If Einstein died at 30, he would still have contributed a great deal.
Gymnasts
Dogs and cats (they live for only a decade yet each and every one makes such a great difference to the world)
Friend, one man can make a difference - no matter his age
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
I don't think you'd want to see any code I'd written after 15 hours. :-)
A large reason why many in this industry find themselves working long hours and weekends is that management makes unreasonable expectations and deadlines.
An even larger reason is that many employees in this industry are immature. No manager can make an employee work more than 40 hours a week. All a manager can do is make an employee look for another job.
Your argument is rife with ridiculous conjecture and spelling errors, but to the idea, "Since the earliest times, humans have formed tribes," is an example of altruism, you are so fucking dead wrong.
It's a modern city gang. A pack. You can better serve yourself by surrounding yourself with other predators. Its really that simple.
You would be a fool and would serve humanity less if you didn't serve yourself first. If you are unsuccessful, your are far less capable of helping others. I personally do not seek the help of poverty stricken bozos when I try to forward myself in this world.
If you claim innate altruism, and a love for the brother man, you are deluded. Every behavior boils down to a cost benefit analysis, and the sooner you admit that to yourself, you can stop trying to convince that your own personal greedy unfair to most people on the planet where half of the 6 billion here have never even used a telephone is somehow fair to everyone. IT ISN'T. Get off the high horse. You would be just as pissed at some cretin trying to steal your stuff because its not fair as he is pissed at your for having a bunch of stuff because its not fair.
I love you fucking communist/socialists. You are so self righteous, deluded and idiotic. The one thing I will never expect from you group is innovation. Leave that to people who have accepted the fact they want to achieve (for their own pleasure), be rich (for their own pleasure), have notoriety (for their own pleasure), to afford lots of children (for their own pleasure).
I mean, something that happens quite often. Kids. They are expensive, life altering minimally 18 year long chores. But people have them not for the good of mankind, they want to escape death vicariously through their offspring. Selfish. Is it evil? No. Is it noble? Probably not, even rats fuck.
You stupid, stupid fuck, If I call Japan from the US on Friday, its SATURDAY there. You stupid, stupid fuck. And they pick up the telephone because they are at WORK.
HAHAHAA. You are such a fucking stupid DUMBASS.
FUCKING IDIOT.
I think communists take comfort in the fact that over 30 million people died from Stalin's 5 year plans and social cleansing operations. I mean, for the good of the people, the ends justify the means. Its so beautiful to see death, suffering, suppression and starvation because a communist dictator's pride is hurt.
I mean, had Stalin not done the 5 year plans, USSR would have behind the west in terms of technology, military and infrastructure!!! Oh man! Lets go kill 30 million people to make sure that doesn't happen at all costs (and they still build everything crappier, everything sucked worse there, and they had zero freedom, unless you were a high ranking party official, but hey, those people are the righteous good prefects of morality and good in the communist system, well, actually, after the Soviet style government fell, its pretty clear the politburo was a pack of raging Mafioso, but hey, for the good of the people.)
Unrepentant communist are these fucking elitist turds with subsidized existence legislation morality on others because they have deluded themselves into believing that whatever epiphanies they have are unique, and correct, and other must think like them or they are cretins.
You know what I have to say, Professor World Government World Taxes World Communism World Mediocrity. You shove it up your fucking ass, you highfalutin prick mother fucker. You lead by example, not with a pen and paper, you fucking poindexter cunt. I would be willing to be the ramifications of putting the world's economies on hold to clean it up, and make it fair would be disastrous. I never see innovation X with Professor. Poindexter's god damn name on it.
Occam's Razor
"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"
"Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora"
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem"
Translation: " "Simple explanations are preferred to complex ones"
A good slogan to live by "JUST DO IT."
Stop your fucking communist theory crap talk, and Just DO IT. You'll fail like everyone else who has tried, and the rest of use selfish pigs out there who primarily want to serve our own betterment (oh how selfish and vile) will have the ancillary effect of making it better for everyone else.
I've measured this in a number of projects over the last 20 years. My own personal records versus the official schedule.
Working longer hours makes the project take longer and costs more. The error rate in the code goes way up, the time spent on bug reduction practices (such as code reviews, design reviews, designing at all) drop. Programmers starting taking short cuts and start making work, not right.
Working long hour might get the code written sooner, but the testing time will triple and you'll wind up throwing it all out and starting over in six months to a year.
On a personal note, if your management has that attitude it is time to start looking for a real job. The company you are working for is in deep trouble.
Stonewolf
The most productive coders in my experience of managing are the ones who are at work fewer hours. I have had my share of reports who consistently work sixteen hour days but are also consistently late on their work once the QA cycle kicks in. A fully rested well balanced programmer makes better decisions and fewer mistakes.
You may be able to help them by having the QA cycle kick in earlier, then. The sooner feedback comes, the easier it is to recognize and learn from your mistakes.
Personally, I'd use a lot of XP practices; between pair programming, continuous integration, and test-driven development you can get a lot of developers to learn the difference between "feels faster" and "is faster".
This is the curse of non technical management.
They can't help you. They got into a jam and can't figure out how to get you of it.
They don't have a realistic strategy to succedd so they ask everyone to help them run like a chicken without a head. They ask for action but not result to show for. 15 a day is a good overtime for a security guard. there is no thinking involved.
Start looking for a real company. Soon!!!
Your company is going under. But leave in "good" graces.
Also known as someone who never had to support himself, much less a family.
In a fight with your emplyer, the stakes are almost always higher for you then for the company. They can afford to loose, but sometimes you can't... hence the term "force" is appropriate.
Well, unless you have rich parents (which you probably have, considering your statements) you'll find all this out by yourself in a few years.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
This is so true.
50% of getting and keeping a job is politics.
Some things are very hard to pull off even if they are within your rights.
The people with good job security and pay is not necesserily the best workers, it's the people that learn to play the system.
That's just the way things work.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Simple. I don't compete with them. I do things they can't i.e. that require a good broad scientific education, experience, time, creativity, foresight, and talent.
You're only competing with the code monkeys if you behave like a monkey. They can *have* all the bananas they want, as far as I'm concerned.
Most coders who sit at a keyboard more than 5-6 hours in a day are dogging it. Done right, coding is mentally exhausting.
Take your basic 60-80 hour a week coder. Subtract time for errands, meals out, sickness, times they should have been home sick but were infecting everyone else instead, debugging stupid mistakes they never would have made if they were fresh, fixing stupid integration problems, repairing technical relationships damaged because they are too tired to be civil, and you come up with a much smaller number. Just spend the smaller number, intensely, and go home.
You can't solve business problems by becoming a stupid programmer. Suits have to solve business problems by making (sometimes tough) decisions.
My advice: spend 40 hours a week and sue the bastard for wrongful termination if he fires you.
No, communism has always worked well. Most human
societies were organized in tribal communes for
millenia. It's the nation-state and centralized
planning that have been proven failures, not
communism.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
> Communism and Socialism won't work. They are based
> on the false assumption that people will work hard
> for the good of society.
You are just wrong. Most of what people do, they
do for the approval of those they respect. Most
people who decide it's worthwhile to get a lot of
money do it to get laid -- the rest of them can
get laid without paying for it in cash.
Communism has worked for thousands of years.
Capitalism in it's modern guise has been
poisoning your children and corrupting your
goverment for -- what -- 100 years? Sure it's
more robust than the centrally-planned nation-state
of Leninism, but how much more? It has only
lasted 30 years longer. I don't think you can
draw many conclusions yet.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
New concept: Responding to posts directly, rather than responding to the ask slashdot.
I know it's difficult, but keep at it.. you'll get it.
I'm not even going to try and explain "recession" to you.
It's almost nonsensical without the correct punctuation. It doesn't make his point as well if you can't tell where he's asking a question or making a statement.
Everyone I interview knows upfront that we work really hard. Nobody comes in taking a 40 hr/wk job and getting slammed with 60.
If you want a 40 hour/week job, go get a job.
I have a small startup, that's the deal.
I offer an opportunity to be involved in our organization. I tell you the truth about it. If you want the opportunity, you'll have to work for it. If you don't, I'll wish you luck and send you on your way.
Alex
...for a limited time. Seriously, ask for how long and ask that the manager put it in writing.
Then decide what you want to do. Depending on your age you might be able to pull a few 100h+ weeks like these, anywhere from 2 to 8, but I'll guarantee you that if you don't stop in time you'll hit a BIG wall. All of you. And it will take you double that time to recover, at least.
Seriously more than a few 100h weeks in a row is insane. The range of disease that you *will* get is staggering, from serious depression to heart attack.
Myself I worked (only) an 80h week for about 3-4 months and it wasn't pretty in the end. I didn't work week ends, I was sleeping the whole time, otherwise I would have died, seriously. Eventually I resigned. The engineers who took up my work after I'd gone said later it was utter crap and had to rewrite most of it. Shortly after the owner of the company I was working with got indicted, his company went bankrupt and for a while he was forbidden to head a company. Basically a disaster all around.
I'm not too proud of this episode in my life.
Two haikus to commemorate the sucktitude:
Crack Pipe Moderators
Crack smoke wafts though air
Dumb shit moderator!
Try to suck less, please
The Humorless Moderator
Crack smoke wafts through air
Humorless moderator!
Why do you hate me?
Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pinochet, Mussolini, Marshall Joseph Tito, Slobodan Milosevic, Idi Amin, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Juan Peron, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ferdinand Marcos, General Suharto, Pol Pot, Fransisco Franco, and certainly the worst of the bunch, SLASHDOT's editing "community[note similarity to commune/communism]" ALL AGREE on ONE THING:
So, you busy little plebian proletariats, get busy, you have some censoring to do!
Two haikus to commemorate the sucktitude:
Crack Pipe Moderators
Crack smoke wafts though air
Dumb shit moderator!
Try to suck less, please
The Humorless Moderator
Crack smoke wafts through air
Humorless moderator!
Why do you hate me?
Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pinochet, Mussolini, Marshall Joseph Tito, Slobodan Milosevic, Idi Amin, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Juan Peron, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ferdinand Marcos, General Suharto, Pol Pot, Fransisco Franco, and certainly the worst of the bunch, SLASHDOT's editing "community[note similarity to commune/communism]" ALL AGREE on ONE THING:
So, you busy little plebian proletariats, get busy, you have some censoring to do!
Good job you little neo commies. Don't want to hear the other side, shoot the fucker in the head as an ENEMY OF THE STATE.
I have a Gun and the Constitution [Not the urinated -on pissed-on hacked fucked up one WashingTOON thinks exists, I mean the real one], please, give me an excuse to use them both.
And the quality of the state of human existence when Grok and his friends roamed the earth in their special little communes? Should we aspire to have no hospitals, high mortality rates, death, suffering and starvation? So that everyone can have it so good...? I love my wife, I want to protect her, and being a hunter gatherer isn't going to wash.
Give me a break. People congregate to better themselves. Is the existence of, say, Berekeley, CatlTech and MIT EVIL? ALL SCHOOLS SHOULD BE THAT GOOD, FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE!
Now, lets chime in on reality. They all cant be that good. The reason, there is strata in human trait, why try to suppress people's nature by washing them all down the mediocre average? The schools formerly mentioned are for the intellectual elite, and the retards are not welcome so as not to spoil the state of academia. You know if you let average people in, they would demand that rigorous treatment of things be subdued so that they can better understand things. Fuck that. I like real scientists, not commies with fake degrees from feel good bogus institutions.
Those with a lot to offer and lot to gain say no to communism.
Those who usually can't provide for their own children say yes, because in that sad pathetic state, they need to blame someone else, like "the man."
You communists are killers, you legislate mediocrity, and your ends justify your means, don't be surprised if you die when you come try to take me off my land in the name of the state. I'd rather take one of you fucks out with me than die a collaborator to those who would emboss mediocrity and complacence on the human soul!
I saw your other post above, and only bow my head in sadness. Here is a rich, 1st world brat deprecating the very system which is his vitality. "Evil" societies and corporations and innovators and entrepreneurs have brought about the very age of computers by which you seem to entertain yourself.
And you would rather mimic the Soviet system which made computers a scare commodity (as well as blue jeans, medicine, the truth, food - you name it, its not for you, for the good of the people (unless you are a high ranking government official or his friends and family))
You little ingrates are really amazing people.
Have a baby, then write back to me and tell me you want to risk availability of medicine for your baby for the good of the people.
Don't try and explain, I don't want the incorrect explanation. I don't know anyone who can really define recession, since its a nebulous term, but my inclination, based on serious evidence you are very unstudied, so please don't try.
And when you stand in line for your unemployment, it's coming out of my paycheck. Please, just go to school and stop costing me money and better yourself.
As an ex company director: long hours affect quality in all creative work. Long hours are only suited to repeating tasks that don't require thought.
I threw my creative staff out of the office after a certain time. Or I let them stay if they wanted to play on the computer.
And in creative work you don't want the bottom line being eroded by under performing burnt out young people. The best word for the bottom line is "Stop. You've done enough for the day".
Now that I am self employed I will not work over 10 hours a day 5 days a week. I did 70h and I was earning more money but having a lot less fun.
realkiwi
Just reply to him this way:
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
Way to read the post you're replying to. Or did you just refuse to respond to the "WITHOUT WORKING LONG HOURS" part?
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Long hours definately affect proper English usage.
My other first post is car post.
I suggest meekly agreeing to the proposal, then go buy a ski mask and a baseball bat. At a later date, intercept your boss in the parking lot and let him know how you feel.
If you worked for an employer, and put in 60 hour weeks regularly, let alone a 96 hour work week, you are a complete dumbass. Hope you enjoyed buying your boss's new car with your unpaid time.
From hard experience I have to tell you: Document everything in writing. Don't answer your home phone -- let them record messages on your answering machine. Etc.
Expect that, when you file for unemployment comp, they will challenge it, and they will lie. It's perjury. It's illegal. But it's almost never prosecuted.
It doesn't matter what actually happened. All that matters is what you can prove in a court of law.
Well, as someone working in India, I can assure you that "Indians compete better by working 20 hrs a day" is complete crap. I lead the team in my last project and never had a bunch of crap popping up whenever someone worked late. It affects quality, alright. It's plain stupid.
Working smart is the way to go. Even when the customer was changing the requirements, we were was able to manage as we had developed components to accomodate all the anticipated changes.
Anyways, even when there are good developers in India, it may be a long time before we move up the value-chain as the managers are still entrenched in colonial attitudes.
Science as a way of life.
shut your fucking mouth you god damn troll. someone mod this fuck down, he is a terroist against free thinking.