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.

Comments

Sometimes it is...

[Kragg]

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.

Coders VS Management...

[cmburns69]

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