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

Just quit.

[autopr0n]

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.

Good Resource

[philovivero]

Most of the arguments you'll see in this discussion have their start in Extreme Programming.

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.

Re:Yup

[Lemmy Caution]

8 hours was defined as a work day for a reason- it's the point of diminishing returns.

No, eight hours was defined as a work day in the US because of the efforts of the labor movement, beginning the middle of the 19th century and, after a great deal of struggle, culminating in FDR's passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was then struck down by the SCOTUS, and then partially replaced by the Wagner Act. The eight-hour work-day came at the expense of workers who were beatened, imprisoned, and killed trying to win it.

Surprised no one has mentioned "Death March"

[Samrobb]

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.

Re:Prediction: you will get fired

[DarkEdgeX]

Insightful doesn't even begin to describe your post-- I'm living proof of what happens when management expects more than can be realistically be given. A team of 3 developers were tasked with creating an app in 3 months; complete and ready to roll out (bug checked and the whole works, by the same 3 developers). I told them it wasn't possible and was told it WOULD happen and we'd work extra hours to get it done.

They were so certain of this that I gave up debating the topic, and when month 3 rolled around, lo and behold, NO SHIPPABLE PRODUCT. 2 of the 3 developers were asked to resign with severance pay. I will NEVER accept that kind of shit from management again-- next time it'll be "I work 8 hours a day, and if you don't like it-- too bad!".