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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.
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.
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.
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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?
projects aren't pumped out in a timely manner, the business will go under
Perhaps management should listen to the developers when creating schedules and product release dates, instead of the marketers?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Don't walk away from this situation, run.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
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.
If you worked in programming or engineering in the 1980's, you are conditioned to fear for your job. There was a long drought in these fields in the 1980's because massive downsizing by the "big, stable" companies threw thousands of competent professionals on the market at one time. If you are younger than this, you are used to a job market so hot that you can just walk into another job. With the economic slowdown of the last two years or so (the dot com bust, followed by the post 9/11 uncertainty) I'm not sure what the market is like. Clearly, if employers are feeling willing to demand this, they must think the market is tighter than it has been.
If I were in a more cynical mood, I would suggest that you contact a lawyer and see if "balls to the wall" was evidence of a sexually hostile workplace.
Personally, I think software development management is of generally poor quality. This is due to a combination of management ignorance, poor engineering practice, the intangible nature of the product (its much easier to explain sensibly why designing, tooling up for, and manufacturing a widget takes a long time), and underestimation by the rank and file developer. If I had the magic bullet for this problem, I would not still be a mortgage-holding software developer, I would be a very highly paid consultant and regular pundit quoted in the trade rags.
I'd walk out the door too, if I knew I could.
Tip for the youngsters: Buy less house than you want. Have six months salary in the bank at all times. Then you can storm out in high dudgeon like antis0c suggests...
> working longer hours is good.
The question is good for whom?
I guess it ultimately depends on do you enjoy / believe in what you do? Has the company treated you well up to this point? How will the hours affect the rest of your life, assuming you have one?
I've worked for some of the big boys in the industry, and all I can say about long hours is that once it starts, it doesn't stop. Management gets used to this "new" amazing level of productivity and it is then expected to get anywhere up to a point where you can spend enormous amounts of time at work to maybe get that 1% extra on your bonus, and a potential decrease should you decide to take normal hours again.
You may make a decent salary but at the end of the day you work for but peanuts per hour. If you have a family what is the cost/ hour of not being there because that extra subroutine needs tweaking?
Unless what you do directly affects someone on life support, it isn't all that important.
just my 2 cents
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 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.
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.
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You know, that's just great.
But I have found that these kind of blown schedules always result from:
(1) Misstatements of requirements
(2) Misapplication of estimates (i.e. applying coding estimates blindly without thinking about what other overhead exists in your process).
If you are a project manager, it's your job to come up with good estimates. If your programmers estimate poorly, it's your job to track that and adjust their estimates.
Me? My answer would be 'fuck no', but I do realize not everyone is a position to say that.
As long as there is no industry or regulatory standard for how long people in a given job in a given industry works, and as long as sales people get commissions for promising more, faster to customers (and not getting contracts unless they do) then more, rather then fewer, jobs will be in permanent crisis mode. It's a sort of inflationary economy. Only when there is universal expectation that any given worker is going to work 40 hours, then bids will go out with that assumption. Otherwise, there's a race to hire only those who can work 50, 60 or more hours a week - and if you can't, you get pushed out of your career by someone with no family or other life outside work.
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.
'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 am working on what could be the largest project of my life... I have a 4 month old son I rarely see.
Shouldn't your son be the largest project of your life? Whatever you're doing cannot be as important as he is.
Why exactly are you sticking with this job? You've already pointed out that you're not being paid well for it since you're salaried. If you're going to find another job, do it now. With the effort you've given, you don't owe them anything.
Claim your life back before you turn into a sad cliche of an absent father.