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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?
Don't walk away from this situation, run.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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...
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.