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

Agreed

[SirSlud]

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?

Re:Agreed

[Albanach]

Indeed, in Europe if they had you working 15 hour days, you could go home at 11am on the Thursday and not return to work until the Monday.

Why? Because the European Union protected its workers by introducing the working time directive which emans the maximum hours you can be contracted to work is 48 per week - you can work longer if you wish and agree, but no employer can force you too, and if you decide not to there's not a thing they can do. Even if later they decided not to promote you on that basis you could take action against them.

Usually I'd be cautious about such intervention, but certainly here I have to agree that it's to everyone's disadvantage being forced to work these crazy hours - I've done it myself and veryone loses - employer, employee and families.

Re:Spend The Time Wisely

[gwernol]

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?

Of the dotcoms, practically none, but then none of the dotcoms that didn't work that waysurvived either. Conversely, 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.

This doesn't prove that long hours are a good thing, but there are at least counter-examples to the claim that this approach never works out.

2 opinions: Steve McConnell and Philip Greenspun

[Lumpish Scholar]

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.)

Re:Hmm...

[sphealey]

The nuclear power industry has done extensive studies on this subject. Tradition in the industry (partially the electric utility industry; partially coming from ex-Navy guys) was to work long shifts - 24 and 36 hour work days were not uncommon.

The conclusion of the studies was that people become increasingly ineffective after 10 hours per day, and very ineffective after 12 hours per day. BUT - they don't realize it. If they are "motivated" they think they are doing fine at hour 16 or hour 20. Objective testing shows that they aren't.

And similarly, anyone can work one or two 16 or even 24 hour days. But after a week of 16s, or ever 7 straight days of 12s, performance again drops significantly.

But hey, since your project won't hurt anyone else if it melts down, go ahead and work those hours!

sPh