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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.
Also - driving your employees like sled dogs will cause them to look for employment elsewhere, and if you don't think that will effect your code quality, you shouldn't be leading a pack of cub scouts, much less a project with a real product.
I disagree. I think not only will it fail to effect code quality, it affect moral negatively as well.
From grade three English:
effect:(v) to cause or create To effect change.
affect:(v) to influence
Long work hours affect performance negatively.
Program Slashdot English 101 terminated -- Poster's Pet Peeve mollified
%exit
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AC
In any case, it's hardly mockworthy.
are you kidding? it's imminently mockworthy. just like every usage of 'then' instead of 'than' (a word whose demise will be at the hands of slashdot 'authors').
Long hours seem to affect spelling.
Long hours effect spelling. You affect knowledge about grammar.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Here is another problem, invite a team of socialists (not the party, in the line of thinking) to regulate your businesses. They don't need to make money, they just exist to feed off of others like leeches. They aren't chartered to create new wealth, jobs or revenue, just to harass others while doing so. I stagger when I think of the rapid rate of "progress" here in the 1st world, particularly the US. People who live in the confines of safe homes and television sets forget a mere 50 - 100 years separates us from what we would consider to be a painful, suffering existence. or normal daily life "back then." The sad part is that most of the world's population, while now by percentage is better fed, medicated and accounted for than ever before, is living in conditions most 1st worlders have no damn concept of.
So this is where I come to the point that sure, the system needs regulation. We need thoughtful people to put some rules down. But no ONE person is smart enough to figure it all out. Sorry, I don't see any son of God archetypes floating around and knowing the answers to everything. I mean, even Einstein was in the communist party, so there goes one of the "smartest men EVER" as a viable societal leader. The way the world best works is people vote. They vote with their wallets. Every day. That, unfortunately, is the ultimate strap on for everyone. Believe it or not. The root religion for humans is greed. And the difference with the 1st worlds and particularly the US, is that it's the accepted vice/religion. Others try and cover it up, or suppress it, or claim for the good of the people but its all a crock. Even squirrels hoard nuts for the winter. We don't have enough power/money/technology yet to set up a Star Trek like utopia. Maybe someday, but until technology makes more things moot (like maybe when fossil fuels are considered dirty, expensive, and not viable) we can have a socialist attitude. But in a world where there isn't enough to go around, forget it. Back to your vote. I vote. People who don't vote vote. People strapped to a life support machine vote. If you come out with something good, people vote by buying it. If its bad, people vote by not. The market is a powerful and sobering reality. CRAP does not fly. Naturally you need accountability for recourses against fraud, but overall, the market is unpredictable, chaotic, fairly and seemingly uncontrollable/manipulate-able (its so nebulous and huge, like the universe). Boeing's are the best planes. Socialists try and keep Scare Bus in business by subsidizing, yes, Britain, France and Germany fork over cash to keep them in business. But they are CRAP. I don't want them, I personally REFUSE to fly on them and write to airlines here and tell them so, airlines don't really want them unless they are on fire sale. The other day I read that a jets front landing gear snapped off, the rudders and engines sheared off the flight 583, (even if it was blown up, that was pretty absurd), an A319 crashed itself into the ground at a Paris Airshow, lots of computer problems, recently one ran out of gas because the gauge was broken. The idea is this. Because companies, and people, aren't affecting Airbus's business model and we have fools subsidizing them, an unsafe, undesirable product continues to plague humanity. I've read all the reports of every major airline mishap involving jet powered passenger aircraft the 777 is backordered to kingdom come and, like the B-52, I would suspect to see them flying 100 years from now, it is the most beautiful plane I have ever seen.
Off of Airplanes and back to your crap boss. Leave. Go home. Suddenly leave. Stick it to him. Or ask to be laid off, because you want unemployment, but you can no longer stand the working conditions. If he fires you for saying that, GOOD. Now you get unemployment - because he cant fire you for saying that. Why the hell are you telling Slashdot. The power to vote is yours. Spend all day on the phone with a good recruiter (these are hard as hell to fine, you'll know when you get one), user resume rabbit, monster, hot jobs, beat the pavement, ask friends, call up old professions, do everything and anything to change the quality of your life for the better. The world owes no one a living, people who think otherwise invariably take from other what is rightfully theirs (communists, generally, who stifle innovation for the greater good and prevent entrepreneurs from improving the quality of our lives). Be self empowered, try hard, get out of bad situations. There are probably a billion people who would die for the chance to work in a clean, unpolluted city, in a clean environment for 15 hours a day. Its all relative. Here, now, you may have come to expect such things which you would think would go without saying, but in reality, it's a bump in the road. Get over it. Get out and do something about it. if you cant make a difference for everyone, for the "greater good," get out on the street and beat the pavement and go looking for someone else to help "Just Do It!" one day at a time. No one should regulate your bosses unfair practices, that would cost everyone money (like a large ineffective department of labor here in the US, that only creates jobs within itself). Your boss would be fired if everyone walked out on him. That's a free market, and if even the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" caught the drift, you should too.
Only thing I have to say in closing, is that a society needs to be FREE, before it can be economically free and a have a free market. There are scumbags and troglodytes in the US, of late, that piss on the Constitution, erode it, and care only to have the free market, and a free economy, but at the expense of the people's freedom. All I have to say to those would be suppressors of the sacred freedom that Constitution laid forth (and which has yet to be fully actualized), is that you deserve to DIE, but I will vote, if this becomes like Germany in the 1930's. I will vote by leaving this place and doing expatriate work elsewhere. If the society is not FREE, the US's vast lead will erode into dust. As it should, because the tenants of the constitution, the ideals of Jefferson and Madison were eroded and trivialized, and will we have left now is a bunch of greed without freedom, and that system is just doomed to fail. Death to the treasonous politicians who undermine my rights to the root document which has the potential to salvage those who are oppressed! ALL politics are local, all governments that tend toward centralized power are corrupts and screw the little guy. All you can do to change things is to change your surroundings to your liking, and you cant worry about the big stuff because they took your freedom away to say much about it anyway. Sometimes an abstraction of the mob is better than the mob, sometimes it isn't. You have to live with the fact you don't get to launch "our" nukes. The system here in the US is far from perfect, but in the words of Winston Churchill;
"A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water." -- Fisher Ames.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." -- H. L. Mencken.
"Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few." -- George Bernard Shaw.
"The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver." -- Jay Leno.
Notice that most of the nasty things said above are about government, its hard to find quips, hacks and flames on scientists, inventors, great innovators. (Except those who are false Idols, like the lawbreaking Bill Gates, and his evil henchman such as Ballmer - the real innovator in that company, Allen, left in disgust.).
meowmix
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
I'm sorry, but your rant represents a lot that is wrong with mankind. A passive approach to living that can barely be called living.
Thoreau wrote:
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not.
Why must we take this "If you have the talent to work on class projects, then fine. If you don't, then just let it go." Bull shit. Why not just extend that to, "If you have no talent, just kill yourself right now."
I say, instead of just refusing to work 60 hours, go find a job where you'll demand to work 80 hours. Live life for god sakes.
Do not ever justify just working 40 hours a week because other things are important. If they are so important, then why are you working those 40 hours to begin with? Are your material possessions truely that necessary?
Please, don't preach passivism. It's morally revolting.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Now honey, you shouldn't get yourself all worked up over the hot chick, you might blow your load too soon and not save any for me. So be considerate and save it up for dear old mom.
See you tonight.
Love Mom
ArsDigita, ah yes, wasn't that a great success story :)
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