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Can People Really Program 80+ Hours a Week?
ibn_khaldun asks: "A question in light of the EA controversy. I'm an academic researcher who does his own programming -- I have to eat what I kill. In my 35 years of coding experience, any time I try to work on a complex program for more than, say, 60 hours a week (coding, not just showing up) for a couple weeks at a time, I'm just asking for trouble: I generate buggy code and debugging it only makes it buggier. Numerous studies in other fields (law firms, hospitals) have shown that mistakes rise exponentially after anyone works about 50 hours per week (don't think about this if you go to the emergency room at 3 a.m.)." Are these rational working conditions? (More below.)
"Does EA sprinkle magic pixie dust on their serfs to get around this problem, or is the work so trivial that it can be done while pathologically sleep deprived, or are the PHB's so technically challenged they don't realize what is going on? This whole 'death march' mentality seems absolutely crazy to me as a programmer, but appears to be common. Honestly, can someone enlighten me as to how these 80+ hour weeks ever accomplish anything?"
How else do they manage to keep their software so secure?
To answer your question: Amphetamine
Not since Slashdot debuted.
Even if you were to assume that my productivity were to go down 10% for every hour over 50 I worked, I'd still be *somewhat* productive at hour 80. Of course it's not linear like that, but if something's *got* to get done, then it's got to get done, whether I'm tired or not.
And I find that I do have hours of clarity even at the end of a long period of work. So If I get that good hour or 2 at 70 hours, I would have missed it if I'd gone home/to sleep at 60 hours.
I don't think anyone can work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need some time to refresh,recycle,renew. What's a reasonable amount of time to recuperate? I think one day always seems to do it for me. I've never had to pull crazy hours like that more than a few weeks in a row, and we always found a way to take off 24 consecutive hours each week. That was what made it work.
It also helps TREMENDOUSLY to work in a cool place with cool people. If you respect everyone around, and they're all busting ass, you'll find it's EASY to do the same, and hard to let anyone else down. I knew guys who would feel guilty about going home to see their kids when crunch was on.
Is that a healthy culture? Probably not. But we did get plenty of work done, and that's I think what you were asking.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
80 hours a week.
.....yeah of the columbian variety!
I suspect most of the programmers working 80+ hours a week spend at least half of it not actively writing a line of code, be it meetings, waiting for some script to finish or reading slashdot.
Personally every person has a capacity and coding 80+ hours without any problems personally to health or even to the code's health is out of the question. I totally agree that it is going to generate very buggy code and may result in more hours trying to debug it. Instead the entire process should be well organised and time alloted to have the best result.
They want me here? Fine, I'm here. But, I get my bills paid, my shopping done and my resumes updated.
40 hours/week of real coding is rare anymore for me and my coworkers. It is usually a little south, even if they make us work more.
I am sure some people can, given that freaks of nature exist all over the place.
Most likely what happens is that many people think they can, but actually can't.
I know what my code looks like when I pull all nighters, it is not pretty. I try to avoid this whenever possible.
I guess it is about knowing your limitations. (something PHBs are hopeless at)
$17/hr. That's what they expect to pay for artwork done in 80-110 hour weeks. On the plus side- that many hours means you're pulling down $100,000 a year....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
For those that dont know, here for about this 'EA controversy':
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/
Even things that are not-quite-so mentally demanding such as electrical work become very difficult once a certain point is reached. For me, it's at about 65 hours/week.
Ok, which wire goes where now!
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
I called in Well today because I went in to work on Saturday. I never would have considered that at my old job but I'm finally starting to realise that if I restrict myself to 40 hour weeks I get a lot more done and I have more time to take care of important things like household chores and family stuff.
Easy, they are overclocking their systems, and then counting the man-hours according to their CPU multiplier. The rest of the time, they are goofing off playing Quake 3 Arena for "inspiration" and "research". That's how they work high hours and yet the products still reach the shelves late.
Any other questions?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
...states that: 'Any code is better than no code.'
But debugging that's a bit easier - just send your assistant to find out which wires are hot :)
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
I've coded, on average, 70 hours a week, for the last six years. This has been on my own project, which is coming along nicely (after about a dozen complete rewrites, language changes, and overhauls).
I don't think I could accomplish this on someone else's code, however. If you love the project you're working on -- if you really believe in it, you can push yourself past the limits of a 50 hour work week. If it's just a job to you, then that motivation isn't there.
But then again, as my signature says, caffeine can help. Not in the long term, but I think people could definitely exceed 80 hours of worthwhile coding in a week if they were consuming lots of caffeine. It really is a wonder drug.
EA doesn't deserve all this criticism. We live in a free market, if those coders don't like their 80 hour weeks, they should quit.
Maybe I should apply at EA.
+ Donald Gunth
+ Email: dgunth@quicktek.net
"Caffeine is the greatest lubricant ever created." -ESR
It sounds like a loaded question of sorts. Seriously - there are folks that can code (or do other kinds of work) for 80 hours in a week. I've done 30 hour coding sessions, and it feels great when you finish the project. But if you can't rest for the next 18 hours or so, it's going to hurt. Not just you and your sleep rhythm (I didn't think that programmers ever really got a "sleep rhythm") but your project as well.
80h hard work for serveral weeks is suicide...mental at least
..in working days..(5 days a week have 120 hours.. and you sleep about 50 hours in this 5 days.. so you have about 70 free hours) i actually work about 35 hours, and on saturday / sunday im tolly dead. I guess it's almost impossible to work 80 hours a week, but who knows, there are people that might do that. I work only at night, from 23:00 till 7am because during the day there is always someone bugging around.
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
I do more coke so I can work more hours so I can make more money so I can do more coke.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Provided that you're working with a damn good architecture and not mud - http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html. Working that long tends to affect your thinking, and chances are that you'll try to only get it *working*, instead of trying to design it *nicely*. Bad design is the first step to buggy code.
"EA games: question everything"
Paranoia is not an uncommon response to lack of sleep from overwork :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I think its important to note that not everyone pulling 80 hour work weeks at EA is a programmer. There are a ton of 3d artists there too. And honestly, as a 3d artist myself I can say: plenty does get done in those extra hours. Its not all neccesarily good. But since "ok looking" art is a bit more subjective than a hard and fast bug, its easy to say the 80+ hour work week is more productive than the 50 hour when it comes to the artists I would immagine. For managers at least...
I work 80 Hours a week! 60 on on chat 5 on lunch an hour 4 at meetings and maybe an hour coding :P but I am trying to cut back on that coding time!
EA makes buggy, poorly written software just like you'd expect. Go ahead and call me a troll, most games nowadays are released to some degree unfinished and faulty, the management decision is how many medium to major-degree problems will cause a drop in sales? Release game at that point. Late games lose more money than buggy games, so get it done fast.
Don't work in visual effects. It's a crap business.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Unfortunately, the pointy-haired-bosses only see - 'more hours worked = faster product development = more product out sooner = fatter bonus at end of quarter'. They think "To hell with the peons that we're stepping on, breaking, squishing, ruining the lives of, as long as we get our bonuses".
Until they actually have to do something - say 1 minute of real work for every 1 hour of work that the rest of the employees have to work, they're going to continue to sit in their corner cubbies, dreaming up what they're going to purchase next with they're million dollar bonuses.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Isn't it possible that the quality of work after some point is so bad that it actually takes as much or more time to fix it as it did to do it in the first place? If that's the case, it's not just diminishing returns - it's negative returns.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
But I find that when I start noticing distractions more than working on the code, it's time to stop the coding, and do some other work, even mindless stuff.
There's always lots of other kinds of work to take care of -- reading email, upgrading software, scanning logs, reading Slashdot (;-)), even cleaning the papers off my desk.
If, after doing that for a while, I still can't focus on the code, then it's time to go home and/or go to bed.
-----
My other sig is funny.
The Pointy Haired Bosses want to be seen to be doing everything in their power to get the job done, on time and on budget. They see that things are falling behind schedule. What's the instinctive reaction when you're falling behind? Jack up the pace. That means making people work longer and longer hours to try to catch up.
They don't know, or don't care because the Powers That Be don't know, that this is counter productive. They don't know, or don't care, that they're more likely to fall even further behind schedule this way than if the people on the job just do regular hours.
By pushing their people beyond reasonable limits, their bosses can pat them on the back and say, "Well, you did your best, but it wasn't good enough. Obviously we need to check our scheduling better next time." There are no control groups to demonstrate that it was the overscheduling that caused the rampant deadline misses, the excessive bugs, etc.
Some crunch time is fine -- if you're close to being finished, and you have a hard deadline, crunching can get the job done when nothing else can. It's overdoing it that kills you. If I were a manager, I'd be erring on the side of too little crunch time -- not too much. And I'd probably be sacked because the perception would be that I hadn't done everything I could to finish the project on time.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The only solution is education, and that ain't gonna happen if those that need educating don't know that they need educating.
Sleep is no substitute for caffeine!
If you have tenure, you don't have to kill in order to eat. If the professor you're working for has tenure, he doesn't need you to kill in order to eat.
The reason people work 80+ hour weeks is because if the project doesn't ship on a certain date (and this is particularly prevalent in the games industry, in which payment is often contingent upon meeting milestones), they don't eat.
"OK, so why not set the milestones a little more properly -- so that you're not forced into such a situation to begin with?", I hear you cry.
If you're a game studio, and you demand sane milestones, the publishing house won't sign the contract. And that means you don't even get into the buffet line, let alone eat.
In academic terms: Nobody has tenure. And unless he was willing to sign his firstborn away as part of a contract that guarantees delivery of either a Nobel prize or a $500M IPO out of your research within six months, your professor doesn't even get to apply for the grant money.
or during post-release patch development.
the best way to do this is to get a bunch of crak addicted programmers and tell them that if they work 80+ hours a week, you will give them a fix. Trust me on this one, that not only would the work be better(by saying the better work gives more crak) but also that program would be crystal clear of errors, because crak adicts will do anything for a fix. Hell, if the government sent a bunch of druggies out to find Osamma saying he has an ounce of crak on him, hed be found in less than a week!
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
Game development doesn't only involve programmers. In fact, most people who work at developing games aren't. On my team (I'm a lead designer), I currently have 3 level designers, 3 modelers, 4 animators, 4 texture and effects artists, 2 testers, one producer, one production manager, one art director and 6 programmers (of course, that's not counting those who develop the engine and its tools).
Game development is quite unique among software development in that respect. Now, can anyone be really productive when they work 80 hours/week? That's the real question!!
Reminder: find a new sig
I've worked 80 hour weeks during a crunch time or two. Quality definitely slipped a little, and we now manage projects better so it doesn't happen again...
But this is EA. I've never noticed any particular stability in their stuff. But it's just games, so it doesn't matter how stable it is as long as it gets out on time... right?
You'll just spend half the time you work the following week fixing mistakes you made the first week because you were so tired. If you keep it up long enough you actually spend more time dealing with design flaws and regular old mistakes the following week.
If you work like this too long then you will make progress, but your progress is of the two steps forward and one step back variety. If you limit the amount of time spent on "burn-out" hours to one week once every few months to once a year... then it's not so bad. If you never work burn-out hours then you're smart and your code will be too.
[signature]
"Even if you were to assume that my productivity were to go down 10% for every hour over 50 I worked, I'd still be *somewhat* productive at hour 80. Of course it's not linear like that, but if something's *got* to get done, then it's got to get done, whether I'm tired or not."
You're making the faulty assumption that negative work never occurs. However, it is not at all rare that a mistake made in one minute can later require ten minutes of time to correct.
At a certain point, the productivity of an individual reaches the point where the mistakes they make during an hour will take more than an hour to correct. Since errors in coding aren't fatal, the problem probably won't arise after fifty hours a week, but it seems possible and even likely that it will arise after sixty hours a week.
Although this may not apply as much to EA, it applies a lot in most the rest of computing. EA makes games, and games are mostly just a get-it-out-the-door type of product. You test for errors, make sure it's clean, then sell it. However, anything that will need to be upgraded to a newer version at some point will need to have clean, maintainable code. For that sort of material, I think you will, overall, start getting negative returns after about sixty hours a week. As far as games go, though, you really might not hit the point until after seventy or eighty hours.
Yes i think so. I find that overworking mainly reduces my capacity to see the big picture. To understand the implications of each change I make.
If the code is well architected, then my return past 40 hours does not diminish so quickly. But chances are if they are asking you to work past 48 hours, your management lacks management abilities, and are askin you to make up for their shortcomings.
I can see where you're coming from, but I find that work done poorly when I'm worn out actually puts me behind.
1. I stuff something up, that worked fine in the first place.
2. I do such a bad job so that I waste time when I am awake fixing things I did when I wasn't.
Waking Up - There must be a better way to start the day.
In any particular day I spend at least half of it talking on the phone and emailing (all work related), interacting with the sales team, going to meetings, and monitoring testing. Some days I'm lucky to get a line of code written.
But the problem I'm so much active at night that I just can't sleep and when it comes to mornings .. vision start faiding until 2pm when the lights come back. I do spend continous 48 hours without sleeping and sleep every two days. And I'm still sane. I just wonder for how long!
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
since I had to do this and not once either, sure, it's possible. It's not desirable over a long period of time, for example more than a month of this kind of stress and you start getting sick, you don't get enough sleep, you become very tired. It's not good in the long run. A week or two at 80 hours is doable without losing that much quality.
You can't handle the truth.
70 or 80 hours a week may be possible for a young programmer but it would kill me. Literally. If I didn't die from a heart attack I would fall asleep on the way home and possibly kill someone else as well as myself.
Why do that to your body? Trust me, your health is worth more than the overtime.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
You still have to ask yourself: In a discipline where any problem becomes more expensive to fix the longer it goes uncaught... does the reduced accuracy cause more problems than it solves. Yes, given an extra 10 hours you will accomplish something... but if you introduce 2 problems for every 1 you solve you cannot claim that that is progress.
I'd be interested to see studies on the errors introduced based on fatigue and correlate that with the cost anticipated to fix those errors.
On the other hand, errors might not be all that big of a deal in the video game industry... I don't know.
You can work 80 hours in a week, but I agree that you would find that 80 hours of work done in one week will be much less effective than 80 hours of week done in 2 weeks.
This is very true. In all areas.
For example, in France we work 35 hours a week, have 6 weeks of paid vacation a year and still we are the most productive people in the world.
Work is not a matter of time, it's a matter of efficacity.
Iraq: war to save the U
I did it for months on a project for a company I co-founded. But I don't think it is possible in a traditional environment.
For me, in between bouts of programming, I would sleep for 3 or 4 hours at a time. When I felt tired, I slept. There was no schedule. This was made easier by being at home and working in my home office. I also drank large quantities of Jolt Cola and somewhat less coffee.
I don't know why anyone would do such a thing for a company that they don't have an ownership interest in though.
Yeah, but working does not necessarily equate to coding. You could be doing a whole lot of other things - designing, project management, documentation, testing and the like.
Most of that does not involve writing active code, and is equally time consuming, if not more.
I think in reality, it's more like writing 20 hours of documentation, 20 hours of software design, 10 hours of UI design and other issues - and maybe 30 hours of _actual_ coding that takes place.
At university (late 80's) there were limited amounts of PCs to work on, so I'd work overnight. I'd regularly put in 18-20 hour days between class, projects and contracting work. As long as I get an hour sleep per 24 I can function at that level for about 3 or 4 weeks before I need to hibernate. Seriously. After finals, I slept for 20 hours. Awoke, used the bathroom, ate a sandwich, and then slept for 20 more hours.
Some people are better at working longer hours than others. I grew used to hearing heads hitting keyboards at about 4am. I never had a problem with feeling sleepy or losing function.
My code at 48 hours is still as good as code I've done when I just begin.
I've seen others that I've worked with and tried to do the same schedule as me, mentally implode after about 20 hours. Some others are still good to go.
It depends on the person.
I work 20 hours a week and love it that way.
show that after 2 hours steady work you should take a 1 hour break away from the work entirely.
Not doing so has been proven to introduce more problems that take more time to resolve than the break time afforded you.
You actually SAVE TIME by taking 1hr breaks every 2hr of work!!!
9-11 work work work
11-12 break for lunch
12-2 work work work
2-3 break for anything!!!
3-5 work work work
6 hours work, 2 hours break = 6 productive hours.
...but if you're too tired to work properly, you're okay to DRIVE home?
rewriting history since 2109
Somebody needs to call the Federal Trade Comission (FTC) and the Department of Commerce (DoC) over this issue. It needs to be investigated.
I think this issue depends on one's emotion state as much as the "work" load. I've been extremely productive on some fun, challenging assignments that made me want to spend every waking moment thinking about the problem. But if the problem (or associated people) are unpleasant/unworthy, then productivity goes to crap in no time. I think some of this is related to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" (an introduction to the idea) in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I have worked on several projects. The task you perform is really relevant in regards to the hours you can spend.
If I'm tired I can't do complex coding. This includes trying to grasp or plan some of the system design. This also includes seting up database layout etc...
The same effect comes from beer. On some of my workplaces we typically drink a beer before the week-end. One beer - and its the end of programming! I'm not even drunk, but complex coding is goodbye.
When I'm even more tired, I should stop programming, while debugging may still be possible. Debugging is often posible to do without to much thinking, as its mostly tracking down the errors.
My personal limit is around the 45+ hours, then I'll start to do buggy stuff after 3-4 weeks. So it really don't pay off spending more time than that.
When you know you limits you can benefit from planning you time. Morning is good for programming and system design (of cause after the first cup of coffee - before that is night...). Aftenoon can be used for raw programming, and evenings for debugging.
An other importaint thing is motivation. On my own personal projects (I'm working on a 3D FlightSim - see www.dragonslayer.dk) I can perform much more. Typically taking out several days in a row... with just the nessecary sleep. But even there I'll need sleep.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Ah vague generalities. You know who else are efficient? Migrant under-age children sweat shops. I know I want to live my life like them! Joy!
The best way to ensure your group is productive is to make sure they know their place, their job and their deadlines. People are smart and generally [at least I do] get less productive the more they are micromanaged.
Oh yeah, and don't let marketting shoot their mouths off before you actually sit down to figure out the timeline of a project because "next week" is never soon enough for a market-droid.
BTW, you bash USA for Iraq in your sig. How's the ivory coast this time of year?
I may come from the great white north but at least I'm not a hypocrite. My country doesn't start wars and I'm damn proud of it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Anybody saying otherwise is bullshitting.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yes, it's possible to work for 80 hrs a week, or even more. However, you need to define "work" here. Would you define reading/replying to emails as work? Would you define attending meetings as work? Believe me, these small numbers add up to take away a sizeable portion of your workday and your energy.
/. as time wasted. It's also an integral part of the process of coding. Hence, i do claim that one can "work" for 80 arse a weak.
If you're talking about pure coding, IMHO, coding is not a tap that can be turned on and off at will. One needs to "get into the flow" to get some real coding done, and this doesn't happen easily (at least for me). I'll often spend hours tinkering around with stuff, browsing some site, but won't for the death of me, be able to finish writing a simple class or stored procedure. Maybe, i'll keep getting stuck, maybe i'll be too distracted, maybe i'll decide to read some documentation instead. Then, suddenly, everything will start happening smoothly and i'll complete a day's work in a couple of hours.
I don't know if it works the same way for others, but i really feel that one cannot just keep coding continuously all day. At the same time, i will also not consider the interstitial time spent tinkering around and writing comments in
Can we please have a way to block these whiney "poor workers at EA have to actually do work stories."
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Its just 12 hours a day.. this is normal working hours on australian mine sites.. and many other aussie workplaces..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
What I'm getting at is that when a coder is in said Zone, the hours mean nothing to them. Look up and it's 4a.m. and you haven't gone to the toilet in 5 hours, and you can't remember when you last exhaled.
But extra special conditions are required to get into this Zone.
1. You find the work interesting
2. You have most of what you want grokked
The problem as I see it is the same as when I'm due to be somewhere on the other side of London, and I need to catch the Tube. I know that in a perfect world, to make it to Brixton, say, takes 30 minutes. And it can. iff the tube is waiting when I get on the platform and the connections are smooth. This is all possible, and I've done it before.
Problem is using that perfect situation as the constant in the equation over a long period of time. It is not sustainable unless there is a LOT of 1.) and 2.).
Games coders can fall into this trap because they like it, and they grokk it. So their managers get in the habit of using the Zone as the constant, and they're more right than other managers. Still wrong overall though.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
(don't think about this if you go to the emergency room at 3 a.m.)
Do any submitters or editors on this website spare a second to actually use their brain? Are you honestly suggesting that the nurses and doctors working at 3 AM have all worked 50+ hours in the last seven days? If you are, you have obviously never come into contact with anyone who has ever worked at a hospital. The people who work the graveyard shift are people whose internal clocks work well with that time, otherwise they wouldn't be working then.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
And I can tell you, they might have gotten 30 hours worth of work done, but the OTHER 30 hours of effort simply reduced the value of the 'good' 30 hours.
In my opinion (IMHO ;-) they got about 10 hours worth of useful work - sometimes. And sometimes they got NEGATIVE work done. We'd have been better off if NOBODY HAD SHOWN UP FOR WORK!
But convince the PHBs of that....
rc
I wonder what their statistics are for their defect rates - I'm guessing that the rate of defects introduced for every feature added or defect fixed must be awfully high if your entire team is that far up the stress curve.
Eventually, they might figure that it doesn't make business sense to run things this way. However, I wouldn't count on it.
Honestly. I can't believe someone modded that up. Read the moderation guidelines. This was not posted to be informative, it was posted to start a fight.
The problem is that the cost of an error increases by an order of 10 for every development stage it gets through. So when you work 80 hours, you may accomplish twice as much coding but (using your 10%) also increase the total number of bugs by a factor of 4. As a consequence, your test/debugging cost goes up by 2-20 times presuming ALL those bugs are caught before beta. Since a decent test team costs as much as a decent development team, all you are doing at best is passing the time buck at a signficant staffing cost.
Now consider that the test team is swamped too. They're making mistakes (but you don't care...you did your part) which means the same thing all over again: another 2-20x cost multiplier.
JMHO based on 15 yrs exp.
you work 20 and bill 80
In my case I have pulled 35hr all-nighters which when added to the regular time in the week is a little over 80hrs over 7 days.
However, in those cases, the all-nighter is fueled by intense adrenalin trying to meet a deadline, and I have found that my code doesn't appear to suffer. My trick is to drink lots of water during (YMMV).
As long as the 80hr week is a rarity, then I can deal with it. But making a habit of doing more than a typical week's work (about 60hr) would surely kill me.
XP suggests that if you spend any more time in overtime you often are wasting money and programmers are way less effecient.
CURRENT RESEARCH suggests that managers need to look at the bigger system and that more than 40 hrs of coding a week doesn't work out in the long run (a few weeks). A few stints of overtime (not a week) are ok but not all the time. I laughed when I heard of EA's 80 hr work week. If they would cut back to 40 hrs there might not be a need for a 80 hr work week.
When you have inadequate architecture, tools, or communication between groups, and the team lacks the will or ability to fix them, schedule slippage occurs. When you're confronted with a hard deadline (e.g. must ship before the holidays) or the project is so far behind the original schedule it's an embarrassment, you get mandatory overtime.
This matches my experience. I (and the teams I've worked on) can work long overtime (60 to 80 hours) for a few weeks... maybe even a month or two rarely.
But continually? Or to even attempt to pull one of these months every quarter? I can't do it. The people I know who think they can do it can't do it either.
We always ended up making bad mistakes that took a lot of time to clean up. We missed obvious architectural improvements that could have saved us days of work. We overwrote code and trashed data! :)
The point is that someone who is very tired will make a lot of basic mistakes that waste a lot of time. Someone who is well-rested and thinking clearly will be much more efficient. Work can progress smoothly and somehow you will be able to work calmly, not dealing with crisis after crisis, like the 80 hour teams do.
Agile Artisans
you insensitive clod!
If you do so, you end up having your staff running burn-outs, complaining and get their wives to send you hate letters.
Beyond like 45 hours, my body REALLY begins to oppose to any more work by getting distracted by anything. Actually, it triggers my arm to reload slashdot every minute hoping to get something else to do.
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
If a product requires more than 35-40 hours/week of work to deliver then it was badly planned in the first place.
This doesn't include "acts of God" or sabotage which can effect the outcome of a project. Shit happens in every project and therefore it needs to be factored in to the time line. Sometimes it doesn't matter how many times the boss asks the engineers how long something will take to achieve, they will always half that time and sell the product to the customer earlier than can physically be achieved.
At my company, we have been in a push to release a beta of our new product, and the developers have been working 10-12 hours for the last four weeks. They're getting sick, they're getting frustrated, and the product is not in good shape.
Here is one of the more telling examples of how these long hours offer a diminished return on investment. I wrote the spec for a component and agreed the spec with the development and QA managers two months ago. The component was declared to pass QA four days before beta release. As business owner for that component, it was my responsibility to do UAT at that time. The component was not even close to the spec I had written. As it turned out, the developer never received my spec and programmed on the basis of an earlier incomplete outline doc (more evidence of bad tech management, in my opinion). With four days to ready the component, I ended up working some long hours myself to specify the changes that would be necessary to get things up to snuff. This is where the long developer hours started to take their toll: each time I sent a list of changes to the developer, some would get fixed, others not, and new ones would be generated. And the errors at this point were sloppy: data in the wrong columns; data that had been present before was now missing; and things of that sort. I know from other experience that these developers are not sloppy by nature, and I can only explain this unacceptable output on the basis of the ridiculous schedule.
The conclusion I would draw from all this is that the short term benefits of a push to make a deadline are hugely outweighed by the long term loss to morale, and even in some cases by the loss of quality in the near term.
Perhaps said spouse is just sleeping around and lying about working 80 hours?
Probably not, that's why you'll occasionally see a car overturned in a ditch or wrapped around a tree. One of the reasons, anyway...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This is absolutely true. The lead programmer on my current project works at least 60 hours every week (and has for years) and more than that about half of the time. He's in at 6:30am and usually leaves around 6:30 or 7:00pm and he NEVER takes lunch breaks. Towards the end of the week, any problem that he "solves" quickly usually requires at least a day or more to re-fix later on. Unfortunately, his seniority makes him almost untouchable when reporting problems like this to senior management who see him as "dedicated and just as productive as everyone else". What they don't seem to notice is that he needs to work about 25-30% more hours per week than the rest of the staff just to produce adequate (not great) code.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to present something like this to management in a convincing manner?
Quoth the submission:
I have to eat what I kill.
And quote the parent:
you don't have to kill in order to eat.
Methinks we have a slight logical disconnection here. These statements mean two entirely different things; one is the converse of the other!
What the submitter meant (if I may be so bold) is that whenever he makes a mess, he must clean it up. There is no team of programmers to help catch the flaws, in particular he can't take a brief rest of only light coding while someone else tackles the hard stuff.
In any intellectual/creative activity you can fall into a special mode: "being in the zone".
When one is in the zone, time is really not an issue. Depending on what one is working on, one might be able to produce work at an amazing pace for many more hours than a standard work week. Usually there is some period of lull after this (the scale can be hours to months). I think a lot of factors play into it, and there are "zone" cycles within cycles (in fact for some people the longer cycles could actually be a bipolar condition).
An additional state that I don't hear much about is the "anti-zone". I'm sure any computer geek that's been around a while has experienced this. It's when you embark on some simple tasks late at night after working 12 hours, like say cleaning some source files, or some task that might be considered just one step above busy work and you realize that 4 hours goes by and you really haven't gotten much shit done at all. That to me is the most visceral representation of the Law of Diminishing Returns in a short term context, your brain is basically working in a textbook way in this case.
Of course, this doesn't always happen. If I am interested and focused I can sometimes continue with what seems like fairly constant productivity until I simply feel physically exhausted.
The law of diminishing returns only works out in the long term at best, it does not accurately reflect small scale productivitiy fluctuations for creative individuals at all.
For a sweat shop and most unskilled labor, the simple ECO101 curve is probably quite accurate even at an individual level.
If I am working on a proof of a new result and I have no interruptions (e.g. teaching, family), I can work for a very long time but at some point I have to stop or my calculations, insights, etc. will be wrong. My normal workday is 7AM - 10PM but I can take a break (or a quick nap in my office) whenever I need; I do not think the ordinary cubical worker has this option. I have found programming when tired to be easier than writing proofs - until I look at the program output and realize that it is garbage. :-) (Those little details do matter.)
Sorry, Frenchmen are the 21st most productive people in the world.
She loves me: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 She loves me not: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BF
For example, in France we work 35 hours a week, have 6 weeks of paid vacation a year and still we are the most productive people in the world.
Oh really, is that why company's are fleeing france to other European country's. Is that why france has an extremely high unemployment rate.
Don't hold your breath about keeping that 35 hour week. It had nothing to do with efficient work, it had more to do with rampant unemployment. If you want to keep that 35 hour week be prpaerd to lose company's like Siemens and DaimlerChrysler. Not to mention that it seems to cost your country approximately 16 billion euros a year.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I used to work in offshore oil exploration. I worked 12 hours/day, 7 days/week. This was math (geodetic datum conversions), precision navigation, operating various geophysical instruments, maintaining computer and electronic hardware, and sometimes climbing the masts to work on the navigation antennas, working on deck with the cable, etc. Stressful, yes. But the schedule made a big difference. 12 hour watches = good, 6 hour watches = hullicinations after 3 weeks.
I thought the goal with programming was to always work half as much time as you billed. I mean your still working when you're asleep and dreaming about a schema.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Iff'n you says Ah has to, Ah can plow dat field in a day, and Ah kin code 80 hours next week....
Just don't beat me wit dat whip, Massa.
Back to da plantation, boys!
Arbeit Macht Frei!
Slavery is Freedom!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
That explains the quality of games coming from EA these last few years... Crap, Mostly Crap, Crap with a slight chance of less then crappy crap, and finally not-so-crappy crap.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
why don't the employee's starting bring a labour protection agency in? Get some help from people who have the power to control how business can use their labour resource.
The only reason why EA gets away with the 80-100 hours coding is because, by and large, people allow it to.
The only reason why its an industry standard, is because games coders tend to be young, naive, highly passionate and focussed people with little outside lives.
Since its inception, making games has been an activity by and for young people, and the business of making games is the business of managing those young people so that you get the most out of them.
Its simple really - if your freinds are working 80 hours weeks, treat them like drug addicts, because they are showing exactly the same obsessive and compulsive behavior. Theyre not making rational risk/reward decisions, and they are devaluing the work and lives of the people around them.
Motivation has to be a big part of it. Look at the groups who cracked enemy codes during wartime back in the early 1940's. They worked very long and hard with great results, but the motivation was very high. This is not something that management can successfully impose on workers in a prosperous, free, peacetime environment. But with the Republicans in, anything can happen.
You are a fool and you no longer have the ability to think.
Unless it is your own project, that you are actually interested in and it was your decision and you are managing it, you are wasting your life away.
If it was your business, if you stood a very good chance of becoming a multi-millionaire when it was all done - to get a big project off the ground?
I don't doubt that these kinds of things are done at places other than EA, I think there is something to be said for "knowing" the code and the project - almost an ESP-like approach to difficult problems (what did I just do to get this to work just now?)
I think the problem is the pressure, and what rewards you get by facing that pressure, and conquering that pressure. If you are conquering that pressure and the only reward you get if you successfully complete the project is that you don't get fired, or quit, that sucks. If you conquer that pressure, preventing bad things from happening - deadlines not being met, VC people not becoming disheartened by your competency (or lack thereof) - but not only do you prevent bad things from happening, you also gain tangible rewards at the same time that propel you into a world...
There are probably places and times where working that hard, under pressure, can reward people greatly - in certain, probably somewhat rare situations - but as far as that being your daily job, for an established large organization, your efficiency is going to be much worse because you "lose it". All the ESP-like qualities of knowing the code and knowing the project become more difficult to accomplish, knowing there isn't any real reward for you or any end to the unfair and unethical treatment.
No matter how you slice it, it's not good; it's not efficient. But perhaps there are situations, where the reward might make it ethically worthwhile, in some rare instances, for a certain type of personality.
I think the answer is overwhelmingly no - it can't be done, it's a total waste of time and a total waste of money. Any procedures, methodologies, and methods that you use developing one video game can probably be implemented for all other video games - there are significant similarities between the projects that it pays to standardize and hire more people.
On the other hand, if you are working on something completely new, uncharted territory, something so innovative that it's never been done before, the development of that business, or project, or whatever has no precedent, and there probably isn't any established way to do stuff. In a situation like this, perhaps going overboard on the hours you work might pay off in some ways that hiring more people, training them, and trying to set up a system to do something that hasn't ever been done before might not be as efficient.
It's an exception, in special circumstances, when there is substantial reward to motivate you. Otherwise, it's totally unethical and downright idiotic.
I've done a lot of tech work involving crazy hours, long shifts and intense stress. It led to a near-mental breakdown and screwed my brain up so much that I developed an abnormal brain wave problem that actually lead to a seizure.
And the scary part is, I'm a lucky one. I've known guys who worked like that for years on end and have gone damned near insane. It's scary, and unless you want to end up a nervous wreck don't do it.
you cant be european, it doesnt cost france, it costs the european union.. ie germany, sweden and the rest of the providers.
i used to work (program) under death march conditions. i was a web developer (shudder) during the dot com boom (shudder) and the hours were very long and weekends generally involved work. on top of that i used to hobby program when i got home. you just cannot create quality software under those conditions. things were constantly breaking, the fixes were microsoft style "fix this but break something else" patches and it was a generally hellish job.
now i work as a subcontractor to a guy running his own business. he starts at about 7am and doesnt leave till 8pm. he complains how he just doesnt get enough done, but i can see he's clearly burnt out, cant focus, cant work and its going to affect his business (and it already is).
im not sure if i should have a kind word to him either, im not sure if he'd appreciate me telling him how to run his business, and he can be quite stuck up about things. (read head up his ass)
I think you might be confusing France with Germany.
I'm with you on this. Even though I'm only at 6th form, I've found that it's possible to work solidly as long as you have a significant break. It's even easier to work if you take advantage of non-timetabled periods in the day to just idle through background work or to relax.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Yeah, but during the next week, you'll still be down 10%, maybe even for the whole week, due to building-up exhaustion and frustration. So your productivity takes an overall 10% hit - not just in the 80th hour as you suggest.
It really depends on the individual. Let's assume for the sake of argument that if I work a 16 hour day instead of an 8 hour day, my productivity will drop by 60%. And let's assume that this is a consistent 60% drop - not just in the Nth hour.
Now observe: let's say that I can crunch out X units of work in one hour if I had only did an 8 hour coding session. That means that if I work an 8 hour day, I'll get 8*X units of work done. If I instead consistently work for 16 hours (getting less sleep, worse food, not getting laid as often, etc.), I will get 16*(1-0.6)*X = 6.4*X units of work done.
Hence, I am less productive. Think about it. It makes sense.
HTH, HAND.
Hmmm... let me fix that. *logs on to Wikipedia*
Done!
Why? Overtime makes you sick more often. Every time a team member puts in 50-60 hours or more a week the chance increases that one of them will suddenly go off sick for a week. Overtime is unproductive - bug rates go up, design suffers, etc., and often the net effect is MORE time spent fixing the problem than was "saved" by the engineer. Tired engineers is also a major motivational problem, and often one grumpy guy that's had to little sleep can reduce the productivity of the whole team.
I've more than once had to send people home because they've driven themselves to the stage where they start blowing up it peoples faces and disrupting others to the extent that they are slowing development rather than speeding it up.
40 hours a week is on the high end for many people. I'd rather have an engineer work concentrated for 35 hours if they do it well. The problem is that when people work longer they tend to believe they are doing a lot, but most often they'll take longer breaks, work slower and still end up more tired.
In 99% of cases I'd NEVER believe an engineer that claims they are actually net producing more over a 60 hour week than a 40 hour week. There are always exceptions, but I've never met one...
when a company starts measuring work performance in terms of hours on the job, just walk away. It is a dead end. Unless you are talking about menial production tasks.
WTF difference does it make how many hours you spent on something? It is of course the results that matter.
When someone start talking about how many hours they spent doing X, they obviously suck at it/hate it.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
80 hours of week done in 2 weeks
[insert bad pun here]
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually it's "Challange Everything"
Don't you watch the EA intro the put on "everything"
if i had a job that demanded 80 hours a week from me, especially without paid compensation (and most don't compensate) I'd be out of there so quickly i'd create disturbances in time and space. after 40 hours, the 'diminishing return' i'm concerned with is not some corporation's bottom line, but the quality of my life. we have only a short time to live and i'd rather scrape by on a moderate income with acceptable hours and time enough to enrich myself as a HUMAN. i wouldn't even work on a project for myself 80 hours in one week, unless there were very special conditions. am i lazy? absolutely not, unless i need to work 80 hours a week to avoid that designation. and if that is the case, i will wear the badge proudly.
Does EA sprinkle magic pixie dust on their serfs to get around this problem
From the NY Times article, it sounds like EA uses coercive techniques and naive young employees. My own response is that I won't buy another game from EA until they reform the way they treat their employees, and I encourage others to adopt the same policy.
My attitude on this isn't just sympathy for EA employees. It's enlightened self-interest. At 35, I'm apparently too old to get a job with EA at any salary, let alone a fair one working under fair conditions. I choose not to support such companies.
The first group of posts indicate that we mostly agree that programming (or working in general) for more then 80 hours is not productive and harms your lifestyle. Hardly a groundbreaking conclusion, though there are enough people out there that might have felt that they should work this much because everyone else seems to.
So what are you going to do with this knowledge? Are you going to have a talk with your peers? How about your manager? Or bring it up at the next all-hands, right after the available high-ups tell you how fine your company is doing? How should we bring this up without fear for our jobs?
Here are some things to think about (feel free to add):
- Post anonymously. If you are truly affraid of consequences, try to do something like what the EA employee spouse did. Post an anonymous letter with your complaints. Keep the letter constructive.
- Talk to the right person. Before you pour your heart out, make sure you are talking to the right person.
- If your boss doesn't listend to you, consider talking to his/her boss instead. If this is too much of a step, consider talking to HR first.
- Talk to coleagues to measure how they are feeling. It could be usefull to break this feeling to your bosses as a group.
- Be carefull not to whine. You want a discussion, this includes listening to the others sides argumentation of why you have to work this way.
- No statistic should tell you how you should feel.
Lets get of our whining asses and start the discussion with the people that will allow you to get your life back on track. This here slashdot forum, though a decent source of news, is not the place where this particular issue will be solved. If you feel strongly about this topic then please do make a start at really solving it...it is your life you know.
Prior to my current position I was a Cost/Schedule Engineer with a construction firm. There have been numerous studies on labor productivity versus hours per week worked and they all point to an optimum long term weekly rate of around 50 hours in the building trades.
For short term gains (read: less than two weeks), 60 or 72 hours can give you a boost, but after abour 3 weeks you actually would have been farther along chugging at 50 hours per week than at 72. After a week or two of 72 hour weeks productivity is in the toilet.
Also, safety problems increase, attendance problems arise, etc. etc.
No construction site in the world would consider working those hours long term since it is so counterproductive.
The returns diminish if you don't get enough sleep and food.
Solution: Work while eating and sleeping. The second is a lot harder than the first, I'll admit, but if you're stuck on a problem, and you sleep on it, things sometimes look better.
With that strategy, I've been able to do a few 70 hour weeks without diminishing returns. 80 starts cutting into my sleep/food time, and I start getting diminishing returns.
However, I'm a big proponent of a social life. All work and no play makes Jack a mentally retarded boy.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Why do you think they have to put out patches for games? It's because they're written poorly by people who aren't at their best. If you don't get breaks and rests, you make mistakes.
/. when I'm doing that kind of code. I don't stop thinking when I stop coding. It's one of the many ways I solve problems. I guess it's like the Dilbert - the hour I spent in a meeting is "work", and the 15 minutes I spent in the shower figuring out why this bug is occuring are considered "non-work".
If it's something as trivial as making a video game, then nobody's going to die when you send out code that's crap. I'll wager that anyone who says, "I can stay up all night coding" is the same kind of person who never documents their code because all they do are assignments for CompSci 101 or put in some undocumented changes for the 2.1.2.3.45.4445 kernel.
In my other window, I've got code up that someone's life may depend on one day. That's right - if it fails or crashes, someone's going to die. If the deadline approaches and it's not done, my response will be, "You're waiting. The code's not done," not, "Oh, I'll pull an all-nighter and ship it untested."
You may be wondering what I'm doing on
My point is, you have to take breaks and think about what you're doing or you end up with garbage. Have a life outside of work. That's what life is for anyway.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
In response to "Does EA sprinkle magic pixie dust on their serfs to get around this problem, or is the work so trivial that it can be done while pathologically sleep deprived"
Who has spent 80 hours in a week trying to beat a game? I know I have spent 80+ hours in a week playing a video game such as Gran Turismo 3, Final Fantasy X, and even Counter-Strike!
If my "Job" was to play those games, I could easily crank out the hours. If I was at EA, I could probably put out 80+ hours playing a NFS game. I've put more than that just drifting in NFSUnderground 1.
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
Boycott
Pronunciation Key (boikt)
tr.v. boycotted, boycotting, boycotts
To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion.
Hmm.. if that is true then shouldnt we fellow nerds gang together and boycot EA among other companies so as to show them in a way they will understand (less income). I'm sure that if something like that happend the work place for a lot of people would be forced to change. Too bad it never will.
But seriously, I'd say MS takes pretty good care of their employees ... but maybe someone knows more about this.
Metric time:
:)
Day = 100 hours.
Week = 10 days.
Sure, I can work 80 hours a week, sleep for 333, and spend the rest of the time with my family.
My country doesn't start wars and I'm damn proud of it.
Me thinks someone doesn't understand the meaning of pre-emptive.
That, or you are not from the U.S.
We most definitely started the war with Iraq.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
Obviously this includes challenging the notion that there are a finite number of productive working hours.
Coding involves deep concentration and focus so you can't focus continuosly for any length of time. However, if you're just doing repetitive tasks, then you can keep it up for a long time without too much of an increase in the error rate.
I've NEVER bought an EA game.
(I pay for my games - I just never liked what EA puts out.)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
This book goes into this in great detail:
Waiting for the Weekend
by Witold Rybczynski
http://tinyurl.com/6kt4r [amazon.com]
The author discusses the disruption of the development of leisure time and it's implications for modern society. It's not a pretty picture. Welcome to salary slavery.
Words to men, as air to birds.
Man, I would hate to be in the solar system that an astrophysicist has played with durring his 120th hour that week. It would have 8 stars orbiting a big hunk of cheese.
I'm still just a MIT Computer Science student, but I can speak for my father, who've been working for 10-12 hours every day, including weekends, for over ten years now. Does he write unusually buggy code? Not really. He just took his job home and made it his hobby.
So it's no doubt possible to spend almost all the time you're awake coding, but you can't think of it as working all day, but rather using all your spare time on your hobby. Unfortuneately, only the few are lucky enough to work with something they burn for, and would be a challenge for the industry to make the workers feel like they are 'on top of it' rather than like supressed pawns.
The EA lawsuit also made me wonder how the employees at Valve are feeling, I've always thought of that as a great working environment, but is that all a fasade?
> Are these rational working conditions?
Of course not, which is why here in the EU it's against the law to be employed for more than 48 hours per week. No-one benefits from longer working hours: employers suffer diminishing returns and employees turn in to square-eyed antisocial nutters.
(A partial exception is Britain, where employees can work more than 48 hours, but only if they "volunteer" to do so.)
Depending on what your doing.
If it the exactly the same job then after 40 hours you make not care anymore and you produce less.
I worked 3 jobs (two at 40 hours week and the other ~20-30 hours a week). I did this for four months in the summer to earn money for school. Each paid well and this allowed me not to work a single hour during the school year and still have more spare cash then my working friends. I was tracked on productivity on one of the jobs. I can tell you even on less then 7 hours a sleep for weeks on end I had a productivity level about 10% hirer then the company average and my error rates where always very low (in the bottom 10 for the company). My personnel best is 47 days in a row with an average of ~15 hours a work every day (I had no life). I was allowed to skip the coffee break and take them at the end of my shift so I could leave early (to eat, sleep, etc).
It helps that each job I did was entirely different. One was entirely physical labor, one was a manager (paper work, handling cash, dealing with customers, etc), and the last was computer related.
The physical job was like a quick 8-10 hour work out every day (kept me in top shape for the ladies in the computer labs). The management job was easy, but I am good with numbers. And I love computer so it was like my hobby.
I am sure I would have died within a few days if I had to do just 100+ hours of hard physical work. If spend 100+ hours a week for weeks on end on doing just one job I would be up in the bell tower with my trusty sniper rifle pretty darn quick.
I could handle lots of work for 4 months at a time fairly easily but I am sure I could not handle it for year on end. My personnel life would not be. I would have money but I would not have a life.
So I say you could work 80 hours a week as long as you did significantly different jobs!
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
I'm NOT saying where I work, but I'm scheduled to work (Coding my life away) from 8AM to 8PM Thanksgiving Day with no comp day or pay.
Those of you getting a day off to eat turkey, drink beer and pass out early on the couch watching football... (sticking up middle finger)
I tend to work in bursts, so when I'm on a roll, I can be putting in 80-100 hours/week and I'm O.K. with that for a modest amount of time (say a few months before physical fatigue starts to become insurmountable). However, I also tend to slack at times and do stuff like post to slashdot :-) and don't sustain above 55-60 hours per week for any protracted time and after a big push I need a break.
When I was younger (about 10-15 years ago) I could still code for a 24+ hour burst, now that just isn't feasible, I don't think I can productively code at all for above a 20 hour burst. I also noticed that I need a vacation every year or two. In the past, I would get unhappy but was still able to work, but in the last 10 years or so, I get burnt out without the break. I also am finding as I'm getting older that I'm susceptible to more severe colds/bronchitis and even pneumonia, so I have to guard a bit more against becoming overly fatigued.
If we are talking about time to fix, it is entirely possible that programming mistakes can be more serious then medical mistakes. If you are a doctor and you kill someone, thats it. A few hours of paperwork, maby. If you write an OS over a single continious 48 hours hacking run, then you are stuck with that crap 25 years later, screwing up millions of peoples lives.
I dare say that when you have a severe case of the stupids is the best time to test.
You are much more likely to do the same stupid shit your users will do.
Make notes. Make automated tests. Fix it when you are fresh.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
Indeed. Another way to state that is "eat my own dogfood." What it means is that he's the end user for his software, and if it doesn't work, he knows about it. Joel from Joelonsoftware had a nice article on the subject and how it helps catch problems.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
all this research that's done relative to the 40-hour work week is kind of funny to me considering the fact that the 40-hour work week is a man made concept.
i think that if humans had a 60-hour-work-week on average, then we'd be looking at studies above and beyond the standard 60 hours of work. if you're used to work 60 hours then i would imagine all 60 hours would be productive. that is to say that those hours would be just as productive as the 40 hours we're used to now.
conversely, if the rest of you only really worked about 10 hours a week at your 40 hour per week job (like i do), then anything over those standard 10 wouldn't be very productive. haha.
yes, you can and I have worked 80+ hour weeks for months at a time inspired by $5000.00-$10,000.00 bonus checks being dropped on my desk. :)
Young coders can be more focussed with fewer distractions. Older coders tend to take on more job responsibilities. Constant little interrupts cause great losses in productivity - it can take me up to 20 minutes to get back in to the flow even after a 5 minute interruption to help somebody else.. Younger people also tend to have fewer out of work distractions. The people going to EA are often very keen and willing to sacrifice their personal lives for work. I remember those days back in the .com boom when I was only 21 ;)
I've also found that as I get older (almost 30) that I have harder time sleeping. If I work until the wee hours it's harder for me to make up the next night by sleeping for long enough (I managed to sleep for a whole 7 hours the other day - I was so impressed!). If I work too late of an evening then I have trouble sleeping that night, which also needs to be made up later in the week. I still like to binge drink like I'm 18 again at the weekends so I don't catch up then either.
I think going a 40 to 50 work week is hardest. Anything beyond 50-55 hours and people start substituting their social lives by socializing at work. I feel sorry for those with families working that hard. In my experience every 2-3 hours extra work after that is only equivalent to an hour of 40-hour-a-week work. And yes, errors go up, things get forgotten, process goes by the way-side and there's always something that comes back and bites your further down the road. You end up constantly in a reactive fighting fires mode.
At my first two jobs I had at least 100 hour week at both jobs. What did it accomplish? Customer X needed all the data for Product Y put into our internal formatted and prepared for insertion into our archaic database. It needed to be done and got done properly. At the 2nd job one of our VPs promised (unbeknownst to the programming staff) a client that we'd have a product ready to demo for them to see if they wanted to fund its full development. That was a solo project using VB, Access and Excel. I coded it all at home since I was working 20 hour days, sleeping 4 hours then getting up and showering and repeating. At the end of the week I went with VP to demo the product and the clients bought it so that accomplished something too. These days I'm a contractor and my current contract forbids me from working over 40 hours in a week. I prefer it this way since I work a lot less hours and make a lot more money than the old days (early 90's are old days for me).
EA: Not only are they a bunch of assholes running their programmers and their respective families into the ground, but they're stupid too because they are causing the programmers to write worse code than they would if they worked on a more humane schedule.
Yeah I know I am a little off topic, but SOX has got many auditors running amok in companies. Our IT department got hit by a train. Conflicting requirments and the need to document all work in 15 minute increments, get 5 sign offs on anything over a day, etc,etc...
So can they program 80 hours in a week? Only in they work 100+ as 20 will be SOX compliance.
How in the heck is EA and those slave houses complying? Do their auditors just brush it off?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There are some valid points here, and if something just has to get continuing to work well past fatigue may be necessary. However, IIRC, the original story indicated that crunch time at a lot of the game houses had evolved to where all the time was crunch time.
When you're working on your 70th hour you may indeed still accomplish 20 minutes of work that moves you a bit closer toward the goal. But when you do it week after week that may mean that the first hour of the next week you still only get 20 minutes of work done, due to residual fatigue.
So, after a certain point, after a few weeks of mega-overtime, I think you must hit the point of negative returns.
I did it a few times... but not for long. It depends on the level of involvement you have on the project and how interested you are to that project.
:)
Without counting programming blitz at home, so far, my worst cases were:
- 60 hours for 3 weeks, followed by a 4-day blitz of 12+ hours per day.
- 2 weeks to do a 3 months project (2 weeks at 12+ hours per day, last days "till you drop, wake up and start again")
- 2.5 days non-stop.
The first example meant a buggy software. We had to code for months under pressure (at 40hr/wk) and had to implement new features and correct bugs for 3 weeks with overtime blitz and finally we had to finalize things under horrible pressure for a few days while the client was actually waiting on the line. The project was ambitious, the idea was good but it was too late for too little.
The second example, I was required to create a software from scratch, with a semi-specific design. After thinking about it a few hours, I immersed myself in code, taking time to auto-demote myself to a coder level and put a "do not disturb under death penalty" sign around my neck. People knew it was hard, I knew it was hard. I was under my own things and after hectic days of coding, I released a somehow bug-free software. Very minor tweaks and nudges had to be done for the final version, mostly due to interfacing with other people's work.
The third example, something slipped management's mind and I had to rush a new feature. The feature was made. I was happy.
In all these examples, only the first one was a disaster, mainly because we were pressed to do something for a very long time, giving our 120% for weeks, followed by giving yet again our 150% for a few weeks, followed by giving a 200% for days. One has only so many percentages in reserve.
The lesson here is how much sustained work I was able to give, at comparable quality. A programmer is somehow like an artist: if he is given time to contemplate his canvas first and at various times during the project, he is able to create something much better than someone who just go heads on and resurface when it's done.
I wonder if he's ever played any of the non-EA sport games? Like both Battle Fields..
EA: May I take you're order?
User: Yes, I'd like the $50 bug special please!
This is quite common on military exercises. I was in the reserves before, and it was quite common to have weekend exercises without sleep. After being up 2 nights straight you don't have any ability to concentrate, so forget about programming or surgery. You wouldn't want to be at the controls of a vehicle either.
You can dig trenches, march, and shoot after extended periods of sleeplessness. But even then, I remember some recruits would actually start hallucinating beyond that point. One friend who was on sentry duty after 3 days without sleep told me he saw trees moving about and changing positions on him. This was shortly before somebody walked up to his checkpoint. He was supposed to challenge the guy approaching him, and ask him for the password. Instead, he remembers the other soldier walk straight up to him and wave in his face while he stood motionless as if he was watching it in a dream. He knew what he was supposed to do, but he felt disconnected from his body. Needless to say, he was relieved a few minutes later and given some down time.
I know they were trying to research ways of keeping soldiers alert and awake for days at a time with stimulants, but there was no cheating the need for downtime. You invariably start to go nuts after several days.
Working death march hours is possible for a short term crunch, but there is no way you can keep it up for extended time and still be productive in any task that requires high concentration. And there is an increasing chance over time that you will suffer a psychological breakdown of some sort.
My rights don't need management.
Resign.
- learn to swim.
While I don't dispute your outlook on the programming industry, I think it's worthwhile to give the academic crowd a fair shake.
If you're going to become a career academic, it means you have to put time into your work or else you'll be swept aside early on. You won't ever have the chance to work for someone with tenure or stable research funding. You won't even get your undergraduate degree.
80 hrs/week was commonplace in my physics class. Early on I took 5 lectures and 3 labs in one term, resulting in a sleep at 2 am up at 8 am routine. A generous estimate for essential needs comes in at 3 hours per day, and suprise, surprise, I was working 105 hrs/week. Not every week, but most.
Basically I think negative returns only come into play if you are working out of despair, not if you are trying to learn, understand or create something. If you are focused, ambitious and keep a clear mind you can easily work 80 hrs/week.
Most academics I know work >= 80 hrs/week. There is no overtime. I guess it's because they really enjoy it.
UBU
For the past 4 years I have worked at least 80 hours a week for at least 10 weeks a year, and close to another 20 weeks over 60 hours.... I generally don't drink coffee so it is possible to make it through without caffeine (although it has been getting harder to do so.) Now if only I could figure out how to convince my company to start paying me overtime.
An arrogant frenchman? Who would have thought.
Dammit, people, the reason the PHBs can get away with this sh1t is that they know that even if you have the self-respect to refuse they can easily replace you with someone that doesn't value self and family enough to say no.
I know that folks in the US have been trained from birth to believe that worker solidarity = communism = ultimate evil, but those whose comments can be summed up as "stop yer whining and get back to work" miss the damn point. I want to work to live, not live to work. When there are enough workers willing to whore themselves out, it makes it impossible for the non-whores to expect fair treatment.
If the developer community would stop putting up with it, the PHBs wouldn't be able to require it anymore.
Many people here might be able to work long hours without lowering quality but that's not the case for the average joe (read: me). A survey in Europe showed that French workers spend less time on their work place for same productivity as other countries workers.
I think 40/45 hours a week has become a standard for some pretty good reasons...
.kill b honi soit qui mal y pense
" You can work 80 hours in a week,"
Why, yes, I can.
My computer, unfortunately cannot. It starts making a lot of dumb mistakes during an extended days work.
So do my pencils and pens. It a damn equipment problem, I can do it, really.
It's common hospital practice in the medical industry to work interns and residents upwards of 12 hours a day. The practice has been defended in the past as nessecary to educate our soon-to-be doctors on the diseases a hospital may see. In fact, I believe more than a few people have said that "the tradgedy of 12 hour intern workdays is that they're not in the hospital for the other 12." There's also been a backlash at the lack of people opting for specialties that demand this insane behavior. Mostly illwill directed at radiologists and other "doctors of convinence."
But I've never seen a scientific study show that interns and other medical professionals are as effective on hour 12 as hour 3. Its been a while since I've studied this at all; its possible that today the AMA and acadamia has condemned the practice, but I wouldn't count on it.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
On the plus side- that many hours means you're pulling down $100,000 a year....
Some quick calculator math shows that kind of schedule, if you have a 45 minute commute, sleep 6 hours a day and eat for 2 hours a day leaves you with 2 hours a day of "free time".
That doesn't include shopping, cooking, mowing the lawn, housework, showering etc.
If you had the gall to sleep 8 hours a day there is no extra time.
So you're going to be paying someone to do all those other things a person needs to survive. You can easily blow $20K of your salary just on eating out. Plus you're going to pay someone to mow your lawn, fix your car, play with your kids, etc. If you live in a metro area you basically are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Note to reader - If you fit this description beat yourself about the head until you realize you need a sane job. If you're really willing to put in 80 a week, start your own business. Much more edifying, net-similar pay.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There are two results of working on projects: understanding of the project and the project itself. Understanding of the project is only generated while not consciously working on anything. If you're working too long hours, you lose this part. You can only write good code with understanding of what you're doing. So working long hours is fine at the end of a project, when you already understand it, and can work on it until it's done with just what you already know (and forgetting how you debugged stuff doesn't matter too much), but it will kill your productivity if you do it earlier in the project or for anything involving design.
If you work 14 hour days all the time (as opposed to just during crunch time), you're only spending about 2 hours a day on improving your insight into the project. You're probably writing good code for half an hour each day and writing junk for 13 and a half hours.
Yesterday, I worked for 3 hours trying to fix a bug, and didn't get anywhere. Then I gave up and went home. During my half-hour commute, I realized what must be happening and solved it in 5 minutes upon getting home. I'd probably have solved it in another 3 hours had I stayed at work, but I actually was done sooner because I didn't work too late.
"In the past, some employees of EA have claimed to be able to get away with as little as 80 hour per week. The current management does not encourage such attitude."
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
I can write code without any sleep. I've worked 24+ hours straight without sleep. Bear in mind that writing code isn't the primary function of my job, but I still do a reasonable amount of scripting and programming.
I can code but I can't debug very well after I've been working for about 12+ hours. That goes for debugging code, debugging network problems, tuning a filesystem, etc., anything that requires high-level cognitive abilities. I can't even fucking drive right after pulling an all-nighter, let alone debug where I'm running off the end of an array or whatnot.
And for the people that make comments about getting high, yeah fucking right. Any of my above statements involving lack of sleep apply just as well if you're high ( be it speed, too much coffee, pot, whatever ). Very productive, but not able to think more than 3-5 layers deep into a problem ( and forget about juggling multiple complex problems ), and not all that creative either.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
I'm a controls engineer (some call us control system integrators) (we make machines move) and during the startup phase of a project, we will typically be onsite in a distant city, away from our families, and you work 12 hour days, 7 days a week. This can last anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 or more months, but it is the final phase of the project (the crunch time), not the norm. On average, our engineers are on the road anywhere from 60 to 120 days a year. A full 7 * 12 hour days will get you over 80 hours. However, you should never put in more than 12 hours a day, and never keep working if you're sleepy, because when you're working around 480 volts and machinery with all the safeties disabled, that would be a Bad(tm) idea. Fingers have been lost (not mine, thankfully).
However, even on a long haul project like that, we still get to go home for one weekend every 2 or 3 weeks, or fly another person out to your location for the weekend on the same schedule (in case you're some place nice like ocean side California - not the norm). There are 2 cases where I had to stay longer than 3 weeks without seeing my wife: once was September 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks when I was supposed to return the following weekend. I just skipped that weekend of travel. The second time was when we really had a tight set of deadlines, and I worked over 30 days straight, even Easter Sunday, though I took half that day off.
So it does happen, and you can still be productive, especially when you're away from home, but you do drain yourself after a few weeks.
One other thing to keep in mind is that I probably make as much base salary as those EA programmers, and I get straight time overtime, so if I work 80 hours a week, I get double the pay (gross, that is - it probably pushes you into another tax bracket for that paycheck, so you don't get double the take home pay).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
The original post doesn't taken sleep habits and general health into account. Too bad, because there's more research and statistics on how these affect productivity. But, what is often shown with sleep and daily energy levels is that there are really large differences between individuals, and I suspect the same is true for concentration levels.
Its pretty common for most of the 'code monkeys' to work more than 80+ hours a week - and yes, I am talking about offshore developers working for Indian companies.
In fact, being one of them, I have worked like a wonderful arse-hole for quite a long time, before I finally decided to start living my life again!
Its a normal working culture there. Tight deadlines - less resources - to get the maximum out of the project.
Now about being able to produce something 'good' and 'real' is questinable, but ppl generally work like this towards the end of almost all projects to meet the deadlines. And doing this since the beginning of their careers, the final product is more or less the same standard.
It is my personal belief that while this may be the case for a lot of induviduals, it is not the case for every last person. Some people can simply work and concentrate longer than others can. A lot of factors can be contributed to this, such as work environment, stress level during work, and what they do during their off-time. I don't know if this is the case at EA or not, but I think that it is very possible that one could program for 80+ hours a week.
INACTIVE ACCOUNT
What a bunch of wimps! When I was doing my surgical residency, an 80 hour week would have been a blessing(i.e., sleeping, instead of being up all night).
I'm confused. What exactly does Amphetamine have to do with software security?
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
A few years ago I was doing graphic design and programming for a web site launch. Near the end I worked 3 100-hour weeks in a row. I'd start the week coding, and then when my brain fried I'd start on design.
I found that after about 70 hours I was no longer productive writing code. It wasn't that I was writing a lot of bugs, really, just that I was less able to understand the problems. For me, a large part of programming is keeping many variables in my head at once. The longer I work without a break the harder I find this. My logic skills don't deteriorate much, but after many hours my retention does.
Switching between coding and design helped me wring a few more semi-productive hours out of the week. Design uses a very different part of my brain and doesn't tire me as much. I don't need to remember all sorts of variables because my eye can perceive them with little effort. So for design or art I think 80-hour weeks are more feasible than for programming.
But year, it doesn't take much of that shit to realize that no amount of money is worth it.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I don't think anyone can work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Try having a job and raising a child, especially newborns. One the posts in the EA article mentioned the need for post-work/pre-sleep downtime. You don't get any as a new parent with a full-time job. For the first 10 months of my son's life, I was literally getting 4 hours of sleep per night 7 days/week, some of which was not even non-contiguous, and virtually no downtime inbetween. Weekends were not much better since baby-care became the full-time job, while work still be needed to be done. By March of this year, my productivity, both as an employee and a father (unfortunately), seriously tanked. It got to the point that I was considering therapy, but couldn't figure out when I had time to go.
Fortunately, things improved on both fronts (we hired people at work and my son started sleeping through the night and otherwise becoming more self-sufficient), but most companies in my experience only pay lip-service to domestic issues while demanding continually increasing levels of productivity. So the bottom line is that this is not isolated to the game industry, but to any institution that has its work-life balance out of whack.
Now before anyone goes and sheds any tears, I will admit that I'm not alone in this insanity as my wife helps out greatly with the duties, although we're both in the same boat job/child-wise, and her maybe moreso than I. We chose to do this, and I'm a very proud father and wouldn't give up my son for the world. Concurrently, I could find a job that is less stressful, but like the EA programmers, I choose not to because the benefits of my work outweigh the costs. In that light, I have complete respect and sympathy for single parents.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
You're assuming that the initial 40 one works of the 80 is as productive as 40 without the extra overtime. It isn't. If one is regularly working 80 hours a week, the productivity is less than that of the same person working 40. It's not that the extra hours are negatively productive, it's that all of the hours worked are less productive.
BTW, this effect was studied during WW2 when there were major attempts to increase production. The only way one could consistently beat a 40 hour workweek in production was to do sporadic overtime. Continuous overtime would, after a while, drop production below that of a 40 hour week.
If it's a project that you're really into, you can do it. Even if you go home your mind is still working on the problem.
That's why startups can (sometimes) do it. The people are personally involved in a project they created. That's why companies like Google can do things nobody else can. Even with a 40 hour week everyone's having a ball.
Unfortunately, most programming is arbitrary, tedious shit.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
The definitive work on the Subject is DeathMarch by Edward Yourdon. He goes over why these kinds of project keep happening, why they're bad (with numbers) and what to do if you're caught up in one. No silver bullet, but pretty good. If you're a manager or you want to slip something under your manager's door, I really liked PeopleWare. It's not about the Death March, per se, but more about how to handle a software engineer like a human being. Of course, some PHB's don't think this is a reasonable approach.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A few years ago, I worked as a contractor for a certain large company. This company is notorious for driving people too hard, so I had reservations about working there.
... - life's just too short for this sort of rubbish, and IMHO anyone who thinks it's appropriate really needs to adjust their thinking.
When my contract was handed to me for signing, the default "max 8 hrs x 5 days per week" clause had been removed. I asked about that, as that clause generally serves as protection for both my customer (they don't get slugged for huge dollars and can plan their cash flow accordingly) and me (I get to see my family). The company replied that it was normal practice for them to remove any such clauses.
A few weeks in, and most of the people around me were working 18 hour days regularly (I started right around crunch time). I made a policy decision as follows:
- I'd work up to 14 hours a day
- once I'd worked 60 hours a week, I'd go home
Remember I was a contractor; I didn't feel any personal or professional commitment towards a management group that had put into place these sorts of work practices, and it was quite obvious to anyone working there that the long hours being worked were leading to mistakes that led to additional hours being worked to fix them.
Anyway, as expected, I got confronted pretty quickly about my perceived slacking off. My response was that I hadn't signed up for a lifestyle change; I was after income, pure and simple. Being close to Xmas, I was quite happy to work a few extra hours, pocket some extra cash and thus fund a nicer holiday, but that was the extent of the sacrifice I was prepared to make for the cause.
I pretty much had them over a barrel at that point; there was no time to train someone to replace me, and I'd made it abundantly clear what my motivations were and that they were essentially non-negotiable.
My personal lack of commitment was discussed in front of the rest of my workmates, by my boss, at the next team meeting. I took it on myself to respond, outlining my reasons for working as I did and that I didn't regard limiting myself to 60 hour weeks as being a lack of commitment - I said I thought it showed a lack of planning, and left it at that. When I finished, you could have heard a pin drop...
A few days prior to Xmas, my boss didn't turn up. This was strange, given that he worked huge hours himself, but not unexpected since pretty much everyone was quite ill at that point due to tiredness and shared (airborne) diseases. When he didn't turn up the next few days either, someone called his house and there was no answer. Eventually a relative of his went to his house and found he'd hung himself in the bedroom.
I've got no doubt at all that his death was 90%+ due to overwork, possibly exacerbated by my taking a somewhat defiant stance in public several days earlier. He'd lived alone and worked huge hours for the past several years, so there was no real possibility for other issues to have caused his suicide.
After a few months' thought, and subsequent discussions with my fellow workmates at that place, I decided that what had happened had been pretty grim but ultimately good things had come out of it. Work practices in that particular group had changed quite dramatically in the following few months; the new boss had put caps on the number of hours worked each day and each week, and re-introduced paid overtime for full time employees. Although several people had left (the turnover in that group ran close to 80% per year), those that were still there were now working in a way they felt was personally and professionally sustainable.
Having several of them call me up to thank me for taking a stance in a very awkward environment certainly helped me personally, although my "stance" was totally selfish.
Since then, I simply refuse to work in "death march" situations. I find the whole idea totally absurd; the end result is that a crappier product is shipped slightly sooner, but people's lives are affected too much for the trade-off to be worthwhile. I've seen two deaths (one described above), several bitter divorces, people leaving the industry, middle-of-the-office screaming matches,
It can. Just look at Andre Lamothe. He works usually 80+ hours per week on a regular basis and still gets to write good code. It's quite impressive how he managed to put the xgamestation together.
But then I guess this is not for everyone. I can go to 50-60+ hours, but then I get the buggy code syndrome, and there goes productivity
I think that sometimes people can put in 80 hours per week, but that just leaves time for sleep. I also believe that leads to crappy code (in the long-run), a shorter lifespan, and an overall poor quality of life.
More often than not, I think that this 80 hours per week is a "brag badge" for those developers who do it occasionally and want to announce to the world how "cool" they are.
Two words: Unionize coders.
I know many of you out there will hate that suggestion, but it's a tool workers have to stop runaway PHB's. Here are the difficulties:
* Defining who is a "coder", because any union contract would immediately have management trying to make employees not part of that contract.
* It's got to be international, so that our colleagues in New Delhi are on the same side as we are.
* Getting people to join.
If we can organize ourselves to produce desktop suites, surely we can organize ourselves to give us more money and time.
I am officially gone from
Code the same thing he does, in less time, have it work better. Do this enough times, and you'll have a convincing argument for leading your own group.
I'm perfectly capable of working 80+hrs/wk, especially on my own projects. But that's because of the internal creative fire from within. How can any company expect to suck that type of energy out of anyone? I'm getting tired of companies who think they have the ability to do this. I see it on Wall St with analysts in the financial industry and now we're talking about it with programmers. With such a technically advanced, capitalist society, what does this say about us? These companies will continue to do this to us as long as our peers are willing to believe the hype that getting worked into the ground for 5 years is going to bring better days. This is the same myth that many of our organized religions use for control. Behave now so that you may thrive in heaven later. I feel strongly that some we should organize ourselves some how. Is there anything we can learn from Union activity? Anything anyone can think of?
Is this serious?
This is not the correct comparison to make. If you work 80 hours in a week, and two others each work 40 hours in the same week, that puts you 20 hours behind those other two. If the 80-hour work weeks are the norm rather than the exception, they should hire more employees to work regular hours at regular productivity levels.
Over time as a family life puts hard constraints on my hours I have realized that if I really maximize the quality time I can get my job done without the extra hours.
I'd done lots of these non-stop coding fests. At least for me, there's like this illusion going on. You put in the hours, but in reality those extra hours aren't accomplishing nearly as much as you can when you're fresh and had some time to let your subconscious percolate the ideas down. You use the volume of hours to paper over the fact that you're not very good at organizing and utilizing your time.
Yeah, there are crunch times but it is so easy to fall into the lifestyle where you stay late, but then come in late, fooling yourself that you're actually getting a lot done by the lateness that you stay.
I also would find myself wasting more time distracting myself (espeically web surfing) when my mind was telling me it was time to quit and go home and rest.
Lastly, one device that helped me was to have a clock with an hourly chime. Then each hour I can ask myself "What do I have to show for this past hour of work?!?" It helps me realize that you can easily burn an hour without realizing it on 3 Slashdot comments, some stock quotes, and some pinball research.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
I'd have to agree with the other person who said to resign -- if the management can't figure it out, is it really the sort of management that you'd want to be working for any signficant time?
It's probably time to start looking for another job where you're not working for and with incompetant people.
Baring that, you have to wait for the person to go on vacation, and show that you'r not falling behind or having any sort of trouble keeping up without them there.
Of course, pointing out the problem does you next to no good -- because the management will have next to no ability to create a good resolution -- the lead programmer will have been set in his ways if he's been working for any significant time, and as he wasn't corrected early, will most likely slip back to those habits.
Your better bet is to find him a life. If he's single, try fixing him up with someone, or find some sort of social group to hang out with. If he's not, he's trying to find excuses to avoid his family, so it'd be better to find something that's work related, that his spouse might accept, so look for any groups like PerlMongers, SAG, or whatever else might be appropriate based on his discipline.
If he's an introvert, you're just screwed. The real question is -- is he one of those people who is so incompetant that they create more work than they resolve? If he's not, you might be able to just avoid it, and take some time in finding a new job. If he's one of those negatively effective workers, I'd look to get out as quickly as possible.
80 hours a week is nothing. try 120 hours a week for 3 years straight with no vacation.
Don't.. your job is to do whatever they want. Their job is to manage. No matter how helpful you think you will be in pointing this out it will be a negative for you.
Do your job.. it's just a job. Go home and be fulfilled in your hobbies or whatever it is you do in your off time.
How do Europeans view these horrible working conditions under which Americans work?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
A capable person with technical challenges is often working when not at work and not at the computer. Chewing over the best way to approach a problem. Realising they've just half-written a module that's almost redundant, if you only do this with that.
When the pressure is on and the work is non-trivial, thinking-time is actually hours of value that employers get for free.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
I'm a coder and I'll be anonymous today as what I write is more embarrassing than something to brag about. I've programmed for up to three days without sleep, for up to 125 hrs in one week, for over 435 hrs in a month, for several months in a row, for over 3,500 hrs in a year for over two years straight in a commercial software development job I tolerated for seven years. It was physically painful, mentally exhausting, and made relationships nearly impossible to maintain. Was it financially rewarding? No. Was it healthy? Definitely not. Would I do it again? No and I probably couldn't. But was it productive? Yes. Did the product meet the market? Yes. Then why would I do it? Real people who use software have no clue how long it takes to produce. Especially when the design is so elegant, the hairy problem they were having now seems trivial. So the combination of feeling the need to make that kind of impact and the inability to walk off a job until that goal is achieved drives me to do ridiculous things.
So the practical question is, are you less productive?
Assuming that were talking about someone who is skilled and wise, one learns to adapt to the mental and physical fatigue that sets in. One doesn't try to solve that all-important logic in hour 35 of a 40 hour day. In programming, there is work that is mind bending and there is work that is mind-numbing. Schedule the work appropriately and the time is productive. If it's two days to Xxxx and it has to get done, what choice is there? Quit and get another job, I guess. And that may be the best choice. But for me, the cost is too high.
I remember one major coding crunch at the small software company I used to work for: We were preparing a significant set of enhancements to our core product, while at the same time working on bringing to market a major new product. The two projects shared giant chunks of code and logic, so it wasn't completely off the wall, but it was still clear that we were going to have an awfully long, hard slog ahead of us.
As a kind of non-overtime overtime incentive pay, management set up a deal to pay a bonus at the end of the project, based on hours worked above a certain point, with all kinds of complicated sliding averages and whatnot. My office-mate and I crunched the numbers, and realized that in order to get any appreciable bonus at the end of the project, we would basically have to commit to 60 hour weeks for the indefinite future.
Well, you know, neither of us were exactly in our twenties any more. I had a wife and a brand new house and a 45 minute each way (non rush hour) commute; and while I still felt spry and nimble, I no longer felt immortal and god-like, even with the help of Mountain Dew and m&ms. I was in my mid-to-upper thirties. I decided that, while I was still capable of working arbitrarily many hours in a week for short bursts during an emergency, there was no way that my health would stand up to 55 to 60 hour work weeks every week, indefinitely. Both my office-mate and I decided not to bother signing up for the bonus program.
<irony> (A couple of years later, I fell ill with a chronic and incurable medical condition which has left me essentially unable to perform any work at all; so I suppose I needn't have bothered being so careful).</irony>
In fact, much to management's chagrin, only one member of our small programming staff -- call him "X" -- actually decided to commit to their schedule.
Determined to get a decent bonus for his troubles, X threw himself into it, working 60 and 65 hour weeks. In the meantime, my office-mate and I upped our hours, too, but to a lesser extent: 55 hours one week, 52 the next; and so forth.
The weeks wore on, and we inched along towards our various goals. X was doing his usual fine work, but he was looking more and more haggard (we were all a bit worse for wear, actually). His code got a little sloppier at times.
And then one morning, he committed a bunch of working code to the wrong place, and instantly wiped out about 20% of our company's source code repository.
Did we have backups? Yes, we had backups; but still, it took three or four of us much of the day to both restore everything and to verify that everything was correct. The final tally was, roughly, at least one full man-day flushed down the drain in fifteen seconds due to nothing more than pure exhaustion.
Eventually, the crush passed, of course. It is probably a coincidence that X left the company shortly thereafter, although he came back a year later or so. He's a very good programmer, but some of the code he wrote during that crunch -- especially later on -- was, shall we say, sub-optimal.
Also I think other countries have 40 hr or less legal maximum work weeks.
Yet, somehow, Americans continue to either ignore or rationalize away the fact that Europe has now a better place to live than America.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Yeah, but what programmer hasn't mastered sleep-driving yet?
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
The only thing you can do 80 hours a week, reliably, is dig holes. Work for a highway cleanup crew doing community service some day...
;-)
As far as coding: 60-70 hours is the limit, depending on the mix of tasks. Major creative solving simply cannot be done nonstop. Even painters divide up chores: sketching, scaling, mixing, blending, dodging... each task has a different mental load.
Personally, when my game is on: the three hour period each day that starts when I wake up, I do my problem solving. I cannot force this creativity, it only happens at a particular time.
The next period of time: 6 hours, is fleshing out the Big Idea into smaller mindless bits.
Next, ~1-2 hours is just commenting and cleaning up test cases, or saving existing test cases so I have something for regression. Preparing for the next day is always a big help.
I can maintain this 10-11 pace every day for a week straight, but no more, and when my brain DOES start to fry (I can usually smell it), I like to switch to more mundane tasks like documenting and commenting.
Even when I was 20 (13 years ago!) and doing lots of crystal to program long hours, I still had to break it down into creative tasks and mundane tasks.
(Now my drug is sleep and food. I work so much better after a good meal and a solid nap. Yes, I'm an old fukker who codes for a living, not one you 15 year old brainiacs who has thousands of CVS tags in Sourceforge and no girlfriend...)
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Uuh...right. Actually, I'm guessing you're kind of asking whether the code outputted by such a regime would be any better than that produced by a monkey*. That really depends on factors such as how much caffeine has been consumed by the coder (or the extent to which any other kind of drug-, adrenaline- or hacking-induced high has been reached by the subject)**.
* Apologies to any monkeys out there (especially if there are an infinite number of them--mainly because I couldn't fight you, and, also, my argument would probably be false then). I've actually known some monkeys who could code quite well in my time but that's another story...
** As an aside, I hate coffee, but I tried taking 50 cups or sthg once, as part of a biology coursework experiment to measure its effects on the body, and it didn't make me high at all--just a bit tired and slightly sick. Also, I didn't sleep all of last week (mainly due to doing my uni work and stuff--nothing interesting). Although I usually have very few hours of sleep every night, this (especially given long periods in front of computer monitor) resulted in me looking a bit ill and starting to get minor hallucinations and disconnection with my senses, at which point I slept for a over a day. Not sure how any of that is relevant as I did no coding either time (and cannot even code) but you know...
[Disclaimer: I'm of course joking...and I should probably read more than the story titles before posting replies too]
[Note for Idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H^HModerators: If you didn't understand the last bit, that means I should be modded "Funny"--not "Flamebait"]
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Unfortunately, his seniority makes him almost untouchable when reporting problems like this to senior management who see him as "dedicated and just as productive as everyone else". What they don't seem to notice is that he needs to work about 25-30% more hours per week than the rest of the staff just to produce adequate (not great) code.
Wow. Up until this sentence I read that he was superprogrammer, not just a workaholic grunt putting out "adequate" code.
If he is not setting any kind of standard of working 60+ hours a week w/o lunch breaks and he produces OK code, let him sit by himself and code. Go have lunch, get to work later than him, leave earlier than him, and enjoy life. If its not really affecting you, consider yourself lucky.
Towards the end of the week, any problem that he "solves" quickly usually requires at least a day or more to re-fix later on.
That did not come across very clearly. What is the magnatute and frequency of this?
Its diminishing marginal utiltiy per hour of labor.
Yeah, I briefly worked at a place where overwork by a few key people was the norm. They never had any time to sit back and think about the big picture because they we always reacting to some emergency and always in panic-mode.
They also didn't have time to even think about delegating their tasks to others (who were underworked) and ramping up new people. Of course, the impression management got was that these people were hard workers and absolutely critical to the company (they were), but really, they were dragging it down by continuously missing targets, messing up mission critical systems, etc.
In the end, the place was just too dysfunctional for me.
Everyone's tolerance level is different, but the effect is the same. Even PHB's that know this fact seem to forget about it when crunch time comes.
This was done in two 36 hour days and one 4 hour day, for a couple of months (with partner-based coding too...)
The work is always brilliant, it works, it is incredible - but there are two problems:
1. You have to be at the same concentration level as I and my partner were at during the time we wrote it to understand the code. No one doing maintenence would be at that concentration level. This includes me.
2. The comments in the code were written at that same concentration level, and so they were too arcane to be useful - as an example, "the rising edge of the signal is needed, and the motif button press is at 270 degrees from it in the sequence in the clause, so rotate another 90 degrees by adding a not". Yes, this does describe what I did - but would it help anyone who is reading the comment?
So, I would say that you can do 80 hours a week on a one-time effort - but you will not be able to maintain it - even if you have code reviews, because everyone will be in the same charged state. For games that don't sell, this will work. For games that do sell, it will result in the need to do a complete rewrite every time a new feature is added that is not segregated to to a completely new part of the game (or website, or configuration tool, etc...).
maybe that's why people in quebec work the least hours on average in canada? :D
i know some that work 9-3 job daily with 2 hr lunch breaks...
my blog
Yes
Is it a good practice
Generally no
Why is it done?
I used to work for a company that during crunches would institute 777's (7am to 7pm 7 days per week).
We only got marginal more work done. Much of it of dubious quality. But..
1. It proved to our client that we were working hard on their project
2. We billed them for it.
80 hr weeks == methamphetamine and marriage counseling :)
I did it for 13 years. During one 24 month project, I averaged 90 hours a week of embedded software and hardware design. In my best year, I hit over 250K lines of ANSI C and the particular project I was on only had 5 bugs reported post deployment. We fixed them for free in a day. While writing that code, I also reviewed every line written by anyone else.
As for sleep, 90 hours per week is less than a 13 hour day. I forced myself to have 8 hours per day of sleep at every point except the last 6 weeks of 3 shift per day testing. During that period, I managed on 5 hours per day.
So, is it possible, yes. Is it possible to be productive,,, maybe even more so because in order to do it you have to zone into the code and eliminate every other element of your life. Is it possible for the code to have high quality,,, maybe even more so for the same reason. When there are zero other distractions and you turn yourself into a programming machine, productivity and quality can go up. Can anyone do it,, no, crafting code has to be your consuming love,,, no time for the pron so many of you seem to enjoy :o) Would I do it again,,, no way, I have a life now. Am I sorry I did,,, no, there aren't many people around with 18 calendar years of experience that include about 29 man-years of experience, approximately 25 of which were as lead architect / engineer on development tasks. I've paid the entrance fee and am now enjoying the club.
- Physiology: increased stress = decreased function of your immune system. Insufficient sleep = increased stress.
- Physiology: going without sufficient sleep is equivalent to having a large quantity of alcohol in your system. You can code, but after one night's good sleep you sure aren't going to understand the mindset that made you not comment your gordian-pot of spaghetti code.
- Human factors: if you're on a team, you don't want to appear to be doing less work than the others.
- and the numbers: 168 hours in a week. 84 for work, 56 for healthy sleep...28 for everything else
Assume all developers find a way to work 12/7: they cancel all vacations, classes, conferences, workshops, ceremonies, weddings and funerals; they telnet into religous services (and never mind all the caselaw protecting rights of religious expression when, for example, it includes having a day of rest); they suspend all taking care of children or parents (nevermind the family medical leave act)...So what happens the first time one developer gets exposed to a cold or the flu? Under regular 9/6 circumstances you might just say "Look, I'm coming down with something. I'll head out early today to sleep it off": you make up the time later, and everyone appreciates that you didn't expose them to the bug. Instead, under the 12/7 situation you're going to try to tough it out. You don't spend 3 hours at the doctors. You won't get the extra sleep you need, so the illness just gets worse. Because everyone else is sleep deprived, more people are likely to catch the cold from you. Because there is no room for errors / illness / humanity in the schedule, anyone who falls behind will be aware of how they're holding everything up. This causes stress. Stress causes illnesses to last a lot longer. Interesting feedback loops ensue.
And this is assuming everyone is gung-ho for the 12/7 plan. What happens when one developer gets creeped out over having to skip a funeral and decides the only choice is to quit? There won't be time to train a replacement: those 84 hours'll have to be absorbed by everyone else.
And that's just the people: that 12/7 schedule doesn't have wiggle room for all the standard crashes, viruses, connectivity failures, power outages, traffic jams, major news events, and other standard slowdowns in modern office life.
So yes, its doable, but I'm not going to buy anything more important that games from a company that expects those work hours from its employees. Even if they hand out provigil like candy and have IV caffeine drips their code will be fundamentally untrustworthy: I'm not buying important software from overstressed, equivalent-to-drunks zombies.
Yes, people can do amazing things if they want to, and unbelievable things if they need to. I've been working 80+ hours every week for the past 2 1/2 years. It's not fun, but I have no choice. A lot of people are in my position. Most normal people that I know these days (ie: not high paid programmers) have two jobs just to make ends meet. So, really, "can you do it?" isn't really a question or even an option. It's a necessity for most people.
I don't respond to AC's.
Fine then. More cheese for the rest of us!
Be careful! Bears shouldn't consume large furry dogs.
Here speaks the voice of an expert. You kids should make a big note of sometimes when I'm there at 4 AM, and I know I'm calculating things wrong, I just go home .
Knowing and recognising this point will elevate you in your profession.
At my last game development job, when we were working 80 hour-weeks, most people would not actually work full-time during this time. We would spend many hours a day playing games, chatting, eating, browsing the web, or working on pet projects. Management did not reward productivity only hours spent at the company offices. You learn to cope with the stress by tuning off from work during work.
"Speed" code tends to be poorly documanted and maddeningly squirrely. I've tried to use code written by a serious gak head, and it turned out to be easier to just rewrite it from scratch.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The problem here is incentive. The upper muckety mucks don't get in trouble here for anything except the failure to complete their project on time. "Bugs in the game? No Problem. I delivered it on time." As long as there's enough hype around the game, people buy it. Only later do they discover it's riddled with bugs.
I work in a semiconductor manufacturing environment. If you put a bug in software for any reason, it amounts to a big problem that affects the bottom line.
We're encouraged to work around 45 hours a week. If we put in more, that's great - but no one gives you any grief for failing to work long weeks when a project is late. If it's late, it's late. If it stops the factory because we pushed to hard on it, we're not likely to work for the company much longer.
According to "All I really need to know in business I learned at
Microsoft" by Julie Bick, it says "Work until your physical pain
forces you into unconsciousness!!"
I don't think anyone can work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need some time to refresh,recycle,renew. What's a reasonable amount of time to recuperate?
Ask an Amish. Your bosses grew up in a post-industrial society that still has a lot of funky industrial/pre-industrial ideas. Historically, sharecroppers and subsitence famers worked from Sun up to Sun down - usually 12 - 16 hours for 6 days a week during the Spring, Summer and Fall in temperate climates. The only motivation they had was starvation (if they were smart) or cultural obligations to 'look busy.' However, most of the work on a farm is menial and not intelectual. Before the rise of computer-assisted industry, a borderline functional intellect in our post-industrial world could find ready work doing slow, repetative tasks that at one time required only a strong back and good arms/legs. Today, work such as programming requires mental, verses phsycial, prowess. While anyone will eventually hit the 'Wall' physically, you can also hit one mentally. (Often long before your body wears out.) Your employers need to learn the Death-March lesson in a bad way.
I knew guys who would feel guilty about going home to see their kids when crunch was on.
It's good to love your work. But, normally you trade your time and effort to someone so they can (hopefully adequately) pay you. You're trading part of your life so you can live the other part better. It's not you or your cow-orkers responsibility to make up for management or reality, and such attitudes (while vainfully heroic) are the reason projects fail. If it can't be done on time, either cancel it or move the dealine. Don't kill yourself for a 'consensual hallucination.'
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
The thing to think about is how much it would cost to employ another person. Assuming there is a need to get about 60 hours of work done. If a company employees one person, that's one desk (floor space tends to be expensive), one license agreement for the software, one hiring cost, one training cost, one salary, one benefits, etc. If they hire a second person it costs twice as much, but will paying some overtime (if you aren't salaried) add up to all that additional time?
Simple answer: No they're not...
By working so much their productivity is actually much worse than it would normally be if they worked half the hours, which any *good* IT manager knows.
However many firms employ manager who have no clue about what programming is about, and who think of it as repetitive manual labour, which can be 'sweat-shopped'.
Just clueless management basically... If I was a EA shareholder I would very unhappy because this kind of gross incompetence in management causes serious to the company.
"One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year." - David Parnas.
Interesting list, but I don't think it equates with productivity. Besides pure labor, you can build wealth with equity. If I had a million dollars in the bank, I could easily make $20k/year just sitting on my butt - just about what an average New Zealander produces in a year. But, by most people standards, the Kiwi is going to be considered more productive than me with my bedsores.
You could argue that the money in the bank is a function of productivity, but if I spend that all and keep up my same level of loafing, my income will drop to zero -- but I would be hard to argue it was possible to become any less productive than I was already.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
When I was fighting deadlines I had to work cumulative pover focused on last day the last 5 days was like boost turbo power work.
It is about motivation and concentration. you have to switch from one part of project to another, take short brakes to clear your mind and continue and sleep something about 4 to 6 hours.
You know when you live in Bosnia and you do not have the other source of income you have to do beter and more then enybody else on the planet if you want to survive.
After those 5 days you have to take 3 days total rest.
Hopefully we are all striving to achieve a good quality of life, not just good quality code.
The poster frames this question as to whether code quality hurts after working 80 hours per week. Shouldn't we be asking whether the quality of your life hurts instead? If working too much hurts our social and family life as well as our ability to participate in society's extracurricular activities, isn't that alone cause for alarm?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
They'll do it and bill for every hour.
Oh, hang on ... were you talking about taking that sort of damage for real?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Jesus jumped-up Christ on a friggin' CROSS, people! When the bleeding HELL did we start viewing our lives as a deathmarch for an employer? Half the problem I see is that we're all looking around at eachother like lemmings trying to figure out how we can be more productive for the employer for no material gain. If you're in a business that demands more time than you wish to give, or doesn't compensate you for your time, then QUIT. The more of you who ruminate over the feasibility of working arduous hours, or whether it's good for us or the business, the more we are saddled with deathmarch companies and deathmarch bosses. REJECT IT. Stop pondering over it. QUIT.
That's an incredibly bleak outlook. It's my attitude on the job I'm on at the moment, (50h/week at the moment, but that's "on idle" - seems like it might get more frantic over time) but that's just until New Year ... or so I'm promised :-)
If it goes on a month longer than that, my boss knows that I won't take it.
I've got a wife and 2 kids - live to work, not work to live
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Ditto, even to the point that I have banished my sub-ordinates after midnight.
An academic researcher should really know better than to ask a question and then answer it.
But of course, you're answer is correct. Ultima:Ascension for example never ever worked, and that's just one of many EA games that clearly indicated that the programmers were exhausted.
The whole problem would be quite easily solved if viable alternative distribution channels for games existed and perhaps if the market were more discerning. Companies like EA would then have to answer for their bad quality. Until viable channels exist, then the situation will likely continue. Of course a great deal of buyers are just kids and don't often make informed choices. I had to learn myself that the game screenshot was not the game, as a kid.
EA have been churning out buggy games for decades, and yes, the programmers are clearly overworked. The problem is, that the market and the consumer don't really mind that. Until there's an real commercial alternative, and people are more discerning, EA will continue on it's merry way.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
So if what he does Mon-Thu is adequate, and what he does on Friday wastes next Monday, he's effectively productive for 60% of the time. 60% of his 60h week is 36 hours, so maybe he's not doing any worse than you.
Just a thought,
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
When I'd come in in the morning, he'd say "Mike, this is almost done. Do you think you could finish it up for me?"
And I'd open up his sources, and there would be the coding of a madman. Nothing made any sense. Bugs everywhere.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
But what if management always see's this guy there at his desk and yourself as the one leaving early and coming in later?
All of the sudden it does affect you because the PHB's look at yourself as the slacker.
That is the problem.
Image is everything in corporate America and politics comes in and the guys who appear to work harder are the ones always heard.
http://saveie6.com/
I can understand the authors lament. I was recently working a job of completely compensated time. 45 hours work = 45 hours pay. So when I would pull a 60-70 hour week, I'd make a ton of dough and the company was economically deterred from doing it to me again unless it felt that the money spent on me fixing the issue cost less than letting it continue to exist.
My most recent position is salary and the corporate expectation is 45 hours a week minimum. Add to that a 1 hour each way commute, and my lifestyle significantly changed. 65 hours of work = 40 hours of pay. Weak. There is no deterrent for my extra labor. Therefore if a problem can be solved merely by increased labor versus a costly technical solution, why bother? If I stay at work long hours, the only impact at home is that I'm not there. There's no additional money. Granted, I have less time to spend that which I have earned, but strangely I don't find that motivational.
I think the real answer about why they ask us to, and why we do, is offshoring. Why do I drive an hour to work a 9-12 hours a day job only so I can drive home broke and do it all again the next day? So they don't send my job to India, or China, or anywhere where they are willing to do what I do, for longer than I'm willing to, for less than I could survive on. Sometimes I just have to tell myself that I believe in what I'm doing. I'm a cog, but a vital one.
How does that work for a person in the gaming industry? You work yourself senseless for months on end, drive your spouse to use the paycheck you don't have time to spend, on divorce lawyer consultations, you create a sense of a empty, dysfunctional family, to get some pimply faced kid the ability to play a neato super realistic football game? Where is the social relevance of that? A generation from now are they going to look back on you and say you were a hero and a pioneer or are they going to look at your function as further enabling a sense of self indulgence and lethargy that, next to the Scent Stories disks, is the ugliest aspect of a consumer driven society. (That said, I do play my fair share of video games).
I think the situation under discussion deserves a bit of perspective: EA you are probably working your people to the point where they are making as many mistakes as they do successes. A better management strategy would be to set a hard cap on the number of hours you were willing to work a individual, and past that cap indicates a failure in management strategy, not worker productivity. Remember, you can be held liable for MILLIONS is one of your wage slaves kills someone in a car wreck because they couldn't function any longer because of your imposed work hours.
EA employees: Maybe it's time to work somewhere else. I know there aren't a lot of game shops out there. I had my dreams too, but they were met by the harsh reality that I'm not a single man, and my career goals to have a intellectually stimulating position do not override my want to have a family. Think of it this way: Can you conclude a 84 hour week and hold you head up high and say to yourself that you may not have gotten any wealthier than you would have working a 40 hour government job, but you make the world a bit better?
It seems to me that these folks are going to the ends of the Earth to enable EA executives to push out game after game. Why? What if you worked all those hours and the game tanked? How do you tell your kids that it was all worth it then when you visit them on your custody weekend? In the end, no one is forced to do anything. You can and should quit. If EA can live with the high turnover, let them, but begging for your job with self sacrifice obviously isn't doing anyone involved any good. Perhaps they would be better off hiring the offshore talent, as they are used to the lesser quality of life, and let you make the hard decisions about where you're going to go. After all, a plumber can make a decent IT-like wage these days and still have pride that he performed a vital service, for about the same number of hours or less. And he never has to be worried about outsourcing, reorgs, or mergers.
A few days prior to Xmas, my boss didn't turn up. This was strange, given that he worked huge hours himself, but not unexpected since pretty much everyone was quite ill at that point due to tiredness and shared (airborne) diseases. When he didn't turn up the next few days either, someone called his house and there was no answer. Eventually a relative of his went to his house and found he'd hung himself in the bedroom.
Perhaps your Boss topped himself because of the humiliation you caused him in front of his team? Huh? Huh? Didja think of that? Huh? Huh?
I did just that many years ago working as a junior doctor in a UK hospital. It wasn't every week, but it happened regularly, perhaps every 2 or 4 weeks, and other weeks were all over 80 hours. Now seeing that the UK is starting to adopt the EU directives that doctors should not work any more than 56 hours per week, I say thank civility!
But guess what, just a couple of days ago someone hinted that they believed unless you worked that much or that hard you don't learn enough or gain enough experience. I put politeness aside and emphatically said "that's nonsense!". Of course, that person never had the pleasure of working more than 56 hours per week, and unfortunately when I was young and just out of medschool it was common procedure that you had to work cruel hours.
I firmly believe that it should be illegal for an employer to force an employee to work more than a set amount per week. Especially so when the employee is young and needy. I think the Europeans have it right at 56 hours for certain professions, though I'm aware that some have it at 48 and others have it at 35. If you're working for yourself then fine, work till you drop if you want.
You'll probably hear many nonsense arguments about productivity and competitiveness. well, I recall hearing that reducing the working hours of French firms under their legislation had the effect of increasing their productivity, because they just had to become more efficient and focused. There should be limits; limits to corporate greed, to inconsiderate and abusive management, and to the notion that the more you enslave your workers and milk the life out of them the more you profit.
Needless to say, I virtually always worked alone on these projects. I never even noticed that it was 80 hours.
A guy I workd for took pride in "working 18 hours a day". That included hours he sat zoned out staring at the screen, with his head on the table nodding off, and even sleeping under his desk. But he kept beating everyone else over the head about what slackers we were for not putting in the hours he did. And as for the quality of the work (he was management); terrible decisions that cost the company (and me eventually) a fortune.
My supervisor told me this, but I haven't been able to verify it myself. Apparantly at NASA you are not allowed to write code for critical applications outside the hours of 9 to 5.
It would be a great thing to tell a project manager in any case.
:wq
And tell me again why killing someone is less serious than a crap OS? :-)
Even assuming a heartless soul who genuinely only cares about themselves, and really isn't at all bothered about killing another human being - and that that person ended up training to become, and remaining, a surgeon, the cost to society is certainly higher - even in Canada
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
....saying it's bad for your health to work over 40 hours a week...present it to your employer....if they fire you, sue their asses for unfair dismisal
working long hours for:
- Architecture and design: counter-productive
- debug and test: whatever it takes
- Fixing bugs: need good sleep
During chip tape outs, I would stay as long as needed to debug an issue. I would always go home and get a good nights sleep before I tried to fix it.
At that time we were working on a module in a power plant and saw all the shifts coming in and out and then the third shift was wandering why we where there already, Funny we never left. They controlled the powerplant and were only allowed to work 6 hours straigth, we fixed there controlling software :)
I think it is easy possible to do even above 100 a week and be very productive, it is just a matter of arrangiung your things good.
Now I have my office at home (no travel time), lead a team of 5 people, jump in for the difficult parts when they need my help and in the mean time take the workload of some 3 "normal" code freaks. And they are good too.
The only thing is you can't keep up to this level for a long time, at some moments you will start getting problems going to sleep or even to relax. If you ever can't sleep anymore and you see shimmering lights when the ligths are off from all the things you are working on and to,long behind the screen, please take my advise take a break for some days if possible some weeks. you will be more productive afterwards.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
Ha, looks like someone did. (And it got reverted within the minute.)
You didn't get the memo? They just discovered in the Bible that God forbids having a sense of humor. I heard the Senate's already got a few bills against it.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Honestly, can someone enlighten me as to how these 80+ hour weeks ever accomplish anything?
No.
Well being a student, I can't say that I have ever worked in an organization where I have to put in 80 hour work weeks, but I have had to do it during my studies, and I can definetly say that as the hours add up my work quality goes significantly down. However, if I do it in short bursts a week here, and week there i don't find that the side affects are as bad, but you definetly need some sort of down time from a week like that, because if you don't you'll wind up like those guys at EA
I love to deploy my packages
What?
Canada invaded Iraq? Holy shit I must be getting my news from the wrong source.
Great White North == Canada... it's in the north, it's big and usually snow covered.
That's like mistaking the "island" for Germany or something. Christ almighty people watch some movies already and learn some culture!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That's why we hire h1-b visa holders.
Yes, they can.
How about that!!! Programmers are being GROSSLY exploited, and they just think it's macho... Ironically enough, it were the same business practices that prompted Karl Marx to write The Communist Manifesto. And people bash liberals, huh? F*** EA. Think I'll go pirate one of their games.
burnout is worse than the burning out period
dms0
You should feel guilty if your just watching - ATR
Yes, you sober dorks or you dorks who only drink alcohol, let me tell you: AMPHETAMINES ARE UR FRIEDNS. Get over the fucking stereotype and learn when to use them and when not to. Sometimes, drugs _can_ let you write more or better code, and when you need to pump out that month's worth of coding in a week, you just might be the better for it.
Idiot
Studies show conclusively that lack of sleep is detrimental to problem solving. Even more important, sleep HELPS problem solving. You brain will actually work out issue in your sleep. Which is why "sleeping" on the problem is actually a legitimate problem solving skill.
When I've done more than 60 hour weeks, I'm not just tired, I'm in physical pain. To keep working, I then have to take something for that pain, and the longer I work, the more powerful a something I have to take. At the end of an 80 hour week, I'm a percocet-powered zombie, just trying to make deadline. I'm making mistakes and not only have to correct them later, but answer the e-mails of the customers affected by them.
I'm not just tired. I'm having to dope myself up so much for the pain that I legally shouldn't operate any heavy machinery.
If you're 25, you can do this Bataan death march. But if you're over 30 and doing 80 hour weeks with no end in sight, you need to reconsider your career choice, because it's not just going to make you tired, it will mess with your back and joints until you're an old man before your time.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Important for me is to get my sleep. If I'm working long enough that I can't get close to 8 hours, my useful working time goes down rapidly. Next most important is to get at least a couple of hours away doing something else - a game, movie, book etc. By the time you add your travel time, eating, etc you have 12 hours max useful work time.
It's pathetic that EA can't get their asses sued off for treating people like this (and have to pay big time compensation). This, in the sue happy States where you can sue oh so easily for other things...
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
Absolutely
Intelligent healthy young people can spend most of their waking hours doing simple tasks which do not require exceptional creativity. The deffinition of work which can be accomplished in a sixty hour working week is therefore non creative and repetitive.
If you are working sixty hours plus a week, then you are not doing work which taxes your mind and you are wasting your talents. Of course its on offer and does pay the bills and therefore is not neccessarily a bad thing from a financial point of view. However it is bad for your physical, mental, spititual and social health.
Variety is the spice of life, all work and no play makes jack a dull boy, addicts do not make good friends - I can think of no aphorisms which praise spending excessive time doing the same thing. Why do you think Archimedies is reputed to have discovered the law of displacement of water being equal to the weight of a floating body in the bath - most insights are generated when you walk away from the task and see the whole picture whilst your mind idles. Maybe your job is so simple that your not even thinking about it half of the time and you can solve the interesting problems whilst "working" - in which case a machine should be doing that "work". Thats how the industrial revolution changed the world of "work" and its comming to the world of software real soon now.
If sucess is just a question of working more hours then beware, because half the world is underemployed and they are a lot cheaper than you.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Deminishing returns isn't really the case, as you work longer and longer the returns get exponentially worse until the point where you go insane though sleep deprevation.
:)
People in this world are pushing themselves to hard to get ahead, sacrificing yourself for your job isn't a good idea, work hard, but don't over-work, play hard, but don't over-play, live a balanced live, live a long and happy life, don't work 80 hours a week stress out when it all goes horridly wrong and jump off the side of the building because you can't face the hell that youve made for yourself
I'm sitting at work now (6:15 pm) and winding down. The last few weeks I've worked 12 hours a day for 5 days plus being on call at night and weekends. Working a lot of hours can cause you to make mistakes while coding. Also getting near to a software release and having management through a bunch of new features and changing the way lot of functions work is even worse than working long hours. I don't have a have a problem normally making show stopping mistakes but some of my coworkers do make a lot of mistakes when working 60+ hour weeks.
in the Valley, for your half a million shed.
Personally, I'd say I can be effective for somewhere between 10 and 12 hours per day. Anything over that and I'm running the risk of screwing up. In my experience, coding for 80 hours in a week may put you 20 hours ahead on Monday, or it may set you back another 20 hours, leaving you with only 40 hours worth of good work.
Know your limit. When you reach your limit, go home, get some food, get some exercise, get some sleep.
I've worked for a while in "top" law firms experimented with long hours.
1) The first lesson is that people lie. Those that tell you that they spend 70+ hours at work are really speaking about 40-50. They may have done a few days like that, but it's nothing representative. People exagerate, it's human...
2) You need regular sleep. In my case it's 7h a day, add 3h to get to and from work, and get into sleeping conditions, you have 14h left for your day. That's 70 hours of face time (not work time) in five days. At most. Law firms will buy you dinner if you work late at the office, so it's possible to squeeze an hour a day into that (that's still 75h max).
3) So how to you reach 80+? Sleep less. That will help you do some additional work, but only as long as your body will handle it. In my case, I lose a lot of efficiency after 48h lacking sleep. So unless it's for a short burst, it's not worth it.
4) You can add some time in by working Sundays. You sleep your Saturday off, and come to work at 10 am the next morning. It actually works quite well.
5) I would say that 1) is also the conclusion. Pulling in 60 hours on a normal basis is hard to achieve. 80 is impossible.
I done two stints for Microsoft as a temp, totalling just under 1 year. Yeah, they treat their people pretty well. I might add that this was on Help Desk, not development.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
An interesting footnote on this whole "hours of time coding" issue...
The world's largest privately held software company is a company called SAS in North Carolina. Their software is basically an environment for doing statistical analysis. Regression, multiple regression, correlation, wilcoxon rank tests, and a slew of other things I haven't got to yet. But the important part is, if you were going to do a study to figure out the "optimal" amount of time to work, and consider not just productivity from the programmer, but all sorts of correlated variables (will someone work 80 hours/week for 10 years? How much will it cost to recruit and train a newbie when someone burns out?) then you would probably use a program like SAS to analyze the data. This is a company that has plenty of computer science and statistics Ph.D.'s on staff.
Their conclusion? 35 hours per week. Keeps the productivity high, the turn over low, and the company growing at double digit rates nearly every year (or maybe it has been every year).
Something to think about during your next interview cycle.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Well, for one thing you could be coding the software that drives medical hardware, and you could have a bug that kills hundreds before they even realize it.
Gizza Job :-)
Yeah my med school mates always mention the long hours they work and the [in my opinion completely insane] 24 hour on - 24 hour off rostering system.
Perhaps they are worked so hard because doctors are in short supply?
Why are doctors in short supply? I think it's because they are allowed to regulate their own industry by having too much control over the training process and artificially restricting the number of students allowed into med courses. Why not lower the entrance mark/grade etc for medicine? I don't mean lower the standard of graduating students, just give more students a shot at the course. If they don't make it through the course then that's fine, they've payed for their education and they lost, it happens all the time in other subjects. With more students the quality and number of doctors will actually INCREASE! And that's win-win for everyone except the existing doctors who find themselves in a more open market and would have to lower prices or raise their standards to compete, etc...
[/rant]
We were the company that coined the term Internet Time. How did we do it, by sleeping at the office and working close to 120 hours a week. Was it healthy? No. Was it smart? Probably not. Did we produce a good product? You tell me. We wrote Netscape Navigator 1.0 in less than 6 months time. (Please don't confuse it with Navigator 3 & 4, which was a very different team) But there was a catch. We had all written a browser before. We were not trying to dream up a new product completely from scratch. We had a good idea from the start of what we wanted to build. Those set of circumstances don't happen very often. If I was tasked with building a new product that had never been attempted before, I would never try and work that many hours. Good design does not coexist well with exhaustion. There are plenty of other reasons not to work crazy hours as well, one of them is "having a life"... :lou
I think this industry has fallen into a sad state when coders are actually taking uppers to get themselves "up" enough to finish the workload that is being expected of them. The day I consider pumping that kind of garbage into my system to meet a deadline is the day I walk out the door and look for another job, or possibly another career.
I think it is a matter of how those 80 hours are being burned. If you sit at your computer desk and work those hours all the way through for the whole 16 hour day, then yes, your performance will degrade even within the first day, let alone towards the end of the week.
It probably becomes a matter of cycling. How many hours are you overheating as opposed to working at optimal levels?
For me, I can chug at the desk for almost 16 hours straight. Take 5 minutes every 4-6 hours for a restroom break and to get something to drink and you're set.
However, that isn't optimal. I wouldn't be able to, nor would I want to, do that for a whole week. I would burn out and then need to go offline for a few days.
If you take that same 16 hours per day and break it up into 3 hour work windows, you have 3 hours of work, 30 minutes to 1 hour of kick-back, and then three hours of work. Granted, you lose out on four hours of actual work, but you are able to partially "reset" your mental state every three hours.
That allows you to clear your palate, so to speak, so that you can prevent yourself from going into a burn-out mode of working. You work three hours on the code, go splash yourself, get some snacks, and maybe catch a 30 minute cartoon or game and hit the code again.
Better yet, you do the three hours, and during your 1 hour break, you look over other bits of code, references, sketch outlines, and physically and mentally shift gears before going back into the work mode.
The other end of it is that you do need to crash.
Working 16 hours a day, assuming you get a full 8 hours of sleep, leaves you with no time to eat dinner or breakfast. That means the normal "breakfast", work, "dinner", sleep routine doesn't work. You would need to keep yourself fed throughout the day, in order to get your 8 hours as well as getting your 16 hours.
The problem with people who pull the 16 hours is that they then go and pursue other activities after that. This results in a lowering of their nightly sleep and a progressively more draining day. End result? Constant tiredness, more caffeine, and degradation in work quality.
In both cases, you're getting your 80 hour week, but in one case, you are actually getting more quality work out of it rather than shoddy work which will require time and effort to debug and fix.
If you work 80 hours that week, but need to spend the next week correcting the errors and bugs, you really haven't gained as much as you thought you did.
If a company was serious about pulling 16 hour days for their employees, they should really think about on-site housing, exercise programs, and time management/stress relief schedules. The longer you need people to work, the more you need to ensure that they are in top shape and form to do that work for those kinds of hours.
Winged Power Photography
Although I would agree with the overall message that comes through your post, it's obviously strongly "romanced." That's your style apparently, as shown by the discrepancy between the title and actual content of your thread. You would have far more impact if you told the truth.
My first job lasted 18 months. In that time I averaged 65 hours a week with a peak of over 85, and a number of 80 hours weeks. I left after the owner/boss wouldn't agree during a heated argument that we needed another programmer -- he actually said to me (at the end of another 80 hour week) that he believed people were at there best under pressure. There's some truth in that, but it's definitely the opposite beyond some point.
The longest single day was from 9:00am Friday morning through the day and night (chinese takeaway dinner was provided -- the least they could do), through the next morning. Around 6am I said I was going home to have a shower and breakfast and got a whole lot of crap about the project having to be finished by Sunday.
The code was often buggy -- not serious bugs, but it sucks when you spend hours looking for a silly mistake someone made because they weren't concentrating properly (not their fault really, after caffiene has stopped helping out). I messed up royally myself one time, attempting to copy the artists files from his computer to a floppy (no network at that place) and doing a del *.* in the source folder rather than on the floppy. He lost about 30 hours work but had enough stuff in the clipboard that it only took 10 hours to reproduce.
The bottom line -- long hours and intense pressure work sometimes, but the risk of mistakes is greater and if you try to do it for long you will burn out.
When I'm too tired, I start using = instead of == . Then later when debugging the obvious problems that arise out of that kind of mistake, if I'm tired, I won't see that newbie mistake until after I've wasted much time...
BTW, you bash USA for Iraq in your sig. How's the ivory coast this time of year?
How does Ivory Coast compare to Iraq?
The French are in the Ivory Coast with mandates from the UN and the African Union.
Awesome, I know a few bosses who could use some quality time with a noose.
BTW, was the company Anderson?
Is it just me? Am I a wimp?
Meh.
I wonder how much social expectations and a person's internal clock come into play. If it was expected that you worked 60 hours, would there be a decline after 50 hours? When you work 50 hours, subconsciously, you might be taking that as a full day of work over what's expected by society. I know when I was younger, anything or 6 was long. Now, 6 hours means I'm halfway done.
Also if you adjust a person's internal clock, light, or sleep cycle, how long can you get productive work out of them. Remember how the Mars mission worked on Mars time and how people in higher lattitudes don't have the "normal" light cycle.
I've found that obscenely long work periods can be accomplished with the help of short (20 minute) naps throughout the day.
Key, I think, is to differentiate between actual programming, and solving the problems you run into while programming. Just "going at it" isn't a terribly good problem solving approach.
Work 15 hours for 6 days, and take 1-3 short naps throughout the day in addition to your 8 or so hours of sleep. Even if you can't/don't sleep, just try and meditate - clear your mind of all distractions. It's odd how it works, but your brain will use the "idle clock cycles" and solve the problems - or at least give you comprehension of them to some degree - you were unable to solve in your waking hours. In this case, a 20 minute nap is much more efficient than 20 minutes of hair-pulling, and possibly even more useful than 20 minutes of 'productive' rested work.
Another approach I've heard others have taken, and I've tried, is to sleep for 1.5 - 3 hours at a time throughout the day - however long your personal REM cycle is - and forgo sleeping at "night". Night is a novel concept that applies to other fields that need differentiation between light and day hours. Programmers do not, as we work by display light either way.
Anyway, I've heard that one benefit of this approach is that you're able to sleep the minimal amount required by your body and don't waste time "between REM cylces". You sleep for 2 hours, and will naturally wake up after the cylce. When you get tired, your body will quickly tell you, as you'll go from chipper to exhausted in the matter of minutes. This probably isn't too healthy long-term, as I heard it depletes a chemical compound in the body that is gained by sleeping longer periods (and is needed). My recollection is sketchy, though - google for specifics.
I've tried this approach for two weeks during a summer once. It takes a week or so to get into the swing, but it's incredibly nice once you're into the cylce, as you'll wake refreshed almost every time; for me, waking refreshed is as common as... well, it's not. It just doesn't happen. So I was quite happy.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work - at all - if you've got a family or other people that rely on you holding a schedule that's consistent with theirs'.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
There are good ones around, but they seem to be fewer and fewer in number.
Contemplate the fact that more and more software is being done like this, and be afraid, very afraid. The next time you get on a commercial airline flight, imagine that the software for their in-flight systems might have been produced that way. If you used an electronic voting machine, think about the fact that the software for the machine you used was probably produced that way.
Is this sustainable? Of course not. But the folks making these kinds of decisions figure they'll have their bonus and be long gone before anyone has to pay the consequences.
-- The pinhead celt
Last year I was doing consulting. My company asked me to work 50 hours, then 60 and slowly it became 80+ hours a week. Life deteriorated and so did productivity and quality. However because of delays and all, the client was not happy unless we work 80+ hours a week.
All that stopped after I had an accident. My company walked away from it as it was not on the job (even though it happenned inside corporate apartment) and my boss etc. Great industry, I wish we had unions!
Does something have to be done to break the hold of sweatshop like conditions, even if the pay is "reasonable"? I think back the the arguments made back in the beginning of the 20th century, and wonder how that experience would apply here.
Note that at that time, a major dis-incentive to unionizing was that there always another body out there willing to work under those horrid conditions. But reform happened over time.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've got no doubt at all that his death was 90%+ due to overwork, possibly exacerbated by my taking a somewhat defiant stance in public several days earlier.
I don't know, what do you think? Did he ever think of that?
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Physically there is a mental exhaustion limit, and no matter how much caffiene or other substances you pump into your body, your brain will just quit.
Sure, you can work for 80 hours a week. However, during that time your brain is burning chemicals. Sleep is required to regenerate the loss. Sleep deprivation/mental over-work is similar to any other mind altering state. You think you're doing fine and being just as productive, however in reality your performance gets worse and worse. And yes, when your brain reaches its limit IT WILL SHUT YOU DOWN! Passing out is usually the main result.
BTW, that's also not really good for the rest of your body, considering your brain is the regulator.
Doing long hours for short durations aren't bad. But the longer the period of time, the more self -defeating it becomes.
~X~
~X~
Many contractors/consultants work at their pace, whereby 1 hour of continuous work is done against 4-8 hours of relaxation, taking a break, whatever. Try working on any problem for more than several hours straight and the quality of your work falls exponentially.
Hours are quoted by consultants as a way to measure the cost of work, not that he'd be spending exactly that many hours of work, its far too difficult to anticipate the time needed. So the work worth a consultants 80 hours, will require 20 hours of work with many continuous breaks if it is to run within the warranty period without a major crash.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I interviewed for a job with a tax software company that told me they expected all developers to work 60-80+ hour weeks pretty much from mid-November to mid-January (every year) in order to get all the final changes in their tax software. Given the comments throughout this discussion, I'm now very worried about the quality of tax preparation software -- with that kind of work load, one should assume it is full of errors and bugs. Either that, or there are people who can work that kind of hours -- even during the most hectic time of the year, no less.
Anyone with a family can't work 80 hours a week. No freaking way. A young guy without a family can pull this off when doing something he loves to do, like working on his dream project, but not sustainably. Maybe a couple of weeks.
Anyone saying that people can slave like that for months for even 100K a year is a bullshit artist. At the best, 80+ hour folks will show up, read slashdot for most of their day and then _maybe_ put in a couple of hours of coding. Why?
"There is no patch for stupid"
It was just after my wedding, and the client was putting such heavy pressure on me to ship that I only took four days off for my own wedding and didn't take a honeymoon, telling my wife that we'd have it after I was done with the product.
Well that was the biggest mistake of my career because the next invoice was for $23,000 for seven weeks of work, and the way I heard about the dot-com collapse was that the client called me up and said he couldn't pay because all his investors disappeared. Bastards. I sent first my attorney, and then a collection agency after them, but was advised by the collection agency's attorney that there was no point to suing them because they'd just declare bankrupcy.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Uh...so why not work 45 hours a week instead and get the benefit of 9 extra error-free productive hours? It beats pushing yourself through 80 hours and only getting 36 hours of productive work out of it....
If the code is well architected, then my return past 40 hours does not diminish so quickly. But chances are if they are asking you to work past 48 hours, your management lacks management abilities, and are askin you to make up for their shortcomings.
Something similar happens with piping design at times. For example, a big rush from management ("look busy") to do detail engineering before certified vendor drawings and specifications are received.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2004/10/ 27-errors.html
The article mentioned studies in the medical field and I was trying to point out how they differ. In the medical field, what they care about is whether or not people make a mistake at all, since it tends to be very bad no matter what the mistake is. By contrast, a whole lot of mistakes can come up in software development and still get solved before it ever leaves the house, meaning that the magnitude of the error and the time it will take to fix is much more relevant.
And this is why I don't go to the doctor unless I'm near death.
"...but if you're too tired to work properly, you're okay to DRIVE home?"
Driving home isn't rocket science.
"Derp de derp."
You're assuming he fixes his own bugs, and that his bugs don't cause problems for other people, thereby decreasing their productivity.
IANAMR but my wife is a resident and on a light month works just under 80 hours a week. On the books she always comes in under the legally required (finally) 80 hours a week.
Keep in mind she must go in two hours early to pre-round on the patients so that when she present the patients to the attendings on rounds she knows what she is talking about. And that she must finish all cases that are in progress and do follow up phone calls as well as dictate notes that has her leaving four hours later than scheduled.
On a tough rotation she works 4 AM to 9 PM six days a week. That is more than 100 hours in a week!!
I think this is ridiculous and absurd and all that but the hospital obviously feels that this type of slave labor is justified because the costs of lost revenue due to malpractice, etc does not exceed the cost of adding more residents.
And you thought 80 hours of programming were bad: try standing in surgery for six cases in a row for a total of eight hours with no breaks for food or excrement!
I am a practicing surgeon, and I can tell you that 12 hour days would be considered a vacation by residents, at least residents from my era (I was a resident in the late '80s).
During my residency, I was expected to be at the hospital by 6 AM. On my "off" days, I generally left at around 8 PM. On my "on" days, I worked all night, continuing into the next day, again leaving in the evening. Depending on my monthly assignment, I was on call either every other night or every third night. I generally got one day completely off every two months. My work week was rarely less than 100 hours and was sometimes as much as 140 hours.
Current regulations impose a weekly maximum of 80 hours for residents, which has been very difficult to comply with while providing continuous coverage for patients.
I'm not kidding.
David Bruce, M.D.
Tampa General Hospital and LifeLink Health Care Institute
I work your average 40 hr week and I still write crap code!
At least by using per capita GDP with a PPP exchange rate. How is per capita GDP using a PPP exchange rate a useful measure of productivity.
I have no idea how productive the French are, but how does per capita GDP tell us?
I would say a farmer in Ghana is a hell of a lot more productive than most everybody I know (almost all from industrialized countries, with per capita GDPs substantially higher than Ghana).
And the formula used to calculate the PPP obviously won't apply to everybody equally.
As an example, compare:
(1) The cost of food in different locations in some of the countries on that list. The cost of food can vary as much as 75% in the same supermarket chain from one area to another. Presumably, food, being a necessity, is factored into the PPP.
(2) Does the PPP factor in the cost of a car, which is considered a necessity by many? That's nice. I don't need a car.
(3) Does the PPP factor in the cost of housing? Forget it. Housing costs vary substantially from one area to another. If it's factoring in the cost of housing, are they using average costs, median costs, etc?
(4) Does it factor in the cost of health care. How are health care costs calculated?
(5) Is the cost of primary or secondary education factored in? If so, how?
And you base that statement on a GDP pr. person figure?
Since the where talking about productive people the appropriate metric is usually defined as the quantity of output produced by a given quantity of labor input, in other words labor productivity.
According to the OECD numbers for 2003 French workers, where marginally more productive p.r. hour than those in the US, and quite significantly more productive than those in Japan and Germany.
If you look at total labor productivity, however US is slightly more productive, but only by working an average of 1815 hours/year, to the French 1545.
I would guess you're in a situation of working too many hours that you cannot get out of, and you are envious of the previous poster's situation. I am guessing you want out but seem stuck.
You have found the need to put the poster down personally proving you disagree with what he says. The difference between attacking the poster instead of his story tells me you don't want this type of story to be told. You are in an unfortunate situation. I don't envy you.
You will have a hard time getting the independence you want, until you see the truth in the previous story instead of fighting against it. By fighting against it you are helping to keep your self in an undesirable situation.
From your bitter comment, I don't expect to receive an answer -- what's better is no answer, but that you do some serious thinking instead. I hope you get things straightened out because it's never fun to be in a bad situation.
Whew! How do you feel now? :)
But Programmers are Humans also, and should have the right to spend time with family have fun etc.... :)
all work and no play makes jonny an programmer at EA (or Microsoft)
Come on, we do deserve some time away from this screen - It's time that Programmers were recognised for there creativity not just how many lines of code produced
I think we are analagous to Artists in many ways,
I have no problem getting out of bed at 3 in the morning cause I have an 'Idea' about something.
but put an artist in front of an blank page for 80 hours a week and see how much that art work gets sold for!
...the guys who appear to work harder are the ones always heard.
Bullshit. The guys who appear to work harder and kiss the boss' ass are the ones always heard. You can work all you want, but the guy kissing ass will always get ahead of you. I know, I've been there...
I have amstered the art of "driving by Braille". That's when you can doze off and drive by keeping the car on the reflective bumps in the road.
:)
Who says you can't multitask on the road?
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Actually, there has finally been some research completed recently that concludes: "The rate of serious medical errors committed by first-year doctors in training (interns) in two intensive care units (ICUs) at a Boston hospital fell significantly when traditional 30-hour-in-a-row extended work shifts were eliminated and when interns' continuous work schedule was limited to 16 hours". Press release here: http://www.ahrq.gov/news/press/pr2004/16hrintpr.ht m
After 60 hours, I find that life no longer holds any meaning. Everseen a CEO working 80 hrs per week?
It just took the bullet a while to get there. See they can only maintain this inhuman pace when the line "hey, there's 1000's of college students lined up for your job!" when there actually are. Now there are not. How many people here want to work for EA now? That's what I tought. The prestiege of working there has suddenly fallen off a cliff. No one wants to work 12-14 hours a day seven days a week without being paid extremely well. People want some sort of life, people want to have fun. Let's face it, no one on their death bed ever said "I wish I spent more time at the office!"
I worked in the game industry for a SHORT time. The team I was on pulled a 30 hour day before showing a demo to the publisher. Needless to say, much of the next week was spent cleaning up this mess. Speaking for myself and everyone I worked with, no good work gets done after the 12th hour at work.
word.
oooo, aren't you brilliant. Failures in rocket science don't result in nearly as many deaths as traffic accidents.
rewriting history since 2109
you just being honest, as apposed to people here saying that they code 60+ hours per week with no problem. whatever.
Meh.
Yeah, right.
...but usually at a cost.
I've worked >60 hour weeks many times. My all-time record is 119 hours (7 AM to 1 AM, 7 days straight with 30 minutes for lunch and 30 minutes for dinner). I wrote a microcode assembler from scratch during those 7 days.
I can do such long weeks for a stretch, but I need to either take a complete vacation or have extended down time at work afterwards.
FWIW
I've worked in the game industry; I was Technical Lead on IndyCar Racing II for Papyrus Design Group back in 1995/1996. When the Mac and Windows versions of ICR II went gold, we - as a team - pulled 40 straight hours to wrap it up. I read ea_spouse's blog, and it brought back memories, not all unpleasant. Of course, I think Papyrus treated us better than it sounds like EA treats their employees.
FWIW
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
so THIS is why EA games suck so badly...
VI VI VI The editor of the beast.
Just as a reference for newbies, this "* of the beast" thing is most likely a result of this 1997 sci.chem usenet folly.
I remember sitting through a review and one manager noted that a certain employee never stayed later than 5pm at work. I was a bit put off by his logic. If the guy puts in his work and happens to get in on time, that is no reason to dock him.
The U.S. military has tested hundreds of thousands of people to see what they can do after getting X number of hours sleep each night for Y number of days with X having values less than 6 (often down to 0) and Y often having values greater than 14. We are talking young, healthy people who have been screened for many medical conditions, who get lots of exercise and a healthy diet before beginning such tests, (and I specifically don't think anyone in their right mind would argue that the average coder can withstand more physical stress without risk of permanent health damage than long range recon, seals, or green berets).
Not only that, but in addition to simulated life or death situations, the military has seen the effects of sleep deprivation on a number of the realest of real life or death situations, some of which could also have profound bottom line impact on the whole institution,(so somehow I also don't think motivation is somehow higher for coders).
Any management team that expects positive results from 80 hour+ weeks for 6 weeks or more is expecting its people to outperform all those whimpy Airborne Rangers and such, and if they are really crazy enough to think that's possible, need to be encouraged to personally go tell some group of Huaah!~ types off. That should take care of the problem.
Who is John Cabal?
A friend of mine had this problem. In a small company, one of the vice presidents would scribble some horrible code and force the programming staff to use it as a foundation for a product. It was then her job to debug and rearchitect the whole thing to make it work. The catch was she had to do it in such a way that the guy still thought his stuff was useful.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I've done nothing but got up, eat some granola drink some espresso then code with espresso breaks for a good month.
Yeah, then someone added Fraggle Rock to the list (and then someone else killed it, while I was typing this)
I've actually run into this, only I wasn't working less hours (more hours), just a different time schedule.
:) I still worked more hours but others had the impression that I wasn't working as much.
.15 hrs away. If I didn't get in early commute was about 2 hrs and not worth it.
:) so he could almost come and go as he pleases.
I was coming in at 7:30-8am and the PHB and the "other guy" was coming in at 10am. If I left at 5pm and they left at 6pm (well the PHB left at 4:30 most of the time...
The commute was the problem. I live 1.15 hrs away from work and the "other guy" lived
Now I'm politically stuck leaving at 6pm or whenever the "other guy" leaves.
Oh, and if your wondering the "other guy" did work for the owner of the company (think millionaire
My only choice now is to find somewhere else to work and learn from my time here.
Most code is buggy feature packed hacks. Any most software geeks work 80 hour weeks. But no one cares because they want the features and deal with the bugs.
Besides if you only use the software in one way, over and over then you just test that one case until it works.
Steps to code
1. Hack features in
2. Test or bugs
3. Squash bugs
4. Goto 2 until there are none
Yes, If coding is a passion then you eat, sleep and dream coding/project.
I've done weeks of 80-90 hours and was only productive probably 65-70 of it. Now in extreme cases I've been able to be productive say 90% of these situations, but it takes a lot of caffiene and mental prep during that time, not just tapping on the keyboard.
In 90% of the cases that overtime for me arises, it's due to managers completely blowing my timelines out of the water or undercutting my estimates to meet a political goal. Excessive overtime is the product of managers that caused the dot-bomb issue to arise. The mentality is that if you're putting in 160 hours for a two week period you're working hard and showing your dedication. Which as we al know is complete horse hockey.
80+ hours a week is a walk in the park, due the miserable conditions canadians put to professional immigrants doing odd jobs and at miserable rates, people is forced to work 120+ hours a week to make a decent living with no luxuries (going to the movies for example).
And you whine for working too much at a good paid job with perks, you really are a bunch of cry babies.
more stories of exploitation in the 21st century.
http://www.canadaimmigrants.com
I have had projects where I was in the "zone" and sat in front of my computer cranking out code for 10+ hours with only eating/peeing/drinking breaks. Then there were times I couldn't get more than an hour or two of good programming done.
It all comes down to whether the noggin is working on task or if that brick wall has been hit. Obviously working 80 hours a week doesn't help the creative process unless one thrives in that kind of environment.
"Hard work never killed anyone." -- Some Dead Guy
They can quit, and if everything works out for them okay, they probably should, and probably do. But that's not to say that EA doesn't deserve criticism. Any shitty employer deserves criticism. Any shitty person deserves criticism.
Pretty much anything that's shitty deserves as much criticism as we in 40 hours/week can dish.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
I can't speak for others - but I certainly can't code that much.
I've been going to school and working at the same time for the last four years, and let me tell you -- it's hell.
You'd come in to work, program for X hours, then go to school and come home. Then you'd have to do homework -- which is more coding.
My work was fairly easy -- scripting. School by comparisson is also fairly easy. But combined I'd do crazy crazy hours of coding (even though it's simple). Add to that the fact that there's math, english and all the other fun stuff.
Anyway, fast forward to now. I'm pretty burned out after four years of this. My work code sorta sucks, my school code is barely average. Did I mention I'm burned out? It takes me 10 times the normal amount of time to write a project for school (I've quit my my job to concentrate on my last year of school).
So - my code sucks, I'm burned out and totaly NOT enthusiastic about going back into the industry, my average sucks and I'm tired all the time.
I love coding, but I'm definitely not going anywhere where there's a > 40/50 work week. I used to not see my friends for weeks, not spend any time relaxing, work work work. That sucks. Coming out with no student loan and some cash saved up is nice. What is the point though, I don't have anywhere to spend it at..
Thats nothin! We have found that with sleep deprivation (min. of 72 hrs w/out sleep), a little herbal help, and lots of coffee spiked with tons of sugar that our workflow increased dramatically after we hit the 4 day wall. Of course we were working on our 'million dollar idea' that was going to reduce actual work time once we got the product out of the boxand used it for clients.
The problem with this is that I like my job, work reasonalbe hours, and make a decent salary. I've gotten good raises both years that I've worked there, and the company is doing quite well. The work is interesting and I like the job, so I don't feel that it's worth resigning just because I don't get along with one coworker.
That's such BS. I worked for a French/English company in the 90s (from the US office) and I spent several weeks a year working at the Paris office.
Typical programmer hours started about 9:00AM and people started leaving around 6:00PM, but the office didn't really empty until about 8:00PM. Lunch was paid for by the company, so we ate in the office most of the time.
We did get 4 weeks vacation....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
If you're a game studio, and you demand sane milestones, the publishing house won't sign the contract. And that means you don't even get into the buffet line, let alone eat.
And this is CRAZY. The system is just going to break itself. Actually it probably won't. It will just ship overseas to cheaper wages. This is something that is happening in the US economy that is frankly unsustainable. It already happened to manufacturing. Retailers (walmart, target, best buy) drove prices down and down. If suppliers could make a profit at the price point the retailers set too bad for them. This has driven most manufacturing overseas. The same thing happens with video games. (and movies, and tv production, and call centers and everything else) The publishers want to make profits. If the studios can't also make a profit they are screwed.
Basically companies are driven very hard to make huge profits and they do what it takes to achieve that goal. If it fucks everyone else in the process, too bad.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Heh. Been there too, man. I was an electrician working on the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas during the two weeks before it opened. We were still pulling wire the night before the grand opening, and we'd been working 16 to 20 hours a day all that last week, and many of us worked 36 hours straight the last two days. I tell 'ya, we were making really bad mistakes left and right. One thing about electrical errors, they're a lot easier to find than programming bugs. You just look for the smoke coming out of the fluorescent ballasts and then check which circuit got piped into the 277V panel instead of the 120V one. The only good part was getting paid triple-time at union scale.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I totally agree! I don't see why anybody would want to work more than say 45 hour per week. It is just not worth it. If you were good enough to get the job you are at now, you probably won't have a problem finding a place to work that is fair. I have only ever worked for fair companies... at interviews one of my main questions to the employers is "how much overtime on average do your employees work". If the answer is not something I like, I walk out the door with a "fuck you".
Meh.
For me its around 20 hours a week. =)
John Susek
Well, in reality I've noticed that most of his work on Thursdays and especially Fridays is very buggy. Also, he rarely has to fix his own bugs. He tends to introduce bugs into other people's code by refusing to step back and understand the whole system when he's in a rush to get work done. Then, the bug appears to have been caused by the developer who normally maintains that section so that developer ends up fixing it. I don't feel that it's worth me and several other developers giving up one day a week just to fix the bugs that this guy can generate in two days. He's reducing several people's productivity, not just his own.
Yes, but how do I fix "When I click on the winged monkey god, the server crashes and the little bugs come out. OH MY GOD! THE LITTLE BUGS!"?
Don't forget, your notetaking skills (and your handwriting--I've been bitten by this) get worse when you're exhausted, too.
~Idarubicin
Ray? Is that really you? Remember? I was in the cubicle next to you! It's been a long time! How did you get through? Blablabla...
1. dumping out code without documentation and thinking at about 100lines/hour
:)
:)
2. very much thinking about design, proper documentation, and maybe 10lines/hour
both leads to an 80h sum, but I'm not sure if all people are talking about the same "coding" here
Anyway, sitting 80 hours/week in front of a PC and code is possible, if you don't have a personal live. I did it for a while, and it worked quite well. Than, girls, drugs, doom1-3, and you know...
right now I'm at about 100hrs per month, and that's a quite nice rate. Of course, no way to get rich (anymore)...
Bermuda and Cayman Islands are number 3 and 4... hmm, I wonder why.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
When it's time to plant, when it's time to harvest, you work 80 hours in four days.
After that, you may work 80 hours in a week, but it ain't the same job. Some of that is setting your line in the stream and readin' the backs o' yer eyelids. Some of it is fussin' with the harness or the plow blade (these days, on your back under the tractor, daydreaming). Some of it's teachin' yer kid how to plant (or fish, or drive the combine).
The problem with 80 hours a week in the office is that their ain't none of that in the office, especially the family. Fishing in the internet has limited use.
The best solutions do come when you walk away from a problem... Your conscious doesn't get in the way while the back of your mind works it over... For example, I'm in first year university computer programming. I'm good, because it's my passion... But I have to help out many people. Often the solutions I come up when helping them are more elegant than the ones I originally came up with... I think "Damn, why didn't I think of that before" Coding always needs at least 2 go's (not counting debugging) before it's beautiful efficient code.
Work hours and productivity was studied heavily during the WWII effort. It was generally found that maximum productivity decreases after 55 hours /r week. At that sustained rate, error rates climb. This can be lethal in a heavy production environment.
Those of us that do 60-80 hrs a week doing hard labour , building/maintaining/destroying/rebuilding your entire corporate world laugh in the general direction of whiney 'deskjob' peons. Yes , this is flamebait , but cmon.Don't complain , I don't. I moved 5 tons of frozen dirt today , with a pickaxe and a shovel and dammit I'm happy about it.... sure makes the beer's taste good. Signed , The steelworkers/concreteworkers/hard labour gang.
Maybe according to the "official" figures, because it's often illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, (I might be off on this, but it's what I've heard. I've also heard that working extra undocumented and unpaid (in the sense that you don't get a wage for them, but you'll quickly not be paid at all if you don't) time is quite frequent.
I don't read AC A human right
Push for quality ensurance measures like strong system and unit tests. It won't necessarily punish this programmer, but it might make his work more productive, and keep the rest of the team from the stressful and boring work of debugging someone else's code. Unit testing is not a hard sell to management, but it can be very hard to get individual programmers to actually participate.
why could the employees of ea seek to join a union?
80 hours a week looks like this:
Monday to Friday 14 hours
Saturday 10 hours
Sunday sleep all day / stare blankly into space.
Then you start again. Except that your one day of quasi-rest hasn't really left you feeling recharged. You don't bother eating well, because it's too much effor to cook. You don't spend time with your friends or family because you're too tired. And when you're not too tired, you're at work.
If anyone tried to do this with physical labour they'd quickly discover why there is a two day weekend traditionally: anything more is not a sustainable pace in the long term. Whipping the serfs harder just produced dead serfs.
The Japanese have a word for this: karoshi. It's a pretty disturbing phenomenon. My answer when I discovered myself falling into that pattern was to sign up at a gym, hire a personal trainer and book 3 days a week at 6:00 for workouts. That forces me out of the office no later than 5:30. And when I get home, things are a litte more in perspective. I make dinner, scratch the cat behind her ears, chat on the phone with friends, go to bed at a reasonable hour and actually sleep well. Then I go into work the next day feeling ready to take on the world and get a whole load of stuff done before lunch. I'm far more productive than I would be slogging away at the end of the day and then coming in the next morning already exhausted.
My job doesn't leave a lot of room for little mistakes. I work with large databases. Data moves through them at high rates, and we have demanding SLAs. Bend them and it costs thousands of dollars a minute as well as potential contracts. Break them and the company loose contracts, maybe goes bankrupt. There is not a lot of margin for error, very little room for mistake. It doesn't matter how important some VP thinks their pet project is. If it can't be done safely, it doesn't get done.
YMMV, but that's what works for me.
Well, then what to do depends on the situation at work. Here's a couple of possible paths to try, depending on what is accessable to you:
1) If you can get away with (as in no repercussions to you) not fixing his mistakes, don't do it. Make sure it's clearly documented who's mistakes they are, and leave him to flounder. It's likely that if it causes problems, management will eventually wake up to the fact that he's the problem. Just make sure you are covered and whon't be blamed for his faliures. If you will, it's not worth it.
2) Find out who the managers trust and have them help you out. There may not be anyone who's in a position where they are willing and able to help. but if there is, enlist their help. Explain the problem, and show it to them, and then ask them to bring it up with the managers. People are odd with trust and advice. You may be technicaly superior to give advice, but they'll take it from someone in another department that they personally trust.
3) If all else fails, fuck it, just ignore it. There are many stupidities where I work, the ones I can't control I just accept and ignore. Sounds like you like your job overall, so don't stress on it. Yes, I'm sure it means your team doesn't do things as efficiently and as high quality as possible, but really, it doesn't matter. Just live with it and do what you can.
I once worked for a fellow (calling him a manager would be a stretch, the guy (Hi Matthew!) had No Clue about leading people) who would bitch if I worked any less than 60 hrs/wk, and once committed to a deadline which meant I hammered in two consecutive 100 hour weeks. Then the silly sonofabitch dared tell me a few months later I "let him down" because I was two weeks late after taking two months to clean up code his crony had left in complete disarray. Holy Christ, I almost punched him. As it turns out, the place later went belly up in no small part because of silly-assed management like the above. Me, I found a better-paying gig and a whole ton of schadenfreude when Sony crushed them like a steamroller running over a box of baby chicks.
I've been in other similar situations, and Death Marches, without exception, occur because of poor planning. >60 hour weeks for more than ten days at a time is God's Way of telling you to start looking for another job because the current place will hit the crapper. Maybe not now, but soon, and after all your hard work you'll be flushed away by manglement scrambling to protect their asses and options.
Francois.
If you are overworked for extended periods of time, your overtime isn't just effected; all your time is effected, which is why you have negative returns. According to studies even small amounts of consistent overtime can lead to negative returns.
...has made me sleepy. Goodnight.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
So, just buy a nice suit and take a bath. Your boss' head will asplode with indecision.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I have no idea how you managed to do anything as creative as coding to any level of productivity over 2.5 days. When I worked for the school paper we had a switch to generator power for 72 hours due to construction. Long story about all the worries, but basically the result was I shuffeled some UPS's and agreed to be present for the whole time. Other than leaving for a shower at one point, I was.
Well with about 8 hours to go, I was just wrecked. I didn't realise it, but the editor did and ushered me to the meeting room and told me to sleep on the table (people did this more often than you might think). After a couple hours I was woken up for the eidtor board meeting, which I'm told I attended in so much that I was in my normal seat, then I stayed up for the switch back.
I had trouble even doing basic things like shutting down the servers correctly and bringing them back up. I'm not really sure what use I'd have been if an actual crisis had happened.
So my hat is off to you.
But what if management always see's this guy there at his desk and yourself as the one leaving early and coming in later?
So, if management sees that your work is always finished and you're asking for new stuff while he struggles to meet his deadlines while working 60hrs a week, how is that a problem. Do make a point of always being done early and asking for extra work when your workload drops to 30 hours a week.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
A long time ago I talked about this subject with my brother, at the time a pilot in the Strategic Air Command. I was working with a group of people who were acutely interested in precisely same question as the poster--is ther a point at which extra hours != additional useful code? As it happens, the question has been extensively studied, and answered, by the U.S. military.
There is a long-established relationship between the ability to handle abstraction (such as OOP) and the ability to do spatial reasoning. The U.S. Air Force, in the 1950s and 1960s, did a lot of research in the relationship between sleep deprivation and spatial reasoning--they were alarmed about the accident rate of aircrews after very long missions. If you're at the controls of a KC-10 tanker, a slight touch with your fingers will affect the rate at which the aircraft wheel bogies forty feet beneath you and a hundred feet back will descend to the ground. If you're sleepy and groggy, you're much more likely to misjudge your altitude or your rate of descent. Hit the runway a bit too hard, or a bit too early, and the landing gear can collapse--and you and your crew will disappear into a ball of flames.
The result? The Air Force instituted something called "mandatory crew rest"--you fly X hours, and you must get at least eight hours of sleep (in addition to debriefing, flight planning, etc.). No matter if there is a global crisis and you are rarin' to fly, if you haven't had your mandatory rest, you stay in your bunk until you do.
So what does that mean for us?
As I wrote above, there is a strong relationship between abstract reasoning and spatial reasoning. The U.S.A.F. has proved that sleep deprivation diminishes your ability to do spatial reasoning; ergo, sleep deprivation diminishes your ability to do abstract reasoning. Based on twenty-plus years in the business, that makes sense: time and again I've seen programmers try to pull all-nighters to finish up a project, only to fall further behind because they wrote gibberish all night long.
But wait, there's more...
Sleep deprivation isn't the only issue: dehydration will also affect your ability to do spatial reasoning (trivia fact: baseball batting averages are lower in the second half of a daytime doubleheader; because the players have been out in the hot sun, baking under dark-colored baseball caps. They get dehydrated, which limits their ability to hit a curveball.)
Bottom line:
Wanna be an effective project leader? Send people home at a reasonable time; provide bottled water or spring water; and discourage (or at least don't encourage) coffee or other caffeine-based sleep substitutes. Do not run a death march project in order to look macho; and be prepared to fend off the Guys in Ties who think a death march atmosphere is necessary.
Sigh--I'm drinking WAY too much coffee these days....
Hahaha u dumbshit. It's not about what's required. And no-one mentioned a job or a career or a deadline. I just said: drugs have their place. And they do. Ask any great artist.
The days of large new unions are over in America, for all practical purposes, unless all these braindead f*ckers wake up in time, which I seriously doubt. Our leaders sold us out starting decades ago, passing legislature that made it harder and harder to unionize here. Now the unions are dying, and it is quite hard to start a large new union.
You might be able to join an existing union (there are a couple around for computer geeks), but I think the current laws will make it hard to get a lot of coders/programmers into it. Ask John Miano, he may know--he has been trying to get a guild going for some time. Whether it is a union....?
Although ten years ago, I never would have ever dreamed of saying this, but there is no doubt that the countries with the highest unionization rates are the ones with the highest living standards.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I wish I worked were you worked.
The problem is not the boss but the bosses boss who makes the decisions on who to let go and promote. The one always seen at work is the one who is more committed and puts more hours.
I agree with you but many people do not think and or get jealous when they work 50-60 hours a week and see someone working 30-40 and think its not fair.
I couldn't agree more that working more doesn't mean getting more. I've been in work 8 of the last 10 weekends and average approx 60 hr weeks for a past couple months. I can't get jack done for the project anymore... after a few hours at work I can't even see straight (my eye has developed a twitch). Forget coming up with creative ideas, I have a tough time even remembering what I was doing 3 minutes ago. At the end of the day I sit back see that what I've done I probably could have done in half the time if I was motivated and had a clear head. Yet, my uppers push me into coming in a working more hours (even over Thanksgiving this year). When the preoject started I was quite interested in it, now I have absolutlty zero interest in it, and could really care less if it gets done... all I want is to move onto something without a strict dealine like this. Working hard gets things done... overworking just mangles and distorts things to a state where they are better off having never been started.
Hey, this is really interesting information. Not to sound contrarian, but do you have a source for this? Online would be nice, but I'm willing to purchase it if need be. It would go a long way toward silencing some dumbasses that I know.
I think what he means is that his code is for his own use, to further his research. If it's fast, stable and easy to maintain, it amkes things easier. If it's a peice of shit that gives incorrect results, it makes things harder.
Also good researchers actually care about the shit they are researching. They want to learn more abut whatever it is they are studying.
His point is that in the commercial world, others have to deal with your mistakes. You fuck soemthing up, the end user deals with the problem. In research you deal with it. YOu fuck something up and the data is wrong, you've only screwed yourself.
I've worked 80-hour weeks and it was productive work. Sure, screw-ups are more frequent when working 80-hour weeks than 40-hour weeks. But if you can judge your own condition and act accordingly then it can be not too bad. When I feel tired I try to switch more to testing (including writing simple test apps for the main product), tidying up code, UI improvements, answering emails.
Other things scared me much more than buggy code though. Such work wears you down. After I worked 60-80 hour weeks for many months I clearly saw that my reaction time went up when driving even in the morning. Cars nearby went unnoticed by me for way too long. I was also more irritated and impatient at home too.
So I think you can work crazy hours and be productive but this can be dangerous (in different ways).
"Does anyone have any recommendations on how to present something like this to management in a convincing manner?"
To be honest, I feel sorry for him. He's putting in a lot of hours and work to keep up with what comes naturally to others.
But then you said he was a lead programmer rather than a normal programmer, so fair enough.
But does management really see that?
In my experience when a fuckup happens they demand to your boss on is it the (insert person who works the least hours) fault? Of if a deadline can not be pushed up they look at you as the reason since you do nto work as much as the other guy.
http://saveie6.com/
I make more than that and I work 40 hour weeks.
But how can a manager under time pressure from above resist the temptation to 'solve' problems by increasing hours? Unfortunately, there aren't any good solutions, and increasing hours in the short term does work, which reinforces the bad managerial behavior. Worse, intermittent reinforcement (occassionally, increasing hours is effective) is the most powerful kind of reinforcement (see any number of behavioral psychology studies).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It doesn't hurt that they have a near lock on the statistical software market and charge punitive licensing fees.
Ah the sweet joys of monopoly! :)
This kind of scientific study will lead to companies paying their programmers less, based on the prescribed 'findings.' Everyone is different, you may be able to generate buggy code at 60 hours/week , and the next guy or girl may be able to stay solid at 90. This kind of news and study are dangerous to the programming field
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
Yes, you can while you are young. My drive to do that burned out about 52, which is longer than most can do it. At 55, my whole being seemed to slow down, and back-to-back 12 hours days had me dragging just to get thru the rest of the week at 8/day. At 58, forget it.
If you don't have your own business, and you are not going to get rich from it, ask yourself how you are going to justify making someone ELSE rich with YOUR life blood. No amount of money on earth will by you even one nanosecond of that time back, and no one guarantees you that you will see even the end of today! If you are doing this when you have kids and wife at home, I don't care how "cool" they are, or how much they are busting it, you should be ashamed of yourself.
If they jumped of bridges, would YOU do it?!
There are alot of texts out there with studies on what can save money for the company. This is how to grab thier attention. They like to see the all-mighty dollar.
For this topic I recommend This study, as well as this one they seemed to help my former boss understand. And for planning time I recommend Code Complete so you can show them that not "coding" right away actually is a good thing.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Is that they are pulling 80-hr work weeks, not 80 hours of pure coding. Those guys are probably going thru useless meetings hell and reporting to six different bosses.
I did the 60+ hr week for about 10 months in 2000 and it totally burned me out. Did I pull 60 hrs of programming a week? Hell no! If I was lucky I may have coded for 20 to 30 hours, the rest was wasted dealing with customers and administrative b/s.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I gather from your comment and your linked website, you think canada is exploiting immigrants because of racism. I doubt it. Immigrants are probably exploited in Canada (as in America) because they ARE exploitable. They are vulnerable. This is what America is all about. America celebrates the basest urges and drives of mankind. We CELEBRATE them! And Canada is learning from us. It is a very old story. The outsider is exploited, enslaved, raped, etc whenever they are vulnerable. If they are outsiders and look different, well, that just makes it easy. Same thing goes on at jobsites all over the world.
Check out a movie called Dogville. You can get it on p2p if you look around.
When the waves of workplace reforms and social safety net reforms swept over the Americas and Europe, western civilization thought it had swept aside mankind's brutish past once and for all. We even allowed ourselves to dream of a spiffy Jetsonesque future, replete with flying cars and so very much leisure time. What will we do with all our leisure time, magazines and pundits asked in the 50s and 60s. And 45 years later, the future did not turn quite that way....
Why not? Delve into the genesis of an particularly evil branch of the dismal science known as "neoliberalism," at the University of Chicago. It was adopted by the zillionaires and the megaCorps and we are now in its death grip.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
And Tom, if you can't recognize THAT as a troll, then it is REALLY time to stop posting
EA Controversy + Latest quality of EA Games = explanation for their crappiness
There were two guys sitting side by side. One would arrive after 9 and leave at 5. A lot of the day he stared out the window. The guy next to him worked huge hours and was always busy.
Comes profit share time (bonuses) the guy staring out the window got at least 3 time the other guy. Why? When he was staring out the window he figured out how to save the company $1,000,000. Effectiveness is not equal to busy, thinking is always better than useless activity.
In this context we are talking about how mistakes today will cost in time tomorrow. In this context, screwing up a computer program will cost more then a doctor screwing up in such a way that it causes death.
I worked at one place where the PHB wanted 70 hour weeks to appear to be "signed on." I started counting up the time spent during the crunch and measured 30+ hours of meetings per week. So even though we were slaving over a hot keyboard for hours and hours, we had the same amount of programming time that we would have had if the PHB could have shut his pie hole and let us work 40 hour weeks.
Yeah, I said it. Most major software packages are crap.
By "major", I don't mean an operating system or a webserver -- think in terms of SAP, Peoplesoft, Banner, etc.
There are other reasons (bloat from version x-3, mainframe legacy still in the app, would cost too much to rewrite major components, compatibility with other apps, big problems require complex solutions that don't easily integrate into all businesses) to explain why ERP's suck -- but compound the problem with overwork...
yuck.
I wish I worked were you worked.
I can't see why - upper manglement doesn't do much, nor do they care, so long as the project slogs forward. Being underworked sucks, though it does have its good points.
I agree with you but many people do not think and or get jealous when they work 50-60 hours a week and see someone working 30-40 and think its not fair.
I usually tell them that if they get really good, they can work as few hours as I do. Really, though, I don't care too much if they get pissed - I'll go get another job and point to my list of completed projects and valuable contributions outside of my job area as evidence of my skill.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
"I've coded, on average, 70 hours a week, for the last six years. This has been on my own project, which is coming along nicely (after about a dozen complete rewrites, language changes, and overhauls). "
Possibly, if you had worked saner hours, you wouldn't need to rewrite it, change the language and overhaul it by your own admission every 6 months.
You show a complete lack of foresight.
Perhaps you're even in the wrong field? No offense.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to present something like this to management in a convincing manner?
You can't. If the management actually knew enough about coding to realise that it's counterproductive they'd have done something about it.
They just love the idea of getting something for nothing - even if the something will ultimately cost more.
Experience has shown me that inevitably messengers will be shot. Tell the boss that his pet project's going to ship late - who gets the blame? The manager who came up with the impossible schedule? The salesman who kept hounding the development team to add new features that weren't in the spec? The programmers that kept quiet hoping that they'd catch up later or the one brave soul that put their hand up & told the truth?
Management (as in non-programmer management) do not have a clue what is or is not possible. Their not particularly mentally taxing job (and I've done the first half of an MBA so I know of what I speak...) may well be able to sustain long hours - 80 hours of sitting in meetings asking stupid questions & writing reports that extend a one paragraph obvious fact over 4 pages of cliche-ridden drivel is not impossible. 80 hours writing high quality code is impossible; especially over a sustained period. I've done all-nighters living on coffee and trust me, that 04:00hrs code is not worth keeping. You produce stuff, but of such low quality you'd be better of not doing it.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
1 depending on environment yes 80 hours is possible 2 drugs may be required 3 not sustainable with same crew/headcounts 4 may cause severe problems a quality goes down b crew failure possible c asset loss possible 5 You have a choice between two possibles a rotate the crew 80 20 b run the crew 60
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Something tells me Bermuda (#3), the Cayman Islands (#4), and San Marino (#5) make your point. Probably some of the others as well. Basically, "corporate tax shelter" != "productive state".
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I've done a 100 hour week followed by a 60 hour week to get over emergencies, but what happens right after is that you feel wasted and that your productivity drops to, say, 10 hours a week independently of how many hours you show up.
Long weeks on a project's startup can be good because the acceleration may produce a good amount of sinergy.
Long weeks over long periods of time are a sure symptom of an ill project.
Creative people, programmers included, need distraction and lots of sleep to be able to give their best.
Juanco
-- Juanco
This was a contract for Sun Microsystems in 1991. The HR people challenged the hours I billed, 24*7 that 168 Hrs. But I was in their PAL1 Building, and had been recorded by surveillance camera working for the180+ hrs straight to finish this rush project, so they had to paid me.
The code worked bug free, first try. It was brutal, drinking lot's a Coke-a-Cola's and jogging every so often helped, when the screen started spinning too much. No showers, and nothing but vending machine food.
It's called EmpCommVideo and my understanding is that it was still in use at Sun two years ago, and may still be.
I used to work like that all the time, not usualy for 7 days, but 3 days or more in a row was my norm. Then I'd crash for 2 or 3 days and go back and do it again. This was my usual mode when I was in my 20's.
Now in my late 30's I feel like I'm going to die after 40 hrs awake.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
I think there is a very important distinction to make in this case: code head written by a speed freak is quite different from a non-addict with a mild dose of amphetamine as a coding/study aid.
...but what the hell is the point of thise post? I guess it's: if you're ever starting some sort of rehab work program for ex-software developers addicted to various drugs to go with opium. :P
Though code written by a speed freak is indeed quite fucked in the brain. Code written by stoners isn't horrible, though the overall system designs is usually either ingenius or downright retarded. If I had to pick some drug for a coder to be addicted to, I think I'd pick orally administered opiates- especially if the poor schmuck had to work 50-80+ hours a week. Opium has a long history of being used by people who did more work than they'd like to in a week, while staying sane and relatively healthy. Drunks code like shit- both alcoholics and a non-alkie coding whilst drunk.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Having an the change to rest when you're tired, something which 9-to-5vers don't have, certainly helps to increase the number of productive hours in a day.
Having a quiet, private place in which you can reach "flow" quickly also helps with productivity. The time-slicing of meetings sparsed accross the day does the opposite.
Read "Peopleware", by De Marco and Lister. The recipe has been known for decades.
Juanco
-- Juanco
Karoshi - Japanese for Death from Overwork
Karoshi (...) (pronounced /karo:Si/), which can be translated quite
literally from the Japanese as death from overwork, is occupational sudden
death. The major medical causes of karoshi deaths are heart attack and
stroke due to stress.
The first case of karoshi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29-year-old married male worker in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company. It was not until the latter part of the 1980s, however, when several high-ranking business executives who were still in their prime years suddenly died without any previous sign of illness, that the media began picking up on what appeared to be a new phenomenon. This new phenomenon was quickly labelled karoshi, and once it had a name and its symptoms were described and popularized, it was immediately seen as a new and serious menace for people in the work force. In 1987, as public concern increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on karoshi.
Usually, Japan's rise from the devastation of World War II to economic prominence in the post-war decades has been regarded as the trigger for what has been called a new epidemic. It was recognized that employees cannot work for up to twelve hours a day six or seven days a week, year after year, without suffering physically as well as mentally.
Meanwhile, death-by-overwork lawsuits have been on the rise in Japan, with the deceased person's relatives demanding compensation payments. However, before compensation can be awarded, the labour inspection office must acknowledge that the death was work-related.
In Korea, where a Confucian-inspired work ethic involves much of the adult populace, both male and female, in a six-day workweek with long hours, this phenomenon is known as kwarosa (Hangul, [...]), a word derived from the same Chinese characters as its Japanese equivalent ([...], ka, being the Chinese character for exceed, [...], rou, for labor, and [...], shi, for death).
See also Google.
"I hope this gives pause to those who love to complain about long hours spent programming."
Or long haul truck drivers. Or airline pilots.
Coding 80 hours is beyond most humans, but I am sure Alan Cox is an exception, especially when he is in the dark! ;-)
In my 35 years of coding experience...
The folks at a place like EA are all in their lower 20's, and physically capable of amazing feats that you or I would only dream of.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
New laws on the Fed. level prevent resident doctors and doctors from working more than 80 hour weeks on a 4 week moving average. Old laws state that a doctor is only allowed to be on 24 hours, then cannot accept new paitents. Said doc must leave after 36 hours though.
Now with coding, while death is not a likely outcome for the paitent, rebooting works on computers, not many humans. Productivity obviouly suffers when the "employee" is too worn out to function properly.
Phil
Please don't mod as "redundant" find something more interesting to mod this down please.
Laugh, it's good for you!
Sorry Sprotch, not romanced at all. That's exactly what happened (well, the parts that were visible to me, that is).
Do you honestly think that no-one here would have a similar story? Nobody ever dies through overwork? Falls asleep in the car driving home at 3am, or gets pissed and jumps off a bridge?
Double the performance for twice the price.
After all, it's EA we're talking about, right?
> There are diminishing returns on labor as time increases. But the point is that there ARE indeed returns, even at hour 80.
This is nonsense. The problem is that every extra hour you work affects the productivity of all the other hours. If you work a 14 hour day, you are tired for all the next day. Yes you may get something done in the 14th hour, but the next day you get less done in all the hours.
If your theory was true, a person who worked 168 (24*7) hours a week would get more done than a person who works a 50 hour week. As anyone who has worked all night knows, on the second day without sleep you get virtually nothing useful done.
Now the problem is that the poor output is not really that big of a deal when nitpicking penies on a small scale. Though over all the company overworking it's employees is actually costing themselves extra, it does not apear that way when each person or team is looked at seperatly. Most developers are exempt (salary) employees, therefor the company is paying them x per year worked. If the company gets them to work more hours then the amount per our goes down, which makes it apear that you can get more for your dollar if you have less people work more hours. And it gets even worse if those making the decisions see each hour over forty as free. Making anything produced after hours as an infinite return on investment, so it doesn't mater how little is accomplished.
That's just my take on it, from experience on both sides of the fence.
The military has done research on sleep deprivation and critical task completion with compelling results. Although some of these tests are designed to see what happens when soldiers are expected to perform tasks under sleep-deprived conditions (http://www.tfhrc.gov/humanfac/sleep/sleepweb.htm) , the principle stands. An entire manual has been published to give guidance on sleep deprivation and suicide prevention, among other things. The military has consistently demonstrated that conditions of overwork and inadequate time off lead to poor performance, flawed decision-making and increased rates of suicide and interpersonal relational issues (for the interested, the manual is available here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159248302X/ webmill0c11-20/ref%3Dnosim/104-3212632-3606348), or free if you have an AKO account.
The universe is made of atoms and empty space. All else is speculation. --Democritus of Abdera, 435 BC
I know for a fact that Ion Storm produced code for more than 60 hours a week for a number of months. My uncle, Todd Porter, had contributed a lot to the coding, and he and the other three (Romero and so on) would suicide-code many times just to get the games tweaked the way they wanted them. It caused family problems sometimes...
But he's crazy.
I got nothin'.
jesus h. chriminey. I'm sure glad I work for a public institution, a University. Hell, I'm a civil servant and proud of it. Yes, I still code. I also do other desktop support. But it sure as hell beats working an 80 hour week! Hell, it beats working 60, or even 50!
I just got this job two months ago. For the 5 years before this, I've worked with the same group of folks in the same University library doing the same thing, but as a student worker. I still have my degree to finish, but one of the biggest perks of this whole civil servant thing is that my tuition is free now! That adds a healthy $8k/yr to my salary in equivalent dollaradoos.
I used to work 50 hours a week and go to school full time, which isn't as bad as 80 hours at your desk coding a week. I was on campus, either in class or at one of my 5 jobs for 70 hours a week, 8 AM - 10 PM Mon-Fri. I only rarely worked on the weekends. Though it was on the weekends I did homework, which if counted would add another 5-15 hours per weekend.
It fucking sucked. And you bet my marks sucked too. My brain didn't function well at all. After the days would start to really shorten in November (yay for Northern Minnesota!), I wouldn't see any sunlight during the week until March or so.
I can't help a chuckle escaping when someone asks me how I'm dealing with working "full-time" (= 40/week), figuring I'd never done more than a lot of college kids, that is, drinking beer, occasionally going to class and getting a lot of money from mum and da. I tell them: "it's like a vacation, but one I'm paid to take!"
So. The point of this post? Good question. Perhaps it is: don't do it. Go get another job. Like me, as a civil servant! Or just at somewhere that doesn't want to anal rape you. Or just some place that won't ask an anal rape of you more than once or twice a year.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Sorry, I don't watch much TV.
Where I grew up the "Great White North" meant anything north of the Mason-Dixon line. (As much as they hated slavery, they hated blacks moving north even more. At least that is what they taught in the red neck school I attended.)
I thought you were claiming to be a yankee... AKA North Jesusland.
Your claim sounded just like something someone from Jesusland would make.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
Something similar happens with piping design at times. For example, a big rush from management ("look busy") to do detail engineering before certified vendor drawings and specifications are received.
I work for one of the companies that your company likely sources components from (piping support manufacturer) and I have to say that from our end things look pretty similar--though in our case, it's not our management wanting engineering done before the proper data is received, it's our customers.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
don't you use source control?
How true.
Time to be a troll. You wonder why your jobs are being outsourced?
80-120 hour weeks are the norm, esp in the developing countries. I work sunday to friday. 16 hours a day. Mostly coding on opensource projects. I sleep 5-6 hours a day. On saturdays i sleep and party hard, its the one day off that keeps me sane. I dont understand why people have a problem with working more than 40 hours a week? I consider 80 hours of coding a easy week.
I do notice my level of mistakes goes up and my perforamnce goes down when my sleep level drops below 3 hours a day. As long as i get one meal a day and 4 or more hours sleep i am good to code.
I also notice that if i fail to take a saturday off for some reason (to much urgent work on etc) then my performance starts to suffer for the next week. I generally only can work 3-4 weeks in a row without a day off before things get thrustrating.
If you are so weak that you can't handle more than 40 hours a week i think you need to try harder. maybe take a few extra jobs up. Most people in the developing world would not consider only working 40 hours a day.
Look at the number of deaths per rocket flight vs the number of deaths per automobile trip.
Putz.
Expect employee turnaround to be VERY high, about 90 days on average.
Groups working on one task may help, till the collective thought process weakens. Then everyone goes home and sleeps, and start thinking about a new job.
These people have to be VERY motivated. Maybe they've been offered what they think is a BIG pot of gold at the end of the rainbow/project.
Well, there's not so much a distinction between those so much as they are two ends of a continuum. Speed isn't a replacement for sleep. A "non-addict" will code just as badly at hour 36 with no sleep as a "speed freak" will. A gak head who's had plenty of rest can code just as well as anyone other coder.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Provigil. Wonderful stuff, seriously. Can't get a proscription for it, shop overseas for modafinil. I used to dose up with effedrin+caffeine, but the rush was too much to bear usually. On this stuff, you can stay awake for days at a time while (amazingly) still feeling alert. The only problems I've noted is remembering to get up and flex every so often to avoid atrophy during those long coding sessions.
My company? I'm just a voice in the wilderness.
Without a competent stress engineer (they are expensive) and a good piping routing study guy working together on the original project for sensitive lines, everyone waffles and tends to dump responsibility downstream. I.E., to suppliers.
Hire me for some good insight.
Heh. That sounds like it sucks. They should just put it in a tricky comment and hope the schmuck doesn't notice. It's especially be easy to do this in Perl, where you could do one of those "make this a string until my secret code" things, put it in a string that is re-assigned/never used and voila! Hell, you could have this guy submitting snippets of SNOBOL or C++ or Java or similarily shitty languages (no offense to SNOBOL) long after you switched to Perl or whatever better language...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
As an argument for taking breaks: in general aviation there are placards that state: "God does not subtract from your life span the hours spent flying". So go and spend time on living.
I'm sure when the first major medical problem happens and there's a lawsuit because the working conditions of the employee were shown to be a contributing factor the company will rethink their policy.
1. Canada invaded Iraq? Holy shit I must be getting my news from the wrong source.
When did he say that? I mean, right after that he said: "That, or you are not from the U.S." It seems pretty straightforward to me that he was saying either you live in a country that invaded Iraq, or do not live in the US. True, yes?
2. BTW, you bash USA for Iraq in your sig. How's the ivory coast this time of year?
What does this mean? It seems like it's supposed to be some sort of dig or dis, but I don't follow. Are you talking about some other Ivory Coast that I don't know about, one that would make this statement make more sense? If so, please enlighten me. Are you implying he should move to Africa because he, a USian, didn't like that the Bush administration invaded Iraq?
3. I may come from the great white north but at least I'm not a hypocrite. My country doesn't start wars and I'm damn proud of it.
Another big point of confusion. When did this guy make any hypocritical statements about the war in Iraq? I mean, I'm a US citizen, and I did not vote for Bush, and if the war as it was proposed had been put up for referrendum I wouldn't have voted for it. But am I automatically a hypocrite because I am a US citizen? Believe me, if I were Canadian, I'd be proud of it too. I'm personally proud that I live in one of the bluest counties in this just-past election.
4. Great White North == Canada... it's in the north, it's big and usually snow covered.
I am not speaking for Phillup, but I've heard other folks talk up where I live- Northern Minnesota- as the "Great White North." Not everyone makes the assumption that the only place with snow in North America is Canada. Next time someone mentions it, I will do them and you a favor and ask them to refer to the north central region as the "Minor White North," or perhaps just "Kinda Kanada?"
As far as I can tell, your statements stemmed from Phill's sig, which reads:
What is so confusing about that? What is hypcritical? I'm very open minded- please do share with me how that one small statement, which makes sense to me, turned into
Poor Phill prolly tried to get information about you by clicking on your URL which just seems to point to one of those shitty generic search pages that promise "pictures of latin women models, russian brides to order - latin women - latina women - latin women photos", though he should've looked at your email addy for the biggest clue.
I mean, really man- what are you talking about? Please do reply. I'm not some minion of Phillup, I'm just curious what you're trying to communicate...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Rational working conditions, eh? How 'bout your ambulance drivers, who work 24-hour shifts, in which they are on duty for 24 hours straight? Is that who you want driving your ambulance when your heart breaks or your brain blows up or something? I don't think so!
Truckers have a limit: They can drive a max of 10 hours after which they must by law have 8 hours of rest. Airline pilots have limits. Train drivers (conductors?!????!?!!!) have limits. How come your cottonpickin' muthufuckin' ambulance drivers don't got no limits like that? It's a pain in the arse to be on duty for that many friggen hours and stuff, ese.
So some programmer complains that he's producin' buggy code after 50 straight hours at the keyboard??! OBVIOUSLY! The way I see it, overtime reduces the quality of an application and increases:
- Its cost, cuz you got more to pay for overtime, or at least for lights and computer and power and shit
- The time it takes to make the damn program, cuz you gotta debug it and shit
So it is more better to simply stop gorking after 40 hours, and work only 8 hours a day, and relax and drink beer and have sex and like do other shit and shit.To paraphrase Vernor Vinge, this is the land of a million lies. Maybe that story is true, maybe it isn't.
about your irony: IANAMD, but I *have* seen some articles about lyme's disease, in which it was mistaken for chronic stress disorder. Of course, getting properly diagnosed for lyme's disease isn't easy; and to be properly diagnosed or treated often involves finding a lyme's disease specialist. most people think you get it on walks in the woods. These days, you're more likely to pick it up in suburbia, because the infected deer ticks are more frequently carried by mice than by deer, and suburbia is an ideal mouse location.
What this guy is saying is bang on.
Tired people write shit code...
I get about 6 really productive hours and then I start to slow down quickly. And forget about the deathmarch thing. If I'm in everyday for a month I turn out pure crap and not too fast, either.
If you manage software development teams and are reading this take it to heart. Manage your projects intelligently so you don't face a big crunch at the end. deathmarch==lack of oversight
http://request-header.info
For short periods caffiene can take you a long way. I've managed to go almost 18 hours straight in my school holidays. A hit every couple hours is enough, if you don't do it often.
;)
I wouldn't recommend doing this often though
The people I know who think they can do it can't do it either.
Mod this guy up please!!!!!!
Excellent point. Lots of fools think they can produce good code when exhausted and the clean-up job afterwards is a bitch. Unfortunately that may be enough to make you meet some arbitrary management deadline so some managers (and sales people) are happy to force people to do this so the company can profit - usually at great expense to the customer.
The only time to do this sort of thing is when you're _forced_ to. I'm talking legislated deadline that means you will cease trading if you don't meet it. Even then it better be a short stint.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I did some rough calculations on the assumption that a person worked 36 weeks at 60 hours a week and 14 weeks at 100 hours a week (crunch time). Assuming the average programmer makes $66k. You end up making only 19-20 bucks an hour in wages. It's amazing that a person would be a game programmer working these kind of hours for this cheap pay. At my work I am earning a similar salary and work 40 hours a week.
Actually, it doesn't quite work like that. Exhaustion will affect all 80 hours, so you aren't going to get 40 hours at full production, etc. You get all 80 at the reduced rate. Prolonged death march projects produce a chronic state of mental fog.
What makes it worse is that software development does not scale in productivity like this. At a certain point, you actually begin to work in reverse, breaking working code and introducing bugs that nullify all of your work. In the early 90's I heard a statistic that said that something like 80% of all large software projects are "abandoned in disgust." That number sounds high, but we don't hear about the vast majority of the projects that go down like this. Shareholders get freaked out about them--and some of them happen in big shops like IBM.
These projects just can't make progress beyond a certain point. You can probably figure out why. The deadline slips. Hours are increased to make up. Brain rot occurs, and errors increase. More slippage, more hours, more errors. Accompany this cycle with the sound of a toilet flushing and you get the picture.
Variated work which includes a different kinds of efforts--social, physical, mental, etc--can be sustained longer. A few people can maintain hours like this on a single task indefinitely by sacrificing everything else--friends, family, hobbies, entertainment, personal hygiene, etc, etc. This is not a desirable habit, but a mental condition probably in need of clinical treatment, which will probably result in early death of nervous breakdown (and try not to be nearby when they snap--there may be collateral damage.) If you can't do it, it just means you're a normal human being.
Its all pretty much been said but this is a topic I know too well... ...if I'm managing other people, its like two jobs. 20 to 30 hours is programming and the rest is humans... ...if I'm programming, I have about five productive hours every day, really productive, flow state time when work happens. ...if I'm rested enough (minimum 8 hours a night no matter what) I can divide the productive time from rote tasks, and do the rote stuff when I'm beat. I won't touch hard problems past a certain level of pooped. ...if I'm on a crunch and having to maximize time on task, my dirunal pattern starts to slip. On six hours sleep, I'm worthless. The later I stay, the later I sleep. Never gotten around this...
Seriously, I got out of there a few years ago, haven't missed it at all. I picked up a 3,000 sqft house with a pool for 280,000. I get paid half as much but I have a much higher quality of life. Look around, the valley ain't shit. 6 figures and I lived in a shed, just like you're talking about. half that, and I live in a nice big house with my own pool on 1/2 acre.
86 the valley. The high pay don't mean shit if you don't look forward to going home at the end of the day.
I worked at a place where working more than 42 hours was a matter for the department director and more than 48 had to be approved by VP. Why? Because they had clear evidence that if you work more you produce shittier and shittier code, and that cost the company money. If there was some kind of situation that warranted OT they felt that the potential gain had to be weighed against the increased risk to the company and that descition was not to be taken by a lower manager.
This company produced mission critical software, but the effects are just as valid for any company. It does cost money to fix bugs, and if you can avoid stupid bugs created just because you had to play macho and work lots of hours the company saves plenty money.
I can handle 75 hours straight but anything after that is a bit dicey. 80 hours straight is nuts. I always need three hours of sleep and a four pack of Red Bulls after I pull 75 hours before I can pull another 75 hours. It's worth it because the company I work for pays time and a half for anything after 70 hours. That's a lot better than California's time and half after a hundred hours. It's been alot better too since we went on a four day week. I was getting pretty burned out on a five day week. It was getting kind of hard to remember what month it was. I can't wait for Christmas. I can really use that half day off.
Everybody around here ( a very large semi mfg ) uses the same answer when called on the carpet for writing crap and/or bogus code.
"I must have been smoking crack that day"
JimD. Soon to be ex-contractor.
Silicon validation of DRAM functionality can consist of a single W/R/V cycle when under pressure caused by an idiotic schedule, So I've heard.
Ah, so that's why Picasso put both eyes and both ears on one side of people's heads. Yes, I see the "place" they have.
Son, unless it's coffee, you shouldn't be altering your body's basic functions at work. Hacking your metabolism: Double Plus Ungood.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
I've done > 80 hours/week for the past 20 years. You have to be resilient and have a passion for code/problems, but that's about it.
Have I ever wasted a week? Lots of 'em. I look at the wasted weeks as recon, checking things out, looking for unexpected things, and the recoding as something unavoidable and inevitable.
If you had something more important or more interesting to do, you'd do it. If you don't, if you're going to get nagged whenever you go home, there's nothing better than coding and a case of diet pepsi.
Yep, certainly sounds like he took that into account. More than likely his boss was already in a very fragile mental state to begin with (single, only focus in life is work, overworked, exhausted)-not a good thing. Someone telling him "this is rediculous, and is in part due to bad planning" may have let to an irrational response. In a situation like this you really can't blame yourself unless you said "go jump off the roof", or something similar. His boss' mind was not functioning properly, and without prior experience you probably wouldn't be able to identify the danger signs until it is too late.
Their conclusion? 35 hours per week. Keeps the productivity high, the turn over low, and the company growing at double digit rates nearly every year (or maybe it has been every year).
Something to think about during your next interview cycle.
Something to think about when libertarians/conservatives claim Europe is hopelessly behind in competitiveness. We get the same amount done AND we have much more pleasant lives.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
These days, I test code for a living. I used to design code for a living, but really, how many times can you write "for (i = 0; i per line of additional testing and review can make it.
Oh, and I've turned in 100-hour weeks in my past life as a programmer, with no greater a bug rate than normal, but 2X to 5X the code of a 50-hour week.
You can't beat focus for increasing output produced to a consistent thesis.
And code, it turns out, is a lot like any other kind of writing. Come back to your own stuff six months later, and you probably won't even recognize it, and you probably can find several ways to change every function, method, class, structure, or combination thereof.
(LET'S TRY THIS AGAIN, JUST ONCE FOR IRONY...)
These days, I test code for a living. I used to design code for a living, but really, how many times can you write "for (i = 0; i < 80; i++)" before you realize your chromosomes are devolving?
Testing involves tons of coding, but it's coding that goes to the heart of computational theory and takes in all the nuances of intended and unintended and irrelevant effect.
In the process of testing code I discover that even the best software engineers, on their best days:
1) make design errors
2) fail to review their specifications for errors
2) code errors into their programs and insert new errors into code that is otherwise specified properly
4) forget what their own code does and use it incorrectly
5) ship it anyway unless some regulating authority demands otherwise
(yes, if you catch it, there's a joke in there)
Some software is bug-free, or as near as 5 hours per line of additional testing and review can make it.
Oh, and I've turned in 100-hour weeks in my past life as a programmer, with no greater a bug rate than normal, but 2X to 5X the code of a 50-hour week.
You can't beat focus for increasing output produced to a consistent thesis.
And code, it turns out, is a lot like any other kind of writing. Come back to your own stuff six months later, and you probably won't even recognize it, and you probably can find several ways to change every function, method, class, structure, or combination thereof.
Not sure about that. In today's economy I think managers love black-hole employees. That is people who suck up projects continuously. They never finish it, and if it's done... it's done totally half assed. But they keep saying "Yes Mr. Manager give me your projects." Eventually the manager gets promoted since his group now handles 200 agendas instead of 20. That's all management sees.
Here's a link google turned up, I dunno how reliable you consider the source though.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
First of all, people who say "I generate buggy code and debugging it only makes it buggier." are not unit testing. If you are not using cppunit (for c++) or junit (for java), then put down all your technical books and study unit testing. Make it a part of your development process. This will indirectly do many nice things for your code. Some examples are:
* if code that already works ever stops working you will know exactly what broke.
* you will end up with loose coupling. (go look it up of you dont know what im talking about.)
* unit tests provide examples for people learning your code. Documentation sometimes does not get updated, but the unit tests will always be correct.
* unit tests help improve your interfaces. (When you realize the hello world test of your interface was hard to write.)
* It's much easier to debug small tests, than to use the entire application for testing.
* you dont have to concentrate as much because unit testing causes you to divide problems into small managable peices.
* unit testing make porting much easier (for c++) because once you finish one platform, the goal is simply to make the tests work for the other platforms.
* you never have to wonder why the application works on one computer and not another. Just run the test suite on the failing computer.
* when a new guy gets hired to maitain your code, you dont have to worry about him #%&!ng it up, because you can just periodically run the test suite to check for breakage.
* you never have to stay late because of a mysterious bug that nobody can find.
* unit tests can help make your code reusable for other projects. If you can test a piece on its own, perhaps (depending on your skill) it can be reused. When the application itself is used for testing code, typically that code gets bound to the application and is not reusable.
* unit testing is a cure for code arthritis. When make a code change creates more pain than relief, the code is arthritic. Anyone that has ever worked on a fully arthritic project, knows real pain.
I can go on all day about unit testing. Try it, you may like it.
For those of you who haven't heard, it basically eliminates the need to sleep while you take it... (until your immune system bites the dust)
That's some good stuff - all of the flavor, none of the guilt. So far...
I know, personally, I'd eat a handful of mealworms for a script of Provigil - would make call nights a heck of a lot less torturous (and less frustrating for my poor patients...).
Move #3 to #1 and leave the poor schmuck alone.
My computer, unfortunately cannot. It starts making a lot of dumb mistakes during an extended days work.
I agree. It's really strage. You get odd stuff happening like if statements always being true, or random compile failures.
Then I come in the next morning and find that some erm... software glitch added a semi colon after an if, or deleted the assignment of a static member variable.
Programming 80+ hours is a walk in the park. Afterwards you olny need 80+ hours -spread over 4 weeks- to redesign the crap you wrote and 8 more hours to re-program it.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The basic problem is that people (ie managers) assume that one hour is as good as any other hour. The way I work, one hour on Friday may be worth 4 hours on Monday. If you just look at total lines of code commited to CVS. Fridays are by far my most productive days while Mondays are the worst. Which days are the best qualitatively, I have no idea. But something causes Fridays to be my most productive in terms of raw output. This may because there are fewer meetings or because there are fewer interuptions. I have a feeling that I may be able to work 24 hours straight at times and have very good correct output but at other times I only get one good hour of code out of a day. Part of this comes from the fact that coding is a blend of art and science. If I am simply reproducing the same types of solutions over and over again the number of hours has much less of an impact than if I am constantly confronted with problems that I have never solved before. In any case I know that my actual rate of productivity (ie problems solved correctly) is very spotty and comes in spurts. The idea of working 9 to 5 only is an antiquated one. It could be that only accomplish 1 hours of work at the office in a day but solve a weeks work of problems in a couple of hours driving in my car thinking about them.
And why does coffee get a pass?
Admittedly amphetamines have their downsides, and some big ones especially with frequent use, but lets not kid ourselves, caffiene isn't exactly brussle sprouts.
Hacking your body chemistry is just like anything else, it can achieve the desired effect, or it can miss wildly. Often it involves trade offs.
I dunno about you but I sleep better, and feel all around better starting about 4 days after I quit a caffination cycle (usually I quit caffiene about the time I start to feel groggy in the morning).
Of course I eventually have a few nights where I am up too late (often involving the weekly poker game these days), and end up needing to see joe in the morning.
I make no illusions though. I am not pretending that joe is health food. Its drugs, pleasant, sweet smelling, black as as a steers ass on a moonless prairy night, tasty drugs. Definitly in the top five of non-medicinal drugs ever. (though if I ever get glaucoma and pot becomes medicinal, it will make it to 4 - and with the amount of time I spend in front of pc monitors, there is a fair chance)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Whatever you may think you know about him from two short sentences, you have no right to condescend to him like that. Parent poster should not be treated like a child until you know he is one.
I hit 90 hours per week for the month of September last year while cleaning up a Nachi worm infestation on a 2000 host network. At the time I felt ok, but towards the end of that month I started to feel very strange and started making positively stupid mistakes. For example, I was at one of our remote sites fitting a new ethernet switch that wouldn't work properly for some reason and during the process, thinking I was wiping the faulty switch, I'd managed to wipe the jobbing switch due to having my laptop serial cable into the wrong box. I can remember looking at it wondering just how the hell had I managed to make such a stupid mistake but at the time I was convinced I was resetting the right one.
By the end of the month, daily chest pains were a part of my life, but I ploughed on through. By December that year I was working on my own in a switch room being particularly annoyed at an OSX server that was misbehaving, and my chest pains started up particularly badly, but then the pain went to my arm and I went light headed. I remember thinking "WTF?" then the nasty realisation that I may be having a heart attack (I'm not old enough surely!). Fortunately I wasn't but it taught me an important lesson about stress which is to never ignore it. This year when things got hectic as soon as the chest pain started I took a week off and just slept. You don't realise how bad you've been feeling until you sleep for a week and feel great at the end of it. I can understand how Doctors make silly mistakes after this which is quite scary really when you think about it.
Be careful when working silly hours over a sustained period - it's not healthy.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I work both as a programmer and as a sysadmin. I work from 8am to 1am 7/7day, so it's about 120 hours a week (+ some full nights).
Yes, the lack of sleep is critical, and yes, I'm doing tons of typos and basic mistakes because of this. When it comes to coding, I'd probably be way more productive with a normal life schedule. I feel like it takes me hours or days to code something that took me a few minutes some years back.
But the sysadmin tasks can't easy be rescheduled. Every task has to be made at the right time (almost always during the night). Supervision and consolidation of the web sites have to be done when there is a high load of them, ie. from 7pm to 0am. Preparing the work for the next day is made from 0am to 1 or 2 am. And from 8am to 7pm, colleagues need someone for the daily tasks and issues.
{{.sig}}
I've found it possible, but only in situations where you have 2-3 project lines going. That is , the ability to move onto something else and relegate something to a background process (your subconscious) rather than stressing out about it. Much like searching for your keys is worthless, eventually you'll go "aha" and remember when the time is right. In addition working in an environment where you can throw questions around the room and brainstorm with people as well as have helpful online forums to vet your ideas. Now as for game programmers, who are simply doing brunt translation of story architects ideas and tuning AI etc. they obviously must be doing something mindless enough that it doesn't matter, something the love enough that it doesn't matter, or are really being abused in which case EA is just a dumb company and doesn't realize how to get maximum productivity out of their employees and certainly won't last. IMHO.
I'm a graduate student, and when we're approaching a paper submission deadline, extended working hours are not uncommon. There have been periods when I wake up and get into the lab by 11 and stay till 1, and repeat this for a week or so. I usually still get 7-8 hours of sleep most of the times but this schedule comes at the exclusion of most other activities. As a result I can maybe pull one of these 80-90 hour weeks, but beyond that my mind just shuts down.
Also it usually takes a few days of little or no productivity at the end of that period to return to normalcy. So although I can't speak for the EA programmers, I can put in bursts of extended hours, but not for sustained periods.
You'll learn that you can code for 3 months straight (weekends too), live without sleep or a social life, and be miserable doing it all at once.
> Drunks code like shit- both alcoholics and a
> non-alkie coding whilst drunk.
Yeah so true, I once coded a small but complicate piece of code after a hefty evening (forgot about a deadline... long story) - worked perfect for about half a year, but then it needed to be extended and it was just easier for me to rewrite the whole thing - thoug the 'drunk' solution was quite clever, because it was a tad faster than the current one...
It's not his Monday he's wasting.
"The only good part was getting paid triple-time at union scale."
....So, we can safely guess that there were too few qualified tecnicians for the task at hand going into the final phase, and you were paid accordingly. I think that's the ONLY instance in which is reasonable for a PHB to ask.
On the other hand, in the business I'm in, it makes absolutely no sense to look at working Hours ( I manage money for a living). If a guy can beat the index working four hours a day, it's debatable that he will beat it twice as much if he works eight.
Worse than that, a schmuck that gets beaten up and destroys value will tend to work long hours to compensate, and to impress on people that he is a dedicated worker. Chances are that he was the cause of his own undoing, because while it is difficult to be better when you are good, it is relatively easy to be worse if you are bad. That's why I tend to knock wood when I hear PHBs saying things like: " We have to redouble our effort!"
Well, I do not want dedicated workers: give me a pro any day.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
I work in vfx for films, I do some programming to do my shots. At the end of a big film (like lotr) I will work around 120 hours per seven day week.
My work slows down, but I don't tend to make unrecoverable mistakes, I take 5-20min catnaps during renders and try and eat as healthy as possible.
It doesn't hurt that 130h x ~$50-70 / week = months of holiday and spending time with the kids but I don't think I can sustain it for too many more years.
I think if I were programming a large application or sharing code with a team I would have real trouble working more than 60 hours and being useful.
Small world, ain't it? :)
You should do a more indepth study on this. I volunteer to be guinea pig, for free.
Flamebait maybe but troll no: clearly, this guy really is on drugs!
p.s. you mentioned "when you need to pump out that month's worth of coding in a week" in an article about work. Those of us who aren't on mind altering substances see a connection there.
From the part at the end, it sounds like you're working to relax after dealing with life, rather than the other way around. When you're working, do you push yourself, concentrate hard, and expend all your energy? Or do you take a laid back approach, work at a relaxed pace, and avoid straining yourself?
I find it hard to believe you've been doing the former for all 20 years, but if it's the latter, it brings up a good point: different people have different ideas about what working 80 hours a week means, just like running for 10 minutes sprinting is very different from running at a medium pace.
Stage 1: Coding begins with only a loose design, few or no detailed specifications, and an unrealistic initial schedule with a rigid end date (the game must be on the shelves for the Christmas shopping season). During this period of blissful ignorance, the team works 40-45 hour weeks.
Stage 2: As development continues, design flaws become apparent, often after they are coded. The publisher asks for changes, then the designers do "a little tweaking" which requires major changes to the code. Now the project is six months out and the team is working 60 hours a week.
Stage 3: A few months before delivery, heavy testing begins and defects are found. To fix the defects and stay on schedule, the developers ratchet up to 80-90 hour weeks. Tired programmers are now making stupid mistakes and creating two new defects for each one they fix.
Stage 4: It's the final crunch before the gold master has to be at the duplicator. The exhausted team is working 16-20 hour shifts every day. If the game is a PC title, generally whatever release is available at the due date will be dubbed the "gold master" as long as all the major bugs are gone; minor problems can be fixed with a post-release patch. If it's a console title, you have more stringent QA, including a detailed checklist that the console manufacturer requires you to pass before a game will be released. Of course, this means even more hours for the developers to work.
I believe most game producers and designers know nothing about software development processes, and many game programmers are young and have not experienced the benefits of applying a process to a complex development project. They don't realize that a few weeks of detailed design work early on can save a few months of rewriting code on the backend.
In my last game project before leaving the business, I was the lead programmer on a four-platform title that was expected to ship in 12 months. I tried to introduce a process with some success, but ultimately, management simply decided to follow the process only when it was convenient for them, and things fell apart. The PC version shipped a month late, I quit, PS2 shipped about three months late, and the XBOX and GC versions were taken by the publisher and handed off to another developer for completion.
Now I work for a government contractor. Though I miss the "fun factor" of working on games, I get better money and I get time with my wife and kids as I rarely work more than 40 hours a week.
silly n00bs; hire a ninja to flip out and kill him.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Is that the company I saw mentioned in 60 Minutes some 4-5-6 years ago?
All I remember about the story on it in 60 Minutes was something like that, it was a large privatly owned company with a phenominal growth while retaining a low employee turnover and being able to offer all employees unbelievable perks.
14 * 7 = 98 NOT 80
SAS is an very bloated tool which is many things to many people. Yes, SAS history is stats, BUT it does a lot more besides.
There are lots of other stats tools (S,R,spss etc)
SAS's unique feature, which is not present in any other software tool that i can find, is its ability to manipulate data with ease.
I can manipulate databases at a speed (coding time) that is orders of magnitude faster than any other tool. SQL is a "toy" in comparison.
During my four years at EA I noticed that a lot of the programmers that didn't quickly burn out were insomniacs. Upper management put a high value on spending lots of time onsite even though productivity was not good. I saw many programmers quickly burn out trying to write non-stuttering audio streaming code for the PSX1 and PSX2.
The _best_ 3D pr0n -> http://www.hookup3d.com
If I work 80 hours in a week, and only get say 60 hours of good work done, that still puts me 20 hours ahead on Monday if I was working 40 hours a week.
Even if you were to assume that my productivity were to go down 10% for every hour over 50 I worked, I'd still be *somewhat* productive at hour 80. Of course it's not linear like that, but if something's *got* to get done, then it's got to get done, whether I'm tired or not.
I experiment the contrary. If I am asked to work more than 50 hours, it's not only these hours where I'll be less productive, it's the whole time I'm working. The more is asked, the less I am productive, the less I enjoy, the less I want to achieve good quality.
So in my case, working 80 hours in one week will produce less than working 40 hours. I am not kidding.
When I started working my managers asked for more hours. I explained to them I wouldn't do it because it would be far less productive. They were very angry and threatened me with bad things, they continued to ask for more hours regularly, and told me I was out of my mind. When I left each of these jobs, the same managers told me I was doing great work and they needed me to stay.
I am confident in what I can produce, given I can work in good conditions. Now I just look for the employer that will admit that while I am working, and not only when I've had enough and I decide to leave.
I recently read two books: Paul Graham'a "Hackers and Painters" and David Kushner'a "Masters of Doom". Large part of the first one talks about Viaweb, the Internet startup built by Graham and his friend Robert Morris in years 1995-1999, and sold to Yahoo in 1999 for $49 million. The second book tells the story of id software. Both stories have one common trait: the programmers were working unbelievably long hours. In "Masters of Doom" there is a special term introduced - "Crunch mode". Last half year of the development of first Quake is described as "perpetual crunch mode".
And, well, if this decreased their productivity, I think one can safely say it's the kind of decreased productivity we all would wish upon ourselves.
Some countries in Europe have understood that : the legal length of week is around 35 hours of work.
For France, it is exactly 35 hours.
I find it very very comfortable : I can work at full speed during the 35 hours, I'm not tired, and i've still plenty of time in the evening to live.
Of course, some weeks, I work maybe 40 hours, but it's a courtesy I do to my users, who need me, and not something in any way mandatory. I could be a complete ass and tell them to call back tomorrow.
Not a winning strategy in the long run, i've always thought.
A little point : I do development, on production systems. While not an optimal (read: a stupid) arrangement, it means I have to double-check every simple command I type, or every simple part of code I commit. 60 hours/week wouldn't do here.
Yes it is. I saw that program. They also have their own golf course, a huge gym, kindergartens and doctors/nurses.
Archimedies is reputed to have discovered the law of displacement of water being equal to the weight of a floating body in the bath
Not quite. The displaced water is equal to the volume of the body in the water, not the weight.
If my memory serves me, Archimedes was tasked to find if a crown made for a king was made purely of gold as requested and not tainted with lead, or some other metal, to make it cheaper to make, which would let the makers effectively steal some extra profit.
After his eureka moment Archimedes realised that he could dunk the crown in water and measure the volume of the displaced water. He could then dunk an amount of gold that weighed the same as the crown and that this should displace the same amount of water. If the displacements, i.e. volumes, of water were different, the composition of the two metals were dissimilar.
I would push the boat out even further and say that 30 hours is about the maximum weekly programming effort (ie actually coding, not just being at work) that can be indefinately sustained. Every once in a while you might manage a bit more, but you cannot sustain that effort week in week out.
Programming, requires a lot of thinking about programming in addition to the actual coding. I would say that this is a 50-50 ratio. Sometimes you solve a problem when you are at home making dinner, riding your bike, playing with your kid, or having a beer with your buddies. Take into account meetings and communication with coworkers and suddenly 30 hours a week coding is the absolute max.
For the past 20 years I've worked as a programmer. I think I've worked about 5 weekends. I usually put in about 6 hours a day of quality coding and pad out the rest of the day with meetings, documentation, surfing, research, whatever. I guess us Europeans are a bit laid back but we somehow manage to get stuff done.
What I mostly notice about people who work long hours is that they get a cold every month. That's because their immune systems are fucked - duh!
The follow-up to this is that they watch the stupid adverts for cold 'remedies' and believe that if they take enough over-the-counter drugs, they can still work. Then they come in and give colds to the rest of the team, and deprive the project of much more useful man-hours.
These days, as a mellowed out 34-year-old contractor, I will rag on my colleagues and team leads till they go home, explaining that I don't want their cold, their work is currently below par, and they would be better off spending the next 24 hours asleep than working. Typically, they eventually give up and go home, not cos they have learnt, but because they feel like shit and the last thing they want is some git contractor hassling them!
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Remember buggy code means progs crash and extra work has to be done, meanwhile sysads get work debugging. must employ assistants.
The GDP rises and we all get just that little bit wealthier.
DO YOUR BIT! Write Buggy Code for America NOW!
Definitely - I used to work on a massive online application at a large UK ISP, and luckily they recognised this problem. They had a golden rule there - "We don't go live after five". Also, no releases were allowed on a Friday. Under any circumstances.
This turned out to be alternately massively frustrating, and a major arse-saver. You might get a huge critical bug to fix and be working like a man posessed on it all day, but if it wasn't fixed, packaged up, documented, peer-reviewed, signed off in triplicate and given to the sysadmins for release by 3pm, it wouldn't get released until the next day. You'd go home cursing procedures and paperwork and middle-management to the seventh circle of Hell.
Of course, you usually got back in the next morning, took one look at your code and saw another potential bug that you missed in your frenzy to get the inital issue fixed.
A few years ago, I never would thought I'd hear myself say this, but most procedures are there for a reason. (Ick! My skin is crawling!) Some of them are there purely to justify some managements existence, of course, but some of them can save your neck.
http://instantbadger.blogspot.com
60 hours a week no problem at least if for a "cause" I really believe in. I have been known to sometimes do that for indefinitely long periods of time. A few times in my work life I have done 13+ hours a day, 7 days a week for as much as a month at a time. That takes its toll. It can be done without high error rates but only in my experience by shifting into a bit of an altered state (no, not by chemicals). In this state which I call "commander in an air raid" I can be very efficient but I am worthless as far as getting along with people not in the same state. Also, when in this state I find I get so much into the problem space that it feels as if my head will burst if I go one bit deeper. But then I do and stretch my limits out again.
I think the original poster may have been referring to productivity per hour worked where France and the USA are roughly on a par IIRC.
On the minus side the French have higher unemployment.
On the plus side they have more time to enjoy the things they've produced.
Anyone who has ever played any amount of EA games can probably testify that the games usually feel like the people that make them don't play them (IMHO). One of my favorite EA features are the "you can't get there from here" menus.
Tiger Woods 2K3 is a perfect example of this. If you want to play the challenges the menu system works against you. After finishing a challenge, you MUST go back out to the main menu and go through the whole process of setting up the challenges again. If you fail a challenge and want to replay it, same thing.
When I read the story about the near-slave-labor conditions at EA, a light went on...hmmm, THAT explains a LOT.
Hmmm. I have seen the opposite effect. The extra hours threw me into total code immersion. In that space I have even coded in my sleep and solved real problems elegantly in a dream. I have also burnt myself to a crisp a time or two attempting to get to that space. But I have learned to pull back in time and recover.
Oddly enough, I went throgh a period where I found coding after a couple of drinks or joints actually helped produce better code.
It was during a period where (modesty aside) I was maturing from "someone who could program well"[1] to a "good programmer"[2]. I've always been unusually aware of my own thought processes (as I suspect many programmers/hackers/martial artists/meditators/etc are), and I've noticed that good programmers all seem to go through a stage where they stop programming with their left-brain[3] and start more right-brain-thinking[4].
During this time I discovered that, as long as I already understood the problem fully, a couple of drinks (or joints) seemed to help me internalise the "rules" of a language, and spend more time on the actual creative side of programming - solving tasks without spending the whole time thinking about syntax or grammar.
Of course, some of the code was still pretty squirrely (what a wonderful word), but I do remember on several occasions waking up in the morning, running over my code again to check for bugs, and actually being blown away by how elegant some bits were - I hadn't thought I was capable of writing code like that at that point in my education. I remember one time finding a solution to a problem in linear time that I hadn't even realised sober could be done in less than exponential time, and it quite freaked me out for a while afterwards.
Even now (several years and several languages afterwards), I find coming back to a problem after a drink or toke can sometimes help you see "alternative" ways of solving it, often wildly different to how you'd normally go about it...
Fotonotes:Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
These 80 hours per week tells me only one thing: that the design is wrong, so in order to effectively do something worthwhile the programmers have got to twist their arms around the existing design.
agreed. also, turning up every now and again 30 minutes late but wearing a sharp suit gives the impression you've been off to interviews and gives a subtle hint to managers that they might want to review your terms of employment.
Sure, but how many of those rocket flights were made by someone who hadn't slept in 40 hours?
Putz.
In many countries such a concept no longer exists. In many countries short term contracts (1 to 3 years) are the norm for researchers other than lecturers or professors, and are sometimes the case for lecturers.
Publish or be damned. Collaborate with industry or be damned. And if you need to write code to get the results which allow you to run the simulations or whatever to do this, then write code or be damned.
This how we identify bad contractors were I work. When others pickup on his bugs make sure the work is sent back to him and only him to work on. Don't accept it until it is at least adequate. In addition to this create a report (weekly or monthly) of how much work is accepted i.e. actually done, you will want to include everyone for comparison and to not to look like your singling him out.
When you have enough to show a trend (PHB's love reports and can understand situations normally beyond there grasp with the help of one) go to someone in management and ask there advice on how to deal with this troubling situation (by asking or advice your creating the impression that this a serious and/or difficult problem), that your senior programmer is spending a lot of time in the office but is not doing as much work as everyone else, if he is the "darling" of management suggest that he could be overworked and that your concerned that's he's burning himself out.
We use the report were I work as a way of identifying which contractors really are doing the work and who just looks like there working hard.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
Oh, here it is :-)
What is really odd is code from a person who frequently does mushrooms or acid. I find it extraordinarily easy to read, much like code from a first-year student who tries really hard to be tidy. One "acidic" HTML writer I know refuses to do anything but 4.0strict without tables. It looks really elegant, but is not very efficient. Programming on psychedelics is also very slow.
I dislike code written when stoned. Redundant lines, utterly stupid algorithms, no Hungarian notation. Some people seem unable to code when they're not stoned, though.
Well, they certainly have the tools to do that analyis in-house
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
-1, Sad
I was going to say something similar. I worked in a factory production line for 12 years doing 50 to 60 hours a week, then i drove light commercial vehicles for another 6 years doing 50 to 60 hour weeks. I am talking about EVERY week, not a 'death march' for a couple of months. It was worth it though, some months I got paid $1400.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Bermuda and Cayman Islands are number 3 and 4... hmm, I wonder why.
It's always interesting that on any measurement scale of performance multiple countries will claim the number one spot based on slightly different definitions of the thing measured.
income/capita, income/employee, income/working hour are the common types of productivity measures. The preferred one depends on % employment, number of working hours per employee, and prevalence of part time contracts. Income/employee for the Netherlands for instance, would suggest that we have shorter working hours than the French, which isn't the case. It is actually very high employment + many part time contracts that causes the lower average. The US, with high employment & long hours, obviously likes income/capita and dislikes income/working hour. The difference in GDP/capita between some countries in Western Europe and the US is so small compared to the difference in working hours, that there is little reason to work for the marginal rise in income. The time is worth more.
There is still something fundamentally wrong with the income side of the equation, however, as your example clearly shows. McDonald's employees in the US are not better workers than McDonald's employees in China because they earn much more. The relation between income and so-called 'productivity' presupposes Marxist distributive justice; that income and invested effort are systematically related. We all know that that is not the case.
No source control? It helps make it obvious who f*cked up. Aside from that just bawl him out for it, preferable in front of his boss. But seriously, argue for source control - and keep your own backups, in case they give the idiot sysadmin authority.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Something to think about when libertarians/conservatives claim Europe is hopelessly behind in competitiveness. We get the same amount done AND we have much more pleasant lives.
Get the same amount done? In France you can be a maximum of 35hrs/week at work, this is not the same as 35hrs/week doing work. Factor in emailing each other jokes, chatting, cigarette breaks, extended 2hr lunches, etc, and you aren't talking about 35hrs of productivity.
Also can't generalise about 'Europe'. Different countries take their jobs with different levels of seriousness (affecting productivity).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
In that case your organisation should start using a versioning system, so that you can look at the history of the files to track who changed what and when.
This is something that I noticed very early in my life (while I was still at school) and avoided ever since. A friend of my father, who is a journalist at a major german computer magazine for about fifteen years or so, once told me that (almost) every job has one or more typical diseases.
;-)
;-) Granted, it's sometimes very hard to avoid the stress, especially when the project is in the ending phase and the release date is nearing. But apart from that there is few need for stress. I've seen on my coworkers that very often people impose stress on themselves or let their bosses impose stress on them. And most of the time this stress is unnecessary and can be avoided.
He said that the typical programmer diseases are too much stress, pains from sitting around all day in a wrong stance (? sorry, I'm not a native english speaker) and gaining fat from too few sports
I've been able to avoid the first and the last but suffer from sitting in a wrong position
(This is why I never wanted to be a games programmer although I'd really like to write games: that industry was too much stress ten years ago and it seems that it got worse)
I think that if the work is imposing too much stress on you, you really should think about looking for another employer. I know very well that this sounds so much easier than it is, and that some people don't have the opportunity to change employer easily. But there are times when one has to ask oneself: what's more important ? My health or my great payment ? Wouldn't a job that's not as well payed but is more fun/healthier be a better deal ?
I have something here from an American, about France anf the hours they work.
As I have posted several times on /., the GDP per hour worked in France is higher than the US and the UK.
Did he inhale?
Trust me, Europe has just as clueless PHBs. Idiots are idiots everywhere, no need to discriminate against any country.
What's different in Europe is that the laws are far more intended to protect the workers, than to protect the CEO's right to shaft you, use you, and throw you away. So it means for a start that they have to actually pay you for overtime, and even more for overtime on weekends. It also means that the boss can't say "if you quit, I'll see to it that you can't get any unemployment benefits or get any work with computers for the next 2 years", because the law says he's got no say in that. Puts them in a _much_ less despotic position in negotiations. Etc.
But in the end, idiots are still idiots, and still appreciate show-biz more than actual work. That's, sadly, what this industry is all about: show-biz. That's one thing I wish they had taught me in university. Would have avoided the disappointment later.
For starters, show-biz to entertain the boss. I know people who can't code worth shit, and don't even know the most elementary basics of the language. People who do more harm than good to any code they touch, and if they're inclined to dabble in office politics they harm the project far worse than mere bad coding. People who aren't just not producing much, but whose contribution to the project is actually _negative_. (Yes, it would go faster without them.)
But they brown-nose and put up a _great_ show of being involved, dedicated and working 12 hours a day. So the boss loves them. They're the good team members, while those who actually do the work are the "bad guys".
In fact, no offense, but from my experience so far, maybe 10% of the people do overtime because they're actually dedicated workers and enjoy it. (Yes, maybe _you_ fit in that 10%. I used to be in there too, so as I've said, no offense intended.) The rest do it because they have something to compensate for. The more incompetent they are, the more likely they'll put up the overtime and dedication show just to impress the boss.
Or show-biz to entertain the clients.
At least 90% of the software developped today isn't even supposed to solve a problem. It's just supposed to be a buzzword collection (or as I call it: BDA: Buzzword Driven Architecture) to make some client PHB feel good.
Etc.
You can still stick to writing software anyway. I did. It's more fun than the stupid office politics games. But you must learn to accept that that's not what's expected of you. Actually being able to code is as irrelevant to the job as it is to a strip-club stripper's job. Your real job, like hers, is really just putting up a good show.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
80 hours a week is just crazy. In the European country where I live, it's actually illegal for an employer to require more than 48 hours a week - and if they fired someone for refusing to do overtime, they would be sued and they would LOSE.
Of course, the USA doesn't have worker protection laws like that. And EA take advantage of that? Big surprise there. Next on Slashdot: Pope believes "Catholicism may have something to offer," bear caught shitting in woods! Is the end of the world nigh?
I looked up Peopleware", by De Marco and Lister and found (among others) this site. There were several brief "reviews", including this one:
... Nah.)
"This book was one of the most influential books I've ever read. The best way to describe it would be as an Anti-Dilbert Manifesto. Ever wonder why everybody at Microsoft gets their own office, with walls and a door that shuts? It's in there. Why do managers give so much leeway to their teams to get things done? That's in there too. Why are there so many jelled SWAT teams at Microsoft that are remarkably productive? Mainly because Bill Gates has built a company full of managers who read Peopleware. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is the one thing every software manager needs to read... not just once, but once a year."
-Joel Spolsky,
Founder, Fog Creek Software
Joel on Software
I am not certain what is a "jelled SWAT team" but I assume it is good? (Since it is Thanksgiving, I have to wonder if it would taste good. Jelly, jello, jelled,
I would guess that the book is good. If Microsoft had ordered its SWAT teams to make security the first, rather than the last, consideration, Windows probably would be a lot more secure.
Productivity is *not* GDP per capita, it is GDP per hour worked, see this site
Ahem... thanks, yes well spotted ... my deliberate error was nothing to do with sleep deprivation at all...
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I second that. 4 hours of programming a day is usually my maximum. What's the point of programming 8 hours when you have to spend 2 hours the next day to fix the bugs you introduced during your last hours the day before?
perception is reality
Another time I pulled an all-nighter to meet a deadline. At around 1 a.m. the system was nearly finished. At 2 a.m. it was broken. Like, really broken. By about 6 it was recovered back to the 1 o'clock state, and at 8 it was finished. I really should have just slept on it and gone in early.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In addition to the good advice sycraft-fu gives you:
register your time, more specifically, keeps tabs on the time you spend correction the senior programmers mistakes. After you've done this for 2 weeks or a month, first look at it yourself. Does he really cost you as much time as you think? It might just be an false impression you have. If not, go to the senior programmer and discuss it with him, or if this is not possible or feasible, go to management. However, it probably isn't very good for working relations to go over his head.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
I believe it can be done. Some of my best code comes after I've spent 20-30+ hours finding many ways that don't work.
Plus once I hit a great idea I don't leave the computer until it's all down, even if it takes many hours to write out because once I get sidetracked from coding for just a few seconds the idea is lost. Usually when I'm on fire, as I call it, I get a lot of code out quickly with very few bugs(usually a semicolon here and there or misspelled variables).
80+ hours a week? Yeah, I could see it as being possible. My personal best is only 65 hours but I had to work weekends to get it done before a deadline. Otherwise I stick to 40-50 hours, mostly because I like to go out drinking too much.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to present something like this to management in a convincing manner?
Resign.
Quite right. After being forced into 80 hour weeks and treated like scum ("I don't give a f*ck about the f*cking employees" is an actual quote from the MD) I quit. They responded with a nice 60% raise and a promise that it would all be better.
Didn't trust 'em as far as I could comfortably spit out a rat, but I had a cunning plan. I took the monster raise and worked it for 6 months to see what happened.
After 6 months, things were actually worse. I quit again and went to work somewhere much nicer, using the rather inflated salary to negotiate a very healthy starting rate at the new job.
I doubt that they will ever learn why I was so p*ssed at them, but that's just not my problem any more. They're already reaching the point where reputation precedes them and people turn down job offers based on that. They can't last much longer without a serious change in attitude.
According to the history no one has touched that page for about 20 days and then there are 15 entries all from today.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
The EA games I have played are (for the most part) bug free. I have encountered glitches to be sure, and in some cases some flat out omissions and bugs. However for the most part they work.
I note that these games are in many cases simple mods from the previous years release - and for the most part folllows a consistant flow for the length of the game.
However the level of defects is low.
Now... EA is very obviously in this to make money (to the point of running their employees into the ground) - however they seem to have found a development model/process/methodology that results in a lot of bug free code. Perhaps the assembly line nature of their development helps account for this - perhaps they just hire good people.
I think that if they could find a process that resulting in the same output that was less reliant on human resources working less hours(after all they cost money) then you can bet they would adopt it. After all: their aim isn't to over work people - it is to make a profit. I wonder if they have people looking into this.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
In Sweden, we do NOT have more pleasant lives than in the U.S. We spend less time at work (40 hours) and have longer holidays, but we spend more time working in the home (painting, cleaning etc.) Taxes are so high, that a surgeon would lose money on working overtime and hire a painter at his/her home.
I'm not an insider (just a gamer), and i've never heard of these practices about other games producers. But there are plenty of examples of games that were not on the expected schedule and that were wildly successful, take doom3, HL2, just to name the last ones. "it's done when it's done" is a good practice, and implies that the developer in focused on a quality product, not on milking some money form the gamers. Hell, it'a game, I don't have to play it on a schedule, but if I'm paying it 60 I want it to be the best it can be. Never heard of JohnC being on a crunch, he even partecipated in priceX :)
Hum I must not have been quite clear. I literally meant what I said. Literally. I'm sure the poster's a great guy, albeit a story teller. The list is of approximations is endless in the original post. From the impossible 18 hours day work to the suicide that comes immediately after his departure. Everything falls into place too nicely. It screams of urban legend. As I already wrote, I agree entirely with him. But I believe he would have far more impact by telling the plain truth. Or is that a second hand story? Do you realize that by romancing one's stories, one's credibility is brought down? Remember Dan Rather? I'm sure the poster's story is basically correct. That's why it should be told in a way that has an impact. Other then that, your estimation is, how shall I put it, a bit off: I'm not nor have ever been in the poster's situation. I did do very long hours, but the final criterion was to do a good job on time, not how many hours you pulled or at what time you showed up. Nothing like the above post. Oh, and I'm currently in South-America, where they have their own way of defining "work."
Yes, source control is good, and everyone should use it. But please don't assume it solves _everything_.
1. There are more ways to break people's code than directly editing their files. Slight changes in the behaviour of classes and methods can mean days of debugging for the poor sod that's merely calling them.
The most heavy-handed and least subtle way, for example, is to start throw unchecked exceptions that noone expected. E.g., item not found in the cache simply returned a null? (Intuitive for everyone who's used a hash-map before.) You can do better. Start throwing an unchecked CacheElementMissingException, and don't document it anywhere. Especially not in the method declarations, which would cause it to appear in the Java-docs.
And because it's unchecked, it's not signalled by the compiler in any way. They'll just see it at run-time. Then argue to the boss that it's all best practices.
But as I've said, that's heavy handed and unsubtle: the stack trace still points to your code. Other stuff, like slightly changing the data you give them ("what do you mean you expected an empty list, not a null, when I have no elements to give you?") can be a bigger headache. Bonus points if it's some condition that happens only once a month, and may pass through both automated tests and manual testing before being noticed.
2. You assume that having proof is everything. Nay, show-biz is everything.
If the boss's favourite "dedicated team-member and hard-worker" edited your code, good luck convincing the boss that it's not a good thing. _Sometimes_ it might work, but there's also a good chance of you ending up the bad guy.
The guy who randomly edits everyone else's code, especially if he's vocal and a good brown-noser, will very rarely seen as the team nuisance that he is. He'll be seen as the dedicated team-member who really cares about the project and gets involved. The really good guy who really cares about your EJB's too, even though he's in the client team. See how dedicated and involved he is?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think managers love black-hole employees. That is people who suck up projects continuously. They never finish it, and if it's done... it's done totally half assed.
That's completely absurd. Why would any manager love an employee that generates such results?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Factor in emailing each other jokes, chatting, cigarette breaks, extended 2hr lunches, etc, and you aren't talking about 35hrs of productivity.
/.
You forgot to write about reading and posting on
But 35hrs/week usually doesn't apply for a week of a developper. 35hrs/week usually means in fact 7 weeks of holidays/year and a work week of 39/42hrs.
WOW ! you started a whole thread of off-topic speculating zealots talking about drugs !
>I don't think anyone can work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It's definatly possible. I work 8.5 hours a day at the office on weekdays, plus an easy 4 hours EVERY day for my parents (usually about 12 on the weekends) and usually 2 hours a day for my own company. Sure it's split between 3 jobs, doing different tasks, but the hours are there.
It seems that the only way to fight this practice is to unionize. Employers don't often listen to their employees until they are on the brink of forming a union.
Simple-
Document his bugs in the code with liberal comments.
' =-=-=-=-=-=-
' Joe assumed that var i will always be an int.
' He forgot that in case y it is used as a string
' Fixed (Date) by (Name)
Enough of these things in the code base will either sharpen up your lead programmer or give you enough to get him removed.
I have a DBA like this too- always giving me schemes that don't match the DB.
It also doesn't help that their regression techniques are outdated, misplaced, and generally suck ass. I've been directly involved with some of their "predictions", they basically threw 500 different configurations of 5-6 algorithms at the data and picked the best one out of the batch ... real scientific.
... double exponential ... it's DOUBLE man!!!11 (This would be the attitude of the people I worked with)
Oh my, a linear regression with double-exponential smoothing doesn't approximate EVERYTHING correctly?! But
Sigh.
I think that a environment where everyone works 80+ hours for so long time is very risky. Any time sooner someone will have a servere crisis of mania and kill everyone. Well, I did have a crisis after some weeks working 52 hours with the one CS end of semester. I didn't killed anyone, but get very delusional. It's a hard outcome to face.
Perhaps your Boss topped himself because of the humiliation you caused him in front of his team? Huh? Huh? Didja think of that? Huh? Huh?
So what? If he was dressing down the GP in front of the entire team, he should be able to take the retort as well.
I have *very* little respect for people who like to be harsh on others but cannot stand being talked back to.
One more candidate for the Darwin Award.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I've experienced this phenomenon several times, where one developers inability to see beyond their own part of the project causes all sorts of problems elsewhere. It's a serious issue - large projects tend to have all sorts of odd corners where you can get into a world of hurts if you don't spend time talking to other developers FIRST to find out how that area is supposed to be driven.
Now you can argue that this is the sign of a fragile codebase and that everything which shouldn't be done should be blocked by asserts, rigourous sanity testing and hardened code. Any time I get my hands into a function these days, hardening it so it can't be abused is high on my priority lists but there will probably always be gotchas which just can't be locked down on a function by function basis.
Ergo, the more complex the codebase you are working with, the more care is required to keep it alive and in a good state of health. I resist working much longer than 50 hours in any given week unless I am doing mindless handle cranking at the end of it and I will not attempt to code complex stuff unless I'm really in the coding groove and my brain cells are humming well. While learning a new project, I've burned myself a few times by coding something while tired, having it pass all the tests I can reasonably throw at it and yet having overlooked some criteria that will cause problem in a less well travelled part of the codebase. And finding the problem inadvertantly introduced earlier may be the work of weeks, not hours. More importantly, if my mistake causes a problem elsewhere, it may not get back to me for a long time, wasting another developer's time trying to diagnose an obscure symptom.
Don't code on large projects when tired. It's almost NEVER worth it.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
80 hour weeks are for pussies! Real coders compile while they are sleeping!
Not that the parent was wrong, but this seems a good time to bring up a big problem with all those productivity stats:
They use different units! And when you look at which units they consider significant, totally reveals their authors' values.
The productivity stats that show the US ahead usually are per-year numbers, per employee, with no consideration of excessive working hours or other bad side effects. When people publish per-working-hour productivity statistics, that is when the Europeans come in way ahead. [Belgium number one, as I recall, etc.] When the "productivity" is per dollar invested in labor, then of course China, India, and various slave-labor locales are the big leaders. You could then say western democracy is what's hopelessly uncompetitive.
So all those "productivity" statistics that are published just to make a point... they are usually about as valid as that pop-media pseudo-science reporting that slashdotters love to hate.
Given a choice, how many people would go to the trouble of killing the guy and faking the hanging, rather than have to work 80+ hour weeks, losing wife, kids, ...
At which point is it worth fighting back?
When you have to work 100 hour weeks, unpaid, forever ?
When the work permanently damages your health ?
When your wife must do the same ??
When her boss gets to fuck her too, as part of the "standard" contract ??
At which point do people start saying "too much" ?
Or, is there *any* point, no matter how extreme, at which some people (too often from the U.S.) will actually concede to be "too much", and grudgingly allow the possibility, that maybe, just maybe, some form of worker protection laws are required to be enforced ??
Not to the
(R)ule in Hell or (S)erve in Heaven [R]?
I like your solution, but sometimes it doesn't work, especially where there's separate support and development teams; development team lead insists that his prima donnas (including Fred) are far too valuable to be fixing bugs. Fred agrees as he considers himself far too good for trivial support work and anyway it's more fun creating new bugs^H^H^H^H functionality.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Because immediate, crappy results are better than delayed, well-done results to a PHB. Try reading one of those 'Management for Dummies' books or any managment book that claims to give results merely by reading it. Those books basically outline all the managment techniques that piss us off. My boss is great, but he still suffers from getting seduced by numbers.
'Can we upgrade to Solaris 10? It's 2 better than Solaris 8!'
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
From the Monty Burns Handbook, chapter 11:
"By establishing your business in a country with starving people and shitsticks for labor laws, you are able to work people till they fall over; there are many starving saps ready to fill the gap and work for the dirtballs that cling to your ass. ehhhhxcellent"
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I work as a Sysadmin for a fairly large university. A lot of the work I do can be solved fairly quickly, and since this is a university, many of these projects aren't time sensitive. I like to build up a 'queue' of finished projects that I save for when I feel like slacking off or pissing off the workaholics.
Nothing beats the feeling of having "at" do 75 CVS commits while I'm off at the beach getting beat up by waves and the workaholics are stuck at their desks!
When I got this job, my dad told me the key to success is making people THINK you're working hard. Luckily, with technology, it's easy to work smarter rather than harder.
From Peopleware, Chapter 18, "The Wholesis Greater than the Sum of the Parts":
-- Juanco
Actually, there were dozens of qualified electricians available down at the union hall. The problem was, as usual, lack of intelligent planning by the PHB. He underestimated the time it would take to do all the work and didn't notice how far behind they were till the last month. Sure, he could've hired fifty more electricians the last week, but we were already getting in one another's way as it was-- we'd essentially reached maximum manpower capacity. The triple time was the one of the good effects of unionization. The dumbass friend-of-the-union-president PHB foreman was the bad.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
OK Everyone run out and read "The Mythical Man Month"
by FP Brooks. The 20 year edition is out there and
worth the read. 80 hours indeed!
dkr
Correlation does not imply causation. Britain has a lower unemployment rate than the US and the steadiest economy in Europe (and didn't suffer the recession the US has been suffering), yet the typical working week is shorter (37 hrs) and a new employee in Britain starts off with 4 weeks of vacation instead of 2.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Oh negative work occurs in games alright. Heap corruptions. It's great fun, some numbskull writes off the end of an array into the heap, breaking someone elses data. But not breaking someone else data at that point when he makes the mistake. Oh no that would be too easy... ;)
What he actually does is breaks someone's code about 2 months down the line, probably in super-super-crunch time. And there's no easy way to relate to the two things together.
Warning signs:
"Well it works on my machine"
"Try reseting and deleting all your files"
"You are not working it right"
"It doesn't work in Release build only Debug build"
"Let's try putting pragma optmise off around that bit"
Conclusion - please don't code fast people.
but you know there's a thing called having a life.
You need time to spend all the money you make and then you need time to spend with the kids and your wife/husband, and then you need time for yourself and your hobbies/activities.
You know something called a life.
I would not work more than 40hrs/week, going over ONLY when needed.
If you have decent change control document all the evidence of their many mistakes, even with time to fixes and drop it anonomously on a senior managers desk labelled "When Homer was taken off the shop floor the accident rate dropped by 74%(check that figure), exactly matching Homer's" OR "How to save 120 hours of development time"
"Must have been on mushrooms/
when you wrote that pile of junk"
- Kristin Hersh, "Rock Candy Brains", Strange Angels
(Presumably in reference to music, but works just as well for code)
Variety is the spice of life
I spent about a year working essentially two full time jobs - 40 hours a week doing IT and ~40 hours doing concerts. From late June until mid-september I didn't have a day off. And I was loving life. I enjoy both fields, and switching back and forth provided a great deal of variety and stimulation.
These days I tend to spend 60 hours a week at the IT job and am far less happy and more fatigued.
Needless to say the project did not get delivered, all three of the programmers burned out (the other two left and I left about six months later).
So what went wrong with the project? Well firstly, at the beginning of it it became clear that if you admitted being able to program you were going to end up programming. So everyone with any sense claimed to be unable to and got to be an 'analyst' who analysed user requirements and wrote specifications, and only those of us who had been too naive or too junior to see that one coming ended up actually building anything.
Secondly, because this was a research project, people somehow didn't often feel the need to tie their specification down to actual data-structures or algorithms. On the whole the specifications we were working from specified mostly what the user should see on the screen, with a fair amount of hand waving. As the underlying algorithms actually involved a constraint-propagating inference engine, actually working out how to tie the interface to the functionality was a fair bit of work in itself.
Thirdly, the project was way too ambitious for the performance of the available hardware. But fundamentally all of that could have been overcome with better management and a better split of the workforce between programmers and 'analysts' (and better partitioning of the application - some of the guts of it could have been offloaded onto a mainframe, which we had sitting idle for the whole of the project).
In teams I've led since that time I've insisted that there should be no division between programmer and analyst, and that everyone has to be able to specify as well as build and, as far as possible, build what they specify. This on the whole has worked.
But the other lesson I learned is that you can work sixteen hour days for three months on end. It can even, at times, be a buzz, provided you're sufficiently supported and appreciated; and you can even produce very good work while you're doing it.
But. But you aren't going to produce anything worth having for the next six months afterwards. You're going to burn out, your health is going to suffer, and your ability to do good work is going to collapse. Your net productivity over a year of working 40 hour weeks is going to be a lot higher than three months working 80 hour weeks and nine months working 40; and that in turn is going to be a lot higher than twelve months working 60 hour weeks.
You cannot sustain high levels of creativity for ever. You will burn out. When you do burn out the best thing to do (if you can afford it) seems to be to go and do something completely different - non-intellectual - for several months; ideally, take a holiday.
If you have a boss who is demanding 80 hour weeks, you need to be very confident that he has enough commitment to you to fund that several month holiday at the end of it.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
If you did, you'd have seen that for over a year (and still today), it's buggy as hell. Ultima Online also was buggy and unstable for the longest time.
I'd say that EA doesn't do anything, and just allows bugs
Tibbon
tibbon.com
See the effect of drugs in a spider web. Maybe this will happen in your code
In the wake of the EA controversy, I see lots of questions asking whether programmers are effective at 80 hours a week.
However, a typical team working on games is composed of 2-3 artists to a programmer, and this ratio is likely to expand in the future.
So, the question should focus on whether texture artists, modelers, etc. are capable at those hours.
Remember, profile the data before doing premature optimization.
One of my previous (decent) managers made a point about making people clean up their own code - he wouldn't let anyone use you for any new projects until the bug reports started tapering off after the release of anything you had been working on.
That was a _very_ instructive work environment - good for teaching yourself discipline :-)
The wikipedia people must hate getting mentioned slashdot.
Scientifically (all those studies referred to in the first post) you are right there are some returns for extra hours. But the *quickly* diminish, to the point where after 2-3 weeks you are actually producing less work than in a 40 hour week. So two or three weeks of crunching can be an effective remedy to schedule slippage. Of course that's not what we're talking about wrt EA. They're talking about 70-80 hour weeks for MONTHS. As a great article put it, "that's not just abusive, it's stupid".
I didn't read through this entire page, but I saw a lot of debating about how overtime affects one's effectiveness as a programmer. Obviously, the more you work while tired, the more mistakes you make, and eventually you reach a point of negative contribution. I would like to point out another, indirect, but important, effect of overtime. My apologies if this has already come up.
:) At any rate, although I certainly experienced the effects of programming while tired -- I had to go more slowly to avoid making quite so many mistakes -- there was a greater problem brewing. I began to feel entirely unappreciated, and worse, I began to see the effects of this overtime on those around me.
The last time I worked substantial overtime was in 2000: about 215 hours in five months. That might not sound like much to some of you, but that included one 96-hour, 6-day stretch.
Have you ever seen the film Metropolis?
In the opening scene, we see the workers performing an actual "Death March". It's the same thing I see people do in the mornings in subway tunnels and staircases: they more or less stumble up the stairs in this eerie rhythm.
That is what despair looks like.
So when I see everyone around me droning on, working excessive hours, I begin to feel less human and more like cattle. I find it difficult to enjoy building software if those are the conditions under which I am forced to do it, so I lose interest in my job, my career -- what was once my passion.
I think that's a stronger and more diabolical effect of excessive overtime on programmers. They might just stop doing it; they might not see the point in giving that much of themselves, only to have employees say, "Thanks. Now work more." No amount of money is worth it.
just be sure that you set it up while you're fresh, so that it's ridiculously easy for you to use it and not fuck it up.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
It's probably correct, but you forgot to mention that the french did vote for a law in 1999 that does limit the worktime of all to 35 hours a week.
So since 1999, the Frenchs are indeed working 35 hours a week...
Speed Slashdot comments also tend to be poorly "documanted."
You say that like it's a bad thing!
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Mm, perhaps, but "less time at work" and "longer holidays" is what a more pleasant life is all about, no? Money doesn't play a big part there.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
TheCarp carped: And why does coffee get a pass?
Admittedly amphetamines have their downsides, and some big ones especially with frequent use, but lets not kid ourselves, caffiene isn't exactly brussle sprouts.
And why do brussels sprouts get a pass?
Whatever nation you were educated in failed at teaching spelling. Six errors.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
IF you are a high-SEI-level shop, and have some SERIOUS line-by-line source code control and configuration management practices in place, then you might be able to compile a "Stupid's Greatest Hits" compendium by looking at modules he changed that someone else subsequently had to change again.
The idea being that you look at Software Change Requests that he authored, claiming a bug fix. You note the modules or lines of code he changed. You then look for later changes to those same modules.
If you have an INDEPENDENT Software Quality Assurance group, that can do this kind of searching for you, your odds of living through this are a lot better. They can claim they were looking for "hot spots", modules that seemed to require a LOT of changes and that could probably benefit from a serious redesign/rework aimed at making them less obscure, and they noticed that some modules were getting double-tapped a lot.
There's a joke which goes something like this, I'm not sure of it's origins, but I heard it as a local (russian) one, so it might not be only a USAF rule.
A cadet in an air force school is trying to pass an exam and gets the following question:
"What must a strategic bomber's pilot do upon receiving a Code Red announcement?"
After some thinking, he paradoxically replies, "Go to sleep!"
"Why?!"
"According to the regulations, strategic bomber's pilot must have at least eight hours sleep before takeoff."
In Soviet Russia... RUSSIANS comment on YOU.
And at 35 hours a week, they can save money, and not count them as full time employees! $$$
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Who the hell works for 80 hours a week? These people need a serious dose of perspective.
First of all, where I live (Ontario) this is illegal. In Ontario an employer can't make you work longer than 48 hours per week, and you can't voluntarily work more than 60 hours per week. Is indentured servitude actually permitted in some US states?
Secondly, why would you want to do this?? I don't want to work 12 hours a day and on weekends. I enjoy my job and all, but screw that. What kind of naive idiots get so pumped up about coding that they'd willingly spent 60-80 hours a week doing it? Your job isn't that great.
I can count on my hand the number of times I've had to work a 12 hour day in the past 5 years. I'm not a sucker so any time I've worked those kind of hours, I have requested and received some sort of compensation.
Thirdly, If you work 60-80 hours a week on a salary, your effective hourly wage is no better than somebody doing some menial job. If you are a highly trained, intelligent code crafting guru then why let yourself be reduced to some floor-buffing burger flipping wage?
Obviously coding for 80 hours is going to result in pretty bad code regardless of what anyone here says. Anyone moderately clever can find a way to market and sell your bad code. Being forced to work 80 hours means your company has: inept project managers, no money for adequate resources, burnt out employees with bad morale, and people who possess or lack whatever qualities required to avoid 80 hour work weeks. That, rather than bad code will cause failure.
Get migraines? Trust me, caffeine *is* medicinal, especially when mixed with Aspirin (aka Anacin or Empirin compound). When you get a light-hurts, head splitting, dry-heaving, can't get up off the bathroom floor migraine going, don't bother with acetominophen. It won't touch that headache; it only makes the puke taste worse. For faster reponse, wash the Anacin down with Coke. It adds more caffeine, and the carbonation speeds up absorption (a paramedic/fellow migraine sufferer taught me that trick). Caffeine and aspirin are both vasco-dilators, which is what you need for a vasco-constrictive migraine headache.
When you got no choice, you got no choice. ^^
Basically, there are techniques you must discover to help you because these things aren't shown in school (I've told many people in schoolboards that a nice course would be "stress management"). You also need to learn to listen to yourself.
I agree however that after 2.5 days, you see ghosts. It's not really funny. You have to really think about what you're doing, check it twice and even thrice. And a coworker better not do a bad joke to you or else you are laughing yourself to your grave.
Being in the zone is a way to go well past normal hours. The anti-zone happens if you try to push too far. The key to exploiting this is to learn to be aware of when you're reaching too far and to actually stop at that point.
Given a true love of programming, certain lifestyle changes can be made to support maximum long hours of programming. If that love is absent, there's no chance.
It's worth noting that much of the above is very nearly the opposite of what conventional management wants, but nevertheless, it DOES yield maximum productivity. In some cases, business reality simply won't permit all of the above.
When making that judgement call, it is important to keep in mind that business reality is being met at bthe cost of productivity (which = money) and there's nothing that can change that. If that is understood, it may make sense to have management do most of the 'customer interfacing' so the developers can have the relaxed constraints they need to reach maximum productivity. It may even be that relaxing hard deadlines will actually result in LESS late projects.
It is also important to recoignize that not ALL developers will do well with this system. Some programmers are naturally about 10 times more productive than others. Those are the ones most likely to benefit from this. The other important factor is that the developers must have a personal interest in the project.
enough talking, let's unionise, come on, how much longer... yes the more unionised the better conditions, this is universal, and is the reason why unions were formed in the first place. australia and america led the world in unionising 100 years ago, today its the opposite, and of course the conditions are shocking as described here.....
the other point i dont see being made is that the extra hours are rightfully another persons job - where one person is working 80 hours a week, there ought to be two people working 40 hours. we are being screwed and squeezed to make up for not just a lack of planning, but the sheer unwillingness to engage adequate staff to do the jobs required, in the hope that maybe saving a few bucks by working people to death and not employing others will somehow keep a company stable.
untrue. the social human cost of burning up workers at 80 hours is far more than the cost of employing more people to do the work. its not just wages that figure in the calculations, its the health, the family, the society that matters. the rationale that it is better to slave one person instead of hire two comfortably is false, and serves only to support the mentality that the bosses's often huge bonuses are more important than the lives of their workers. the bottom line is, you will die early and your boss will live long off the sweat of your back.
dont just think - ACT! i am an aussie who is now reassured to see americans moving beyond the coldwar anticommie rhetoric into real world considerations of the need for workers to organise - based on common experience of exloitation. and for this i congratulate you sincerely!
Having thought about the relationship between drugs and work in humans and their societies for some time, I would like to extend your observations somewhat with my own experience.
In computer programming I notice there are three 'modes'. I only call them modes only because I can't think of a better name.
They are:
Brick-n-Mortar
Complexity
Creativity
Brick-n-Mortar is the simple, repetitive work that you need to do in every project. It's the tweaking of the user interface, the creation of non generic sql tables and setting permissions. It can't be made generic, it is project specific or just time consuming. The best drug for this kind of work is usually caffeine, because it's mostly boring stuuf you just want to complete.
Complexity is the system design on a macro-scale. How all the different parts fit together and interact with each other. It requires intense concentration of thought on many disparate entities and their relationships. The best drug for this work may be no drug at all. It may just be peace and quiet, meditation or relaxation. Alchohol or Cannabis or (mushies, DMT, ??) are NOT suitable for this mode.
Creativity is the part of the system that requires innovation or creation. A clever algorithm or a innovative use of an existing algorithm. Or creating a powerful and flexible framework that boosts productivity, or a feature with a high 'coolness' factor. The best drug for this mode of work may be Alchohol or Cannabis or some other drug that tends to make you inwardly reflective.
The problem I believe, is that someone will have one 'coding satori' moment under the influence of a particular drug, and will then generalise that state to all programming tasks. The overall result is that you are left with a system that can be brilliant in parts, but needs to be cleaned up by the person who follows (which on occasion has been me).
Cowardly Disclaimer: The author of this post does not engage in the taking of illegal drugs, and the above is purely academic speculation.
And why do brussels sprouts get a pass?
They taste like shit, so they must be good for you.
What I was trying to say, is that we actually work more than Americans, if you include the work in the home. The holidays are just spent on other kinds of work.
I would find it more pleasant to work overtime with what I like than having to paint my house.
Completely true. Sometimes playing with ideas and thinking unconventionally is exactly what you need, but a lot of the time you just need to focus and get stuff done. Some substances are just not good at helping you to get stuff done.
;)
*posting anonymously so my employer doesn't know their programmer is a stoner
I agree that having a fairly large and loud ego is essential to programming in a corporate environment.
Where I work, the level of computer literacy is at right about the caveman level. I got a phone call this morning because the user could not follow my easy instructions to... copy a file from one folder to another. The way I see it, if you can't copy a file, you are computer illiterate. Dealing with this requires a tremendous amount of tact (ever notice how people HATE when you call them out on their computer illiteracy?). When dealing with users, I try to be as tactful as possible.
Management is a different issue. I have gotten told in about a million different ways that what this company really likes is for people to be in the office as much as possible. Extra hours, weekends, the more the better. I ended up doing exactly ONE "death march" for this company, a massive software upgrade of the entire proprietary system -- designed, programmed, tested, completed entirely by one person (me). During this time I did plenty of weekend hours, worked from home, really tried to make that deadline. The company tried to get me to cancel a 4-day weekend I had planned, to be best man at a lifelong friend's wedding (Actual quote: "can't you ask your friend to re-schedule his wedding?"). I refused even though I feared it might lead to me being fired. It didn't, yet when my review came up my boss only wanted to talk about the 4-day weekend. Then he told me he had "never" known me to put in overtime etc. for the company. This was infuriating since of course I had put in hundreds of overtime hours. Since then I have worked almost zero overtime and have stuck as close to a 40 hour schedule as humanly possible. When my boss mentioned how I did this in my last review I told him that my 40 hours contributed more than anyone else's in the building, that after 40 hours I am pretty much burned out (who isn't?) and that I didn't intend to stay late just for the sake of appearances.
Of course, this attitude could easily get you fired, but in my case it's entirely true. If I could work somewhere where overtime was paid at time and a half or at least was appreciated and rewarded, then I would gladly put in the time. But if you are working over 40 hours, consistently, with no extra compensation or recognition, then you are getting screwed, period. Unless you have a huge salary which is contingent on working a certain amount of overtime, you should just leave at the end of the day. It's worth it.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
Obviously one can program 80 hours a week. The question is whether you should.
There are clearly two sides to the question: is it good for the programmer to program more hours? and is it good for the project for programmers to program more hours? It's not necessary to pretend that these are the same question: there are exceptionally important projects with close deadlines (see Marc Stiegler's David's Sling for a fictional example) where the end result is so important that destroying programmers is acceptable collateral damage so long as the project is completed within a very tight time frame.
So: is it good for the programmer to program more hours in a week?
On average, no. Sure there are some programmers who can maintain an 80 hour week indefinitely, but the modal programmer will suffer loss of productivity as well as undesirable physical and mental side effects after some period of extended additional work.
Studies as far back as the first decade of the 20th century have demonstrated lessened productivity and increased accident rates with 10 hour work days compared with 8 hour work days. Modern studies of stress and sleep deprivation show that losing as little as an hour of sleep a night can have an effect similar to taking one or two stiff drinks.
Personal experience suggests that there is an average threshold after which effects become more severe -- somewhere between two and four weeks of 50+ hours. That doesn't mean there are no effects earlier, it's just that the effects become more obvious with time and hours.
How about the project? Is it beneficial to the project to work more hours?
In some limited cases, yes. As productivity (output per unit time) decreases, increased work time can result in an actual increase in productive output. So if you really need to have something done next week, you can get extra work in by crunching.
Unfortunately, productivity continues to decline over time as extra hours are put in, and while there is a limit to the number of additional work hours that can be put in, there is no practical limit to the reduction in productivity -- it can go negative, and do so in spectacular fashion (insert gratutitous story about wiping out codebase or fragging development machines here).
Determining the breakeven point is hard: programmer productivity is a complex and difficult measurement that most companies are simply not willing to invest in. Programmers themselves have concerns that some artificial measure will be applied to their performance reviews. Managers who know programmers have concerns that programmer behavior will be modified to "game" any artificial measure to the detriment of some nebulous "actual productivity". As someone who's been both a manager and a programmer, I think both concerns have validity.
I could write extensively about specific measures of output, but suffice to say that it is a difficult task and there is no commonly accepted rigorous measure (especially in the games business) of programmer output, and thus none of productivity (output per unit time).
In light of this lack I fall back upon my personal experience: crunching (50+ hour work weeks) has limited utility to most projects. After only 2 - 4 weeks of crunch most programmers have lost so much productivity that they are getting 40 or less hours of "real work" done. From a project point of view, they would be getting at least as much real work done if they dropped back to 40 - 50 hour weeks, and from a personal point of view they would be much healthier and happier. And they would be saving something up for that next crunch time.
I tend to agree with the notion that there is a point of diminishing returns and that it happens for most WAY before 80 hours per week. Especially as I am back in the coding for my pay mode and 40 years old is rapidly approaching. BUT, there have definiately been times when I get in the groove and the time sails by unnoticed and 80 hours in nothing and I am getting more done that I could fathom. So there is an in the groove/zone effect that can be powerful. But it is NOT an every week kind of thing. That just leads to baldspots, pot bellies, burnout and automatic weapons in the workplace type things.
any game developer worth his salt knows that mountain dew is the drink of choice.
hence the thousands of freebies that they give out at E3 every year...
mmmm....colored sugar water...mmmm...
Gekido's Lair
But are you actually forced to paint yourself?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
My father is professor at a med school. One of the things I've often heard from the profs is about both the sheer volume of material that must be imparted to the students. One thing they tell me is that, compared to an upper level undergraduate course a med school course normally has triple to quadruple the amount of information to learn on top of which the students are required to learn it even better. I've been told about how even some students are at or near the top of their class in undergraduate studies are unable to cope. And it's not the profs in med school *want* to be mean or excessive, it's just the nature of the profession that requires it. No one wants to place their lives in the hands of a doctor who doesn't know their stuff.
Most med school classes are already large as it is; better to keep the entrance requirements high than waste time on people who aren't going to survive it anyway. Basically what I'm saying is that, from what I've heard, though the entrance requirements are tough, med-school itself is even tougher.
Regarding doctors being in short supply and expensive, I'd lay the blame on the insane medical malpractice insurance fees that are now a requirement of working in the field. Look at the situation in West Virginia for example. Doctors refuse to work there for fear of being sued into oblivion.
Haha. That is if you obey tax law. When it comes to work in the home, few people in Sweden do.
Too true. When I was young and foolish I worked 80+ hour weeks. One day while waiting for the train into work on a saturday my brain shut me down and its casing required four stitches where it hit the platform. Fortunately I didn't hit the tracks and I was only out of commission for a week. I also got half a head-count to reduce my workload.
35 hours per week
That's all well and good. But with several friends working at SAS, this is what I've observed: non-technical personnel have the 35 hours per week rule enforced. Secretaries, receptionists, etc. work 35 hours per week at SAS and are told to go home after that. Technical personnel, however, appear to be somehow exempt from this rule and work the usual industry standard 60 hour weeks with the usual rubrics of project deadlines and special one time (but perpetually repeating) requirements used as justifications.
That's actually a very interesting breakdown of the "types" of job in each project, and you're right, both in that different drugs will aid different jobs, and that people will over-generalise from a satori (hmmm, very useful reference) moment to all other moments.
Actually, using Satori as a metaphor (or perhaps not a metaphor) is also interesting. I've always thought there was a under-appreciated similarity between meditation and programming.
Although they seem to be opposites (empty your mind of all thoughts vs. thinking of as many things at once as you can), they do seem to lead in similar directions, and the experience of hack mode/flow state/whatever your preferred term is has always struck me as very, very similar to descriptions of temporary enlightenment.
The intellectual satisfaction when you suddenly "get it", at comprehending exactly how elements of a system fit together, and instinctively understanding the place of each component in the system sounds to me very like descriptions of the "joy" experienced by understanding the entire universe as one entity, and completely comprehending one's place in it.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but the two experiences certainly seem to share much in common - perhaps at opposite ends of the specrum, but the same spectrum nevertheless...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
I remember Netscape 1.0. There weren't many other browsers out at the time.... I remember Lynx, Mozilla, IE.....and I think that's about it in the beginning. So what had everyone written before?
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
The moderation of this lovely innnocent comment is funny!
It is true, but it is another reason to hate the French! And the 'we are still the most xyz in the world' that is a forgivable French trait!
No I love French people, and on the subject of a 35/60 hour week (mine ranges from 50-60 most weeks) I agree:
When you have a little too much pressure, you try and over stretch yourself, I found that for 3-4 weeks you get very productive 50,55 hour weeks, but then you have to put in a 60 to cover the same, then you drastically go down hill, and work 60 hours, but make so many mistakes - I re-wrote 3 days of code after a 60 hour week, then took the rest of the week off!
It isn't just physical limitations, but working a 60 hour week can put pressure on your OOW life. You spend less time without your partner, you see your friends less.
Over working can have serious problems, and in computing, you never clock up overtime.
Now, only in one job in computing was I confident in placing all these extra 20 hours a week as higher paid consultancy type hours [they had a scale]. The fact was, as fast as I was breaking down tasks and delegating work, there was more work to delegate.
So there you go! With my developer hat on, for some reason I work these stupid hours, and do not even consider the application of overtime to my work. It comes with the job...
[factor in about 30-40 minutes on slashdot / comics.com / extra-work email at a minimum a day and it looks better]
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com