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Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work
so sue mee writes "There's a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It's the single most expensive way there is to get the work done. When used long-term, Crunch Mode slows development and creates more bugs when compared with 40-hour weeks. Evan Robinson has an article at the International Game Developer's Association site talking about the harsh realities of crunch time, and why the gaming industry should stop using it." From the article: "It is intuitively obvious that a worker who produces one widget per hour during an eight-hour day can produce somewhere between eight and 16 widgets during a 16-hour day. As we've seen, that's the essential logic behind Crunch Mode's otherwise inexplicable popularity. But worker productivity is largely dependent upon recent history."
Quite true. And one of the mistakes management makes is hiring people who can't or won't estimate correctly. On prefectly reasonably well-run projects I've been on, things don't get done because some hot-shot lone coder tells management he (and it's always been guys in my experience) can do in half a day what will actually take 3 days from start to completion of integration and testing. Sometimes they just plain don't actually know how long things take. Often, the only portion of the task they think of as taking time is typing time. These wishful thinkers typically type in the change they think is right and check it in and call it done.
If this sounds more like the coder's fault, let me assure you it's not. Miss an estimate once or twice, OK. Nobody is perfect, you learn and move on. Consistently fail to estimate correctly and management needs to take notice. Either pull that person out of the critical path (so missed deadlines don't hurt so bad) or have someone else who has shown better estimating ability size the task and use that number.
If, after 12-18 months of work, management is still letting someone who makes committments he can't keep blow the project's schedule, that's pretty much professional malpractice in any real profession.