I'm sure there have been a lot of studies on this, but similar occurences in my life have taught me this..
It's all about quality of life. Are you getting out of it more than what you are putting in?
High workload can be sustained with quality for short to medium durations if there is a driving force inside of the individuals doing the work. Do you feel like you are doing something really really important? [kissass]I'm sure the guys who started slashdot put in a lot of 15 hour days[/kissass] to get it up and running they way they wanted it. I doubt, however, they had a manager referring to balls to get them to stay and do more work.
While lack of sleep can be overcome in a relatively short amount of time, lack of motivation cannot. Lack of motivation is a virus that is not directly measurable, and has a long gestation period. It usually starts with one or two people suggesting the currrent situation now sucks, and how much better it was before. This is extremely infectious. Soon it is the manager that sucks, then the project itself, and then the whole company.
There are lots of running gags about how managers don't get IT employees (re: Office Space). These gags are only as funny as they are true. Hey, if you knew what code you were going to write beforehand, don't you think you could just sit down & type it out? Or even better, write a program that can write code for you based on feeding it business cases? Development is both left-brained and right-brained; both logical and creative. Lack of motivation affects both sides.
When you stop caring about the code you write, you start doing things in a way that will directly cost more. A problem that would have cost a penny to fix in business requirement stage costs more than a dollar in development. I'd further suggest that it will cost more than a hundred dollars in application sustainment over its lifespan.
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I'm sure there have been a lot of studies on this, but similar occurences in my life have taught me this..
It's all about quality of life. Are you getting out of it more than what you are putting in?
High workload can be sustained with quality for short to medium durations if there is a driving force inside of the individuals doing the work. Do you feel like you are doing something really really important? [kissass]I'm sure the guys who started slashdot put in a lot of 15 hour days[/kissass] to get it up and running they way they wanted it. I doubt, however, they had a manager referring to balls to get them to stay and do more work.
While lack of sleep can be overcome in a relatively short amount of time, lack of motivation cannot. Lack of motivation is a virus that is not directly measurable, and has a long gestation period. It usually starts with one or two people suggesting the currrent situation now sucks, and how much better it was before. This is extremely infectious. Soon it is the manager that sucks, then the project itself, and then the whole company.
There are lots of running gags about how managers don't get IT employees (re: Office Space). These gags are only as funny as they are true. Hey, if you knew what code you were going to write beforehand, don't you think you could just sit down & type it out? Or even better, write a program that can write code for you based on feeding it business cases? Development is both left-brained and right-brained; both logical and creative. Lack of motivation affects both sides.
When you stop caring about the code you write, you start doing things in a way that will directly cost more. A problem that would have cost a penny to fix in business requirement stage costs more than a dollar in development. I'd further suggest that it will cost more than a hundred dollars in application sustainment over its lifespan.