> I was doing all-nighters and basically killing myself
I often suspect that the true goal of most time-estimation exercises is to guilt you into working unsustainable amounts of unpaid overtime.
I often suspect that the true goal of most time-estimation exercises is to guilt you into working unsustainable amounts of unpaid overtime.
I don't see the point in working all-nighters for a company unless you have a stake in the company (shares or owner). For my own company, sure I'll pull an all-nighter before an important meeting, for a company where I am one of hundreds? No thanks.
Labour laws tend to be more protective here in the EU though so no fear of being fired by refusing rediculous requests.
Haha, isn't this the truth. I work at one of FAANG as well and was curious how one of my colleagues was accomplishing so much. His output is astonishing. I checked his work profile and noticed he had commits, notes, and research actions starting at 7:00 AM and going until 1:00 AM the next day, every day, including weekends. I don't think the founder of this company ever even worked that much. I guess there's just some people who never burn out. Meanwhile, my wife gets annoyed about dinner when I work past 6 PM...
I once read there is only concrete that has either already cracked or is about to crack.
We all do this. Once. When we grow up, at ~23.
Every ten years or so I get stupid, I guess.
I guess I finally wised-up when I turned 51, we'll see if I stay that smart in a couple of years :-)
That tends to happen once every 10 years.
It doesn't tend to happen in day-to-day grunt work at an AdTech shop, pushing JIRA tickets.
Turned out he was outsourcing his work to a job-shop in India... Couldn't actually programme worth a damn.
For instance, when I was in college, I had a job that paid by the hour. I didn't need a lot of money, so I worked one day a week.
In our field, there's no option where you can opt to work four days a week, or work part time.
You would think that at some point, and employer would come up with the idea of opening up some part time positions. There's got to be thousands of talented techies who've reached a point in their life where they don't want to work 50 hours a week. But such a role simply does not exist.
It's particularly odd since a lot of us make good money. IE, my Dentist probably works 20 hours a week, and I imagine the reason he works so little is because he isn't living paycheck to paycheck.
In the US and other high wage countries, most developers are hired because of the need for maximum velocity at all costs or having them available to discuss things directly with non-technical stakeholders. Neither of these roles fit well into spending 20 hours a week knocking out bugs and well specced features.
I lead a team four days a week and it's working quite well. The other team members work five days a week. They didn't request shorter time.
It would hugely open up the field to women with caring duties if more companies would do this. Perhaps this is why they do not - I don't know.
Sorry HN! Of course I meant that it's actually just a complete coincidence that so many women leave tech after having children. We all just choose this completely on our own and childcare is not a factor in the least. There's literally nothing we could do about this completely natural and voluntary situation. It's not even worth asking the question.
Hammer it, lads. Happy to go to zero!
The difference between "full time" commitment, where the business might say "we don't care how much or how little you work, just give us results" vs where you are saying "I work for you 32 hours per week - no more no less, that's it, thank you very much" is huge. Mindblowing.
Suddenly you are not under pressure to deliver deadlines, you are only giving them 4 days a week of your time, doing your best, and that's it. You are off the hook.
I really wish they wouldn't, because I have to come along and clean up the messes they make in their fatigue induced haze. Meanwhile I just finished a project that we originally plotted as taking 18 months. It took about two once we sat down and thought about what really needed to be done, and those two were mostly slowly rolling out configuration changes.
Most of the problems I deal with are young engineers coding like the wind, adding new services, and locking the system more and more into its current state until all wiggle room is gone and it becomes a multiyear, multiteam project to modify the system semantics in the slightest way.
I like to think that most big-ish products can be divided into three equal parts, each consisting of 90% of the work. It's that third 90% that separates the decent products from the great ones.
[Yes, I can do math. I mean that you get to your original 90% goal and realize you've still got a LONG way to go.
"Problems worthy of attack / Prove their worth by hitting back" -- Piet Hein]
Anecdotally, the place I work for in the US doesn't expect or even want people to work all-nighters, if a project is that under-resourced, it needs to be halted or more resources need to be allocated. Under-resourced projects always fail and waste a lot of time and money. This is only the culture I've observed at my engineering dept though, FWIW.
If you don't think you have the money to meet the estimated project time you need to find ways to reduce the time. Sadly that leads to problems as described in the article.
The is an impedance miss match between software development and real world business reality.
A. aren't testing enough / at all or haven't given any consideration to what is the smallest change needed to deliver value
B. have serious organizational problems around coordination
C. are running a company completely unsustainably