Managing Software Engineers
philip.greenspun.com
Yes, it's from 2002, but still surprisingly pertinent.
philip.greenspun.com
I genuinely enjoy my programming job, and it provides me interesting challenges. I think I am at least an average programmer, depending on where you're putting the "average" bar. But I enjoy many other things, too. I want time to read, play chess, go out places, study other fields, and spend time with friends -- and I don't even have a family and kids, like many professionals!
Given that I'm programming a minimum of 8 hours a day, why would it be a red flag that I usually prefer to spend the other 8 doing something else? I'm already spending as much time programming as all the other things I also love, combined!
It's easy. The author of that piece, at the time he wrote it, was making a shit-tonne of money hiring out programmers to large corporations on an hourly basis. He had a huge vested interest in persuading his employees that this is how they ought to be. Did/does he really believe it himself? That's another question. We only have the material that he chooses to make public to go on.
And did anyone else notice that he equated "productive" with "works long hours?"
Read up on the studies yourself - the 40 hour work week was established based on output studies of factory workers - people who, like you say, aren't doing anything complex. They still suffer from performance penalties just like everyone else, and they also eventually go into negative output mode, just like programmers.
Having done the grind work while strapped for cash, I can tell you that the allure of money and the desperation of making rent will only make you productive for so long. Everyone has different limits, but at the end of the day someone who is overworked will likely give up large sums of money just to work less.
As an employer, why can't you give your guys normal 8 hour days? It's more economical for everyone - you are getting sustainable, high output, as opposed to the illusion of working hard, while getting very little out of your employees in reality.
But then again, I don't run a successful consulting firm.
So, even assuming that simple work will allow you to get a significant long-term productivity boost working people 8 hours instead of 12, in the long run, you're going to be working with a set of people who'll likely be challenged by the work, so fatigue will cause problems if they're challenged at 8 hours/day, or you could be getting smarter work out of them if they challenged at 12 hours/day.
Of course, building the tools to automate drudgery does take some time, and considering Ars Digita apparently operated during the first .com boom, time-to-market was critical, so some of this logic doesn't apply to the original example.
Otherwise a good article, but what does this mean? That because Marketing often makes life difficult for developers, you should instead make life difficult for Marketing?
The average home cannot have a grand piano but almost any office can.
This as well. The article seems to be making good point after good point, then throws out curveballs like this.
Re: marketing, I'd imagine a lot of the time, marketing happiness verus engineer happiness is a tradeoff. Either you stick to very concrete business deadlines imposed by perceived market, making lots of engineering sacrifices along the way, or you build things at the pace set by engineering. You can certainly over-do it in either direction, but there's also a lot of workable gray area.
Most people desire a separation between work and play, and I think one ought to respect that. It's unreasonable to expect your employees to embody their job at all hours of the day - including weekends! At some point they will leave the office, and chasing them and trying to reel them back in with perks or goodies is just going to generate antagonism. You expect happy engineers yet you clearly have no respect for their personal time, how does that work out?
Even a little bit provides a huge lift to the spirits.
Any good survival books on 'Hacking your Manager' for those passing temporarily through the corporate underworld towards their first startup?