> Who do you think is going to be more productive? Who's going to put in 16 hour days at crunch time?
I'm 31 years old, have been doing lots of crunch times of 16 hour days that lasted for weeks and I really hate this expectation and mentality.
I'm more productive than ever, even though I started saying NO to overtime, because fuck you. Yet, I've worked with plenty of beginners and when I say beginners, I'm talking about 5+ years of experience and I have been more productive then all of them, even though they've been more eager than me to work overtime.
The difference has been in the following areas:
1. less experienced engineers when facing a hard problem tend to slap some code in place that barely does what the feature request asks for, without thinking of the implications much, like the potential for accidental errors, or how that code interacts with the business logic already in place, or how that functionality will interact with future features already planned. And so every sprint, every release you end up reworking/rewriting/fixing stuff from previous releases, because a rookie skipped the due diligence and slapped a poorly thought out turd. As a consequence, that's why we have software development methodologies, like Scrum, or whatever agile bullshit is the latest fad, because process is required to get good results with average people.
2. no man can keep focusing for more than 7 hours per day on average. Yes, I've been able to stay "in the zone" for more than 12 hours occasionally, however the average for really good people is no more than 7 hours. The rest of the time is filled with "busy work", like pointless meetings, replying to email, reading HN and staring at the monitor stupidly. If you don't believe me, install RescueTime and marvel at the huge amounts of daily jerking off.
3. Solid work requires a well rested mind. I'm at the top of my game when I sleep well at night and I get great ideas in the periods in which I have a good social life.
4. I learn faster than any 20-something, because I have a solid knowledge base. For example it takes me about 2 weeks to become functional in any programming language, that's because I've already worked in production and played with about a dozen thus far and in regards to paradigms, I've already worked with them all.
> No wife or children.
5. Pity that you view that as a liability. As a father of a 4-year old boy, I can tell you, a child is the greatest motivation you could ever have, which is why I trust people with children at home more than I trust a 20-something that hasn't felt what true responsibility is like.
I'd like to know where you work that you can say "fuck you" to overtime during crunch period. Because, you know, I might like to work there. Seriously, contact me. :) My email is in my profile.
This is what I guessed before I started following profile data traces:
* bad_user would be based "anywhere outside of Silicon Valley".
* You wouldn't be.
I was right. (bad_user is in Romania, according to his LinkedIn.)
That's not to say it's easy to blow off demands of overtime outside of Silicon Valley either (I've heard horror stories about game companies), but the tech companies that you can do it at seem much more common.
It may simply be founder/executive age. When the CEO has to go coach Little League, he loses any moral high ground he had for saying you can't go play with your kids.
Yes, I'm in Romania, but I've been working exclusively with Sillicon Valley companies and have been working within startup environments for the last 5 years.
Being able to say NO is not a matter of where you work, but rather one of actually saying NO. It may not work well of course, your managers and peers might not like that, the secret being to not be at the bottom of the chain - as in, you have to be reliable and capable and work on hard enough problems as to not be easily replaceable. If you can prove that you're as good or even better than somebody doing overwork (which is entirely possible because of the reasons I outlined), then nobody will mind, as in the end it's all about the value / artifacts produced, not about the lines of code written and not about the number of hours worked.
And in my oppinion, if you can't produce value while working regular hours, then working overtime won't help anyway. And if you can't produce value with overtime, do you think your boss will keep you hired just because you're a "hard worker"? The market really doesn't care about that and your boss/manager would be an incompetent if he thinks otherwise.
Speaking of market forces, it's a mistery to me how you Sillicon Valley based developers, that live at the horse's mouth so to speak, can't easily switch to jobs that you like in case you're working in environments full of jerks. I mean, even if everybody expects you to work overtime or to do things you don't like, you can always build your own startup for Christ's sake, something that I (being outside of the US) can't easily do.
>Being able to say NO is not a matter of where you work, but rather one of actually saying NO.
That's been my experience. Companies will push and push until you say no. After that they may not give you 30% raises every year, but they're not going to fire a productive employee who refuses to put in long hours.
Eh, my personal experience has been that no one actually asks you to stay late for anything. A couple of people seem to do so without being asked, but if a deadline is missed, the reaction is generally, "Well, let's examine the process for what we're doing wrong. Are we overcommitting? Were the specifications wrong? Are the engineers being randomized too much? Did we change the specs midway through?" Etc. It's never "Oh, you didn't put the extra hours in."
In the mid '90s I had a job working in a company doing logistics software. Every Friday about 2:00 my manager would come around and say "We're really behind on our delivery, so the team is coming in tomorrow for a half day. I'll buy everyone pizza for lunch."
On Saturday, of course, things wouldn't go as expected. Many times we were still there at midnight, and he came around asking us to stay for just one more hour so we could help test the latest build. Then there were more problems, so he'd ask us to come in on Sunday. For just a half day.
This happened probably three weekends out of four the first year I was there. It got to the point people were taking Friday off because they figured each hour of vacation was actually worth three hours.
So I came to the realization it was either put my foot down or find another job, so one Friday I went into his office and said "Don't even ask me to come in on a weekend. Ever again." I thought it might cost me my job, but that was the end of it.
I'm 31 years old, have been doing lots of crunch times of 16 hour days that lasted for weeks and I really hate this expectation and mentality.
I'm more productive than ever, even though I started saying NO to overtime, because fuck you. Yet, I've worked with plenty of beginners and when I say beginners, I'm talking about 5+ years of experience and I have been more productive then all of them, even though they've been more eager than me to work overtime.
The difference has been in the following areas:
1. less experienced engineers when facing a hard problem tend to slap some code in place that barely does what the feature request asks for, without thinking of the implications much, like the potential for accidental errors, or how that code interacts with the business logic already in place, or how that functionality will interact with future features already planned. And so every sprint, every release you end up reworking/rewriting/fixing stuff from previous releases, because a rookie skipped the due diligence and slapped a poorly thought out turd. As a consequence, that's why we have software development methodologies, like Scrum, or whatever agile bullshit is the latest fad, because process is required to get good results with average people.
2. no man can keep focusing for more than 7 hours per day on average. Yes, I've been able to stay "in the zone" for more than 12 hours occasionally, however the average for really good people is no more than 7 hours. The rest of the time is filled with "busy work", like pointless meetings, replying to email, reading HN and staring at the monitor stupidly. If you don't believe me, install RescueTime and marvel at the huge amounts of daily jerking off.
3. Solid work requires a well rested mind. I'm at the top of my game when I sleep well at night and I get great ideas in the periods in which I have a good social life.
4. I learn faster than any 20-something, because I have a solid knowledge base. For example it takes me about 2 weeks to become functional in any programming language, that's because I've already worked in production and played with about a dozen thus far and in regards to paradigms, I've already worked with them all.
> No wife or children.
5. Pity that you view that as a liability. As a father of a 4-year old boy, I can tell you, a child is the greatest motivation you could ever have, which is why I trust people with children at home more than I trust a 20-something that hasn't felt what true responsibility is like.