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Re: Overtime: the "Bad News" Warning Sign (Process and Quality References)

by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop)
on Dec 23, 2010 at 20:23 UTC ( [id://878866]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Overtime: the "Bad News" Warning Sign

A few quotes from Peopleware on the subject of overtime:

Overtime for salaried workers is a figment of the naive manager's imagination. Oh, there might be some benefit in a few extra hours worked on Saturday to meet a Monday deadline, but that's almost always followed by an equal period of compensatory "undertime" while the workers catch up with their lives. Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if you start sprinting in the first mile, you're just wasting time.

It has been our experience that the positive potential of working extra hours is far exaggerated, and that its negative impact is almost never considered. That negative impact can be substantial: error, burnout, accelerated turnover, and compensatory "undertime" ... When you take into account the way that the team members' differing abilities to work overtime tends to destroy teams, the case against it becomes persuasive.

They further note that Jerry Weinberg proposed an interesting psychological explanation for why so many folks propose overtime even though they know it's not going to help: "we don't work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on time".

Process References

Quality References

Extra References

See Also

Updated: using this node for "Process References" nowadays.

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Re^2: Overtime: the "Bad News" Warning Sign
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 24, 2010 at 16:32 UTC

    Peopleware is one of my must-reads, and it flags many warning signs. It has interesting opinions about open plan offices, having too many things to do, and it's amazing how little seems to have changed for the better in the past couple of decades.

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