At a personal level, if time permits, I probably would just work on the code continuously until it's done, once and for all--to me, one long torture is better than a poke in the arm repeatedly day after day.

At a managerial level, a project manager (or someone in that role) should recognize if a programmer is of "maintenance" type or not, and assign tasks accordingly.

A "maintenance" type is someone who has greater mental endurance and tolerate towards repetitive tasks and reading someone else's code. He might also be someone who works better on existing work than doing something from the scratch himself.

A flap side of the "maintenance" type is someone who prefers creating new things from the start.

A possible task assignment arrangement could therefore be, assigning "maintenance" work to new hires as they're probably not ready to do their own project from the scratch yet, and at the same time they could learn something from existing codes. Gradually, you could see who are better off staying at "maintenance," and who doing something else.

In reply to Re: How do you avoid "Code Burnout"? by chunlou
in thread How do you avoid "Code Burnout"? by hacker

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.