After years of dealing with these kinds of clusterf*cks, I take a different tack. Deadlines that are crazy are the result of poor planning, usually 2-3 levels above me. So, I refuse to cover for their mistakes. I will work hard, and I will make a good-faith effort to make the deadlines, but I will not ruin my life or my family's life for them. Life is too short and there are too many jobs out there that pay well-enough.

I came to this conclusion after I worked over 100 hours in a week (including 18 hours on my wife's birthday) to get a major release out for a company that laid off their entire development staff the next Friday. We were laid off because we asked for something completely unreasonable - time to design. Not only that, but we were allowed to interview for our jobs, but only half of us would get it back. After that experience, I realized that it simply didn't matter.

When I do have to work against a deadline, I follow the "Basic Principles"TM:

  1. Always code the smallest portion that will work at any given time.
  2. Build on successes.
  3. CVS is my personal savior.
  4. Testing, even if it's just basic smoke-testing, is more important than development.
  5. Test every single change, one at a time.
  6. Have a clean development environment that no-one else can mess with.
  7. Spend the time to make the computer do as much of your work for you as possible. The investment will always pay off tenfold in the first week.
  8. Don't sweat the small stuff, and it's all small stuff.

Yeah, a lot of those principles sound like XP, but I don't follow the XP paradigm. XP is just a codification of the "Basic Principles"TM.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose

In reply to Re: Problem-solving Under Pressure: Noting the Proportion of Knowledge, Skill, and Chance by dragonchild
in thread Problem-solving Under Pressure: Noting the Proportion of Knowledge, Skill, and Chance by ccarden

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.