Re: Overtime: the "Bad News" Warning Sign

In the latter 10 or so years of my career I made a speciality of taking on the very jobs that you would have rejected.

It paid extremely well.
It afforded me many latitudes.
For example, I made it my habit to start work at midday or a little earlier, and work until midnight or a little later. This provided sufficient overlap with the 9to5ers to ensure good communication. And sufficient alone time, free of: ringing phones or nagging emails; nearby loud discussion of last night's game or soap; meetings, stand-up or sit down; micro-managing managers and lead-from-all-sides project leaders; to allow me to be at least doubly productive as I am in a 9to5 day. (And often as not triply productive as many of my peers.)
I would work 4 days weeks or 3 week months, and at least double my usable free time.
And they picked up the tab for my evening take-outs, as well as the hotels.
There is considerable personal (and group; I was usually part of a team that took on these roles), satisfaction in bringing a behind schedule & over budget, doomed to fail project in, back on track.
Even better if you can bring it in, on or near to time & budget.

As with all aphorisms, over-simplifications and dogmas; there are always (at least) two ways to view things.

If you are charged with developing an up to 12 man-month -- 4 men/3 months; 2 men/6 months etc. -- (say) 50k-100k, data-entry or shopping cart project, for the 3rd or subsequent time, then you can, maybe, get away with a big-design-up-front-and-hope-the-implementation-works, waterfall approach to project management.

But, once you reach the scale of projects costing (multi-)millions and requiring high-10s/low-100s of developers, by the time you've researched and planned your project to the level of detail required to ensure that method succeeds, you are bankrupt!

Because your competitors brought 3 or more revisions of your vision to the market place and stole the march on you. They were probably imperfect--lacking functionality or a slick interface or both--but that improved over their 3 releases. And at that point, it doesn't matter how perfect your implementation is would have been, it won't get a look in. That's in the commercial software world.

In governmental projects, you were cancelled before you wrote your first line of code. Actually, before you even came close, because almost all government contracts call for an early proof of concept demonstration; and then frequent sometimes unannounced, proofs of progress.

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

Comment on Re: Overtime: the "Bad News" Warning Sign

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Re^2: Overtime: the "Bad News" Warning Sign by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Dec 28, 2010 at 15:53 UTC
I personally think that what you are saying, and what I am saying, is not mutually-exclusive at all. Certainly, some tasks need to be done during “other shifts,” specifically so that they do not impact the first-shift activities. (And, in an Internet that works around-the-clock, “it’s eight o’clock somewhere.”) (Reference to a Jimmy Buffett/Alan Jackson hit song.) There can indeed be great advantages to working a shift that overlaps nine-to-five. I am quite confident, BrowserUK, that you are experienced enough to have planned your own work (and/or your own team’s work) very well, even if the hours worked were unconventional. It is easy to know from hearing you “speak” that you have been around this block many times: yours is the voice of well-seasoned experience. The particular situation that I was speaking of is a different one: lack of planning, both before and during the execution of the project. (As you well know, a project that is designed to have staged-deliverables and prototype deliverables must be planned before and during its execution, even more carefully and nimbly than other projects must be.) I just had the very unpleasant experience of being close-at-hand to what turned into a one-month long train wreck. It was a very time-consuming data load process for a production system; a process that indeed would take several weeks, and it should have had two weeks to spare. But no one took the time to make sure that all of the files to be loaded were in place, that they were the correct versions, or that they were not corrupt. No one took the time to make sure that tablespaces were big enough, nor that temporary space pools would not be exhausted, even though this was a monthly process that had been done many times before. (Apparently it was always like this.) And so the train-wreck happened, I surmise, again. Steps were running for days and then crashing. One step after another after another, and it obviously could never have been otherwise (for entirely predictable, technical reasons). “This thing’s gonna blow, because it cannot possibly do anything else...” I frankly could not believe my eyes. What was the subsequent demand? You guessed it ... overtime. What possible good it would do I know not, but very single person on that team was expected to throw their lives to the wind for the duration. “Ride up to the front with our horses and lances and try to dodge the machine-gun bullets as we battle heroically save the day.” There was no planning, only reacting ... like having one’s head stuck in the middle of a gumball machine. It was the damndest thing to watch, and a certain Billy Joel song was running through my head. It happens. Frequently. I know that, for myself as for anyone else I have ever worked with, mental fatigue is a critical concern. (And as I get older, my stamina is not what it used to be.) You can get tired, and your concentration goes to hell, and you go into what I call, “stupid mode.” I know from experience that the only thing to do is to “take a backup now, and get the hell away from the keyboard.” No drinks, no coffee. Read a book and go to sleep before you do any serious damage... because you will. ./;'

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Re^2: Overtime: the "Bad News" Warning Sign
by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Dec 28, 2010 at 15:53 UTC

I personally think that what you are saying, and what I am saying, is not mutually-exclusive at all.

Certainly, some tasks need to be done during “other shifts,” specifically so that they do not impact the first-shift activities. (And, in an Internet that works around-the-clock, “it’s eight o’clock somewhere.”) (Reference to a Jimmy Buffett/Alan Jackson hit song.) There can indeed be great advantages to working a shift that overlaps nine-to-five.

I am quite confident, BrowserUK, that you are experienced enough to have planned your own work (and/or your own team’s work) very well, even if the hours worked were unconventional. It is easy to know from hearing you “speak” that you have been around this block many times: yours is the voice of well-seasoned experience. The particular situation that I was speaking of is a different one: lack of planning, both before and during the execution of the project. (As you well know, a project that is designed to have staged-deliverables and prototype deliverables must be planned before and during its execution, even more carefully and nimbly than other projects must be.)

I just had the very unpleasant experience of being close-at-hand to what turned into a one-month long train wreck. It was a very time-consuming data load process for a production system; a process that indeed would take several weeks, and it should have had two weeks to spare. But no one took the time to make sure that all of the files to be loaded were in place, that they were the correct versions, or that they were not corrupt. No one took the time to make sure that tablespaces were big enough, nor that temporary space pools would not be exhausted, even though this was a monthly process that had been done many times before. (Apparently it was always like this.) And so the train-wreck happened, I surmise, again. Steps were running for days and then crashing. One step after another after another, and it obviously could never have been otherwise (for entirely predictable, technical reasons). “This thing’s gonna blow, because it cannot possibly do anything else...” I frankly could not believe my eyes. What was the subsequent demand? You guessed it ... overtime. What possible good it would do I know not, but very single person on that team was expected to throw their lives to the wind for the duration. “Ride up to the front with our horses and lances and try to dodge the machine-gun bullets as we battle heroically save the day.” There was no planning, only reacting ... like having one’s head stuck in the middle of a gumball machine. It was the damndest thing to watch, and a certain Billy Joel song was running through my head. It happens. Frequently.

I know that, for myself as for anyone else I have ever worked with, mental fatigue is a critical concern. (And as I get older, my stamina is not what it used to be.) You can get tired, and your concentration goes to hell, and you go into what I call, “stupid mode.” I know from experience that the only thing to do is to “take a backup now, and get the hell away from the keyboard.” No drinks, no coffee. Read a book and go to sleep before you do any serious damage... because you will.