“The Sun hasn't Set yet”: Is it worth forcing programmers to work 80 hours a week
/ photo by Joshua Blount CC
In our blog on Habré we write about how cloud services are used and what spectrum of possibilities IaaS has . We also touch on the topic of effective development of services and applications, for example, last week we published a material in which we gave some tips to managers on how to effectively interact with the development team.
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Today we would like to touch on the topic of working hours. One of the users of the social service Quora asked a question that gave rise to a heated discussion among developers. He tried to figure out how to get programmers to stay in the office 80 or more hours a week. We were interested in this topic and we decided to see what the developers themselves think about this.
Superficial glance
People far from developing software have given the author of the question standard tips for increasing employee motivation for overtime work. Managers were recommended to create conditions in the office that programmers would not want to leave: free food, exercise equipment, a place to sleep, shower, entertainment. According to the participants of the discussion, this approach works especially well for bachelor programmers, for whom life in such an office will be more attractive than living at home.
The low productivity of the developers was also attributed to the fact that the team does not have a strong and authoritative leader who inspires her by her example. Solving the problem is simple - you need to attract a project manager who would understand programming and infect the development team with enthusiasm. Of course, if management wants staff to work 80 hours a week, this person should work as much, if not more.
If a company practices payments with equity instruments, then the amount of remuneration should be decent - at least comparable to the employee’s salary. But if the management wants to achieve increased productivity, then the remuneration should be appropriate - double, triple, tenfold salary, depending on the abilities of the employee.
Many have noted that the developer himself will work to exhaustion, if he solves an interesting problem. If the project is tedious and routine, a person needs only to be motivated correctly, to submit a boring task in a different light - the developer himself will begin to carry it out with furious zeal.
An employee has an internal motivation if he realizes that he is working on a socially useful project, for example, on cancer diagnosis technology or a fingerprint recognition system. In this case, the developer will not need external motivation.
And if you dig deeper?
However, the share of answers presented above is extremely small. The majority of responding programmers saw in the question a much deeper underlying reason - the problem of evaluating labor and respect for subordinates.
Most people say that there is no need for programmers to work 60–80 hours a week to achieve optimal productivity. And all because productivity is not identical to the time spent in the office. A programmer can sit in an office and 100 hours a week, but what is the use of it, if more than half of the time he is busy with abstract activities, creating the illusion of a hectic activity?
If the manager assesses the work of the developer with spent hours - he is inexperienced, which means that he can be deceived. A smart developer will not refuse to offer time-based work if he knows that he can complete the project much faster than the regulated deadlines.
It is noteworthy that a person who is unaware of programming will not distinguish a working programmer from a pretending one. The same goes for paying for the amount of written code - people far from software development do not know that even the simplest operation can be described with an arbitrarily large number of lines.
The time of the programmer is difficult to assess. He can sit all day on the Internet, because he has no inspiration, and in the evening, washing himself in the shower, come up with a working code. Inspiration can come at night at the weekend, so the developer will have to work in his personal time, which the employer is unlikely to pay.
Also, programmers complain that the leadership is not able to adequately assess their work. The manager may ask to add a new button in the application, not realizing that there are hundreds of lines of code and hours of work behind it. If the programmer is familiar with the task, and he wrote the code for a couple of days, relying on past experience, paying him only for the time worked is unfair and offensive. Employers should understand that when assessing the value of labor, one must take into account not only the time spent in the office, but also experience and skills.
On this subject there is a bearded anecdote, which was shared by one of the developers who answered the question:
The man had a car, and one day she broke down. He tried to repair it on his own, but he failed. He turned to different mechanics, but none of them succeeded. But once a car mechanic volunteered to repair the car, asking for it ten times more than usual. The man agreed. Then the mechanic took the nut and, without thinking twice, put it somewhere under the hood. The car started up.
“It will cost $ 1,000,” said the mechanic.
- You are joking? You worked only three minutes! - the man was indignant.
To which the mechanic replied:
- Should I get the nut back?
There is another variation of this story:
One woman asked Picasso, then still a little-known artist, to paint her portrait. The master in 30 seconds sketched an image. And said:
- Someday this masterpiece will cost a million dollars
- A masterpiece? You have spent only 30 seconds to write, - the woman was surprised.
“My dear, I spent 30 years learning to create masterpieces in 30 seconds,” Picasso replied.
To score 80 hours, a person will have to work 12 hours almost every day. In the week of 168 hours. Of these, 56 hours we spend on sleep, 7 hours - on the way to work, 80 - to work, about 17 - to prepare and consume food, another 7 hours goes to household chores. How much time is left to communicate with family, play sports, rest, self-development? 30 minutes a week! 5 minutes a day!
MD.com Technology Director Brian Fox (Brian Fox) shares his bitter experience: “I worked for people who didn't care about my personal life. When I wanted to leave, they did not understand why I wanted to do this, they assured me that they loved me and offered an increase in remuneration and improved working conditions. ”
Yes, the Internet is full of stories of developers who in paints describe long sleepless nights and liters of coffee drunk. And they are quite true to themselves. But the developers have worked in excess of the norm not all the time, but for a limited period of time.
Studies show that recycling is justified in short-term projects. However, after several weeks of emergency work, employee productivity inevitably decreases. Short-term project is comparable to the sprint, while the usual work - with a marathon.
A 40-hour work week is considered a benchmark, because in 8 hours a day a person manages to reach his peak performance, but does not have time to “exhaust”. Peak performance is reached approximately 2 hours after the start of the working day - this is the time for “overclocking”.
2 hours before the end of the working day, productivity drops, a person begins to be distracted, talk with colleagues, make plans for the evening. Thus, we work about 4 hours a day, not official 8.
In addition, the number of accidents at work increases significantly if the working day exceeds 8 hours. A programmer’s work cannot be called dangerous, however, by working overtime every week, a tired employee may have an accident on the way home or another unpleasant situation.
/ photo by Nathan CC
Programming is a creative and at the same time monotonous and exhausting work, and lack of rest kills creativity in a person. A tired developer begins to remember the names of functions longer, becomes absent-minded, it is harder for him to make technical decisions.
This leads to the appearance of numerous errors in the code and bugs in the program (the developers state that the number of bugs increases approximately 2-3 times, after a long time of work). It is unlikely that an employer would benefit from a situation in which, in addition to overtime work, you have to pay for debugging time.
So how can you increase productivity in order to close projects quickly, but not “sit on the hump” of the development team? There is a solution - hire more developers. If you want programmers to work 80 hours a week, increase the number of a team that works 40 hours a week twice.
It is worth looking at even more experienced programmers who can do the same amount of work as novices, but in less time. The book The mythical Man-Month, which describes the development of IBM OS / 360, describes how the company selected developers with a performance ten times greater than that of the most unproductive staff.
It should be noted that when hiring programmers there must be a person who is able to assess their skills, which do not depend on such factors as the appearance of the person and the name of the educational institution he graduated from.
Highlight key and minor tasks in the programmer’s activities so that he can concentrate on the first ones. Remove micromanagement from the development team and keep business rituals (meetings, meetings, reports) to a minimum.
There is a paradox: if a developer communicates with management - he doesn’t work, if a developer sits down at a meeting, he doesn’t work, but if he discusses programming with his colleagues - he works.
Conclusion
It is important to remember that application developers are a category of workers to whom a special approach is needed. Do not force them to work overtime all the time - it will only create the illusion of productive activity. However, this statement is true in relation to other professions.
Managers should understand that their subordinates are also people with their own problems, desires, families and friends. Creating a trustful and friendly atmosphere in an organization with a competent selection of personnel and having a worthy goal will solve most of the company's problems (depending on the internal environment), including the problem of labor productivity.
PS Interesting materials from our blog:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/306216/
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