Neil on Software

Working continuous overtime is one of the worst diseases you can inflict upon your company.

1. By making changes outside of work hours (comitting code as a software dev), you're upsetting your teammates understanding of the state of the project. Ever had on-call push a 200+ LOC change after hours to hot-fix a bug, then had to have a two hour meeting next morning to figure out what changed and how to re-do the fix properly? When you make changes outside of hours, you put your teammates into that position every time.

2. You upset your teams and your companies understanding of their capacity. Because you are not beholdent to work overtime by the contract, if you decide to take a break from overtime for whatever reason, projects will start slipping with no perceptible root-cause. This is a really bad spot to put your team into.

3. You're likely to become the "rockstar". This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but can be damaging to companies that do not now how to work with them - see https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-projects/developers/the-rockstar.

4. You will eventually start burning out, there's no question about it. Burn out doesn't affect just you, it affects the company. Once you start burning out, all sorts of interpersonal and quality problems will develop that will jeapordize a (hopefully) otherwise healthy team.

5. You will ocassionally ping your teammates outside of work hours, some of whom, due to various reasons, will feel a need to respond,…

Ooo! I wrote another article talking about single date estimations:

https://neilonsoftware.com/2016/07/13/a-far-too-brief-rough-outline-of-how-to-approach-single-date-estimation/

Yes, a specific date is absolutely what every manager at every level in the organization wants. As long a payroll is issued bi-weekly, and earnings reported quarterly, the desire for a fixed date will be a thing.

The issue is, fixes dates when it comes to new software development is a fantasy. If you really, really wanted to talk to experts about hitting dates, I'm thinking that a well-funded initiative done in collaboration with 3 of the 4 branches of the U.S. military and the most respected innovator in aviation technology would be where you would go to find them. I would like to offer up the F-35 Joint Strike/Fighter program as exhibit 'A'. Turns out, despite all that funding and discipline (and threats of what will happen if you miss a deadline), they still can't hit their dates. If they can't, what hope do we have? That's not a rhetorical excuse - that's a real question.

Is the answer Agile? Personally, I don't think it is. I think Hollywood has a far better model that anyone else does (pre-production -> production-> post-production). To get new ideas, I study how specific movies are made. One of my favorite case-studies is how they did "Max Max: Fury Road" (lots of storyboards - lots and lots and lots of storyboards). "But hollywood movies are always late/overbudget!!!", yes - which is my…

That's all well and good, as long as people aren't expected to produce a month's worth of software from 40 hours of nothing but meetings.

Unfortunately, they are. Largely due to inexperience and incompetence at the managerial level (zero technical chops once you go any level above IC).

I'm well aware most software companies aren't like this, though. They'd go out of business, like this one will. Almost every key engineer (including CTO) has left this company already - six of them in the three months since I joined. One of them wrote a 10 page open letter to the CEO on the way out. Things are a real mess...

Among other gems in that open letter was a link to this article [0].

[0] https://neilonsoftware.com/2020/09/08/non-technical-development-managers-are-like-head-chefs-who-cant-see-taste-or-smell/

I stayed 2 months on a 4 million LOC qt thing, it was quite awful. Like it was said, indeed, rewrite things slowly, or maybe rewrite the most essential parts.

Or just quit that job, it might not be worth staying there.

Resistance mean it is a situation of hostage taking: https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-projects/developers/the-hostage-taker/

It's very serious and coders do this for job security. Don't accept this BS.

Soft skills every dev should know:

* https://neilonsoftware.com/soft-skills-every-dev-should-know/

This next one isn't life-changing. But, it has intriguing ideas in it, summarized from Fooled by Randomness:

* https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/fooled-by-randomness

The last link has a trove of top-tier content if you go to the articles section. Smart lad!