Overtime Blues - Part 1

The next subject that I want to talk about, and it's a large subject and quite dear to everybody's heart... working overtime. I might not get to all the points that I want to cover so it might span out to a few ranting blogs. Why do we do it? Work commitments? Getting ahead in the company? Caring about something and seeing it through until the end? Monetary compensation? Managers making you feel obligated to be a 'team' player? But is it worth it? I say no. I always like to escape my entire argument by saying that doing some overtime here or there is sometimes needed and necessary. But in most cases I say no. Let’s examine some of the common reasons why someone would have to do overtime. Poor/No planning. Unrealistic business/marketing commitments. Manager's over-commitment (poor planning). Scope creep. All of these are, for the most part are out of your control, as a dev. I still find it extremely tragic that as developers I see people unable to breakdown their own tasks and estimate them with a reasonable amount of reliability. And what's even more tragic is a manager trying to make time estimates without even consulting a technical person. And if it is with a technical person, it's with the WRONG technical person. Time estimates in my opinion is an art form, some companies out there have tried to quantify this process, a great article about this was written by Joel on Software. But back to the subject, overtime. In this day and age as developers we for the most part are held accountable for other people’s project decisions. The process of project decision making is 3-5 iterations outside of our scope, prior to us getting involved. And I say that's terrible. And what do we do about? Absolutely nothing. Doesn't that make you angry? Is your manager held accountable for his/her decisions or is it you that has to put in the overtime? Does the sales guy promise x,y,z prior to contacting you if this is even achievable within the timeframe? Why do they do this? Because they can... What we have to realize is that if you give in, it only perpetuates more of this type of behaviour. You have to break the cycle somehow. There has to be push back! Trust me, when there is push back from below to above, you're going to be invited to more 'decision' meetings, and self reflection meetings. Stand your ground, these are just smoke and mirror meetings where someone is trying to define what you're trying to do. And truthfully flat out tell them that there has to be a sharing of accountability on project commitments.

Tell me more thoughts on the subject? As for the post, more to come this week ;-)