Comments on: Shorter hours in software

Famously long workweeks are shrinking as management improves and employees focus on life outside the cubicle.

[bjbrock]

Pardon me if I don't feel sorry for programmers

working 50 - 70 hrs. a week. As a technician, there are many such weeks with those hours. Why? Because the programmers products keep getting lousier and lousier. And just keeping their trash up and running is a monumental chore.

I think that there is software available today to do anything you could want. It may only work half the time, though. I think these programmers need to fix their junk and then all find other lines of work. We could get along with the software already out there. Any new stuff will just be a bigger piece of trash and more headache.

If their stuff doesn't work, why are they working on new stuff instead of fixing what is out there?

[C.Schroeder]

40 hours max for everyone

Nobody should be working more than 40 hours per week in any profession, period (especially health care). If you are required to work more, then it is a staffing problem that needs to be addressed by management. This problem isn't limited to just the software industry.

[C.Schroeder]

Macho programmers

Maybe the macho programming environment of the dot.com boom is partly responsible for the decline in women studying Computer Science in recent years?

[Ubber geek]

Science in recent years

http://www.analogstereo.com/rover_45_owners_manual.htm

[Marcus Westrup]

Management still doesn?t get it

Coding is not a traditional job; it is as much an art form as a discipline. Good programmers don?t work well 9 to 5, the creative process happens in spurts.
From my experience a session can involve staring at a screen for days trying to get around a problem, getting an idea and pouring out the talent all in one long push. That might mean a 30 hour stint without food or sleep, followed by crashing for a few days. And then some grunt work to clean things up.

To put this in perspective: The 9 to 5 programmers I?ve know in the past are still working 9 to 5. The others are running their own companies.

Wasting Time at Work - Results of a Study Conducted by the Government

In companies that have a lot of overtime, they waste a lot of hours during the workday,"

Agreed. According to http://www/ch4nce.com, lots of people are wasting time by gambling online while at work. The study is here: http://www.ch4nce.com/story/2005/2/22/203725/371

[qazwiz]

Another reason for Changing Hours

Twenty five years ago the programming methods were vastly different. When you wrote a program you were given a list of what needed to be accomplished and pretty much carte blanche there after. The system had each programmer writing in their favorite style and method. the key phrase "document your work" was just emerging and commenting in programs varied widely. We quickly learned that comments weren't supplimental but rather KEY to good programming so a revisited program could be quickly understood. But we still did most everything even when it had to interact with another program the only consistency was what went in and what was supposed to come out. A new program for each machine, optomized to use the precious resourses of memory and storage,(remember reel to reel tapes?)(this created the memory saving practices that later gave us the Y2K fraud) this meant the program on your machine was entirely recoded if it was to run on mine. Each program was effectivly started from scratch.

The change to drivers that run hardware,(small programs that give identical output from identical input) allow for common ground to programmers for the various flavors of a machine

Likewise the programming languages have evolved too. Few if any comercial programs are written in machine code which changes with each CPU. Higher level programming languages allow a program to be ported from system to system, sometimes with little more than a recompile, and the Object orination allows a more complex style to be expressed in a few words that use to take code that looked like spaghitti, (if it worked you couldn't figure out why).

Microsoft displays the convience of the new programming style. The infamous Longhorn has reciently been announced to be void of at least three sections of its original intended system. This likely was accomplished by just commenting out a handful of lines that said #INCLUDE and recompiling thus excluding them from the final product.

Likewise current programing, when done modularly, can also be included or excluded with ease.

No more hairpulling sessions(for those of us who still have hair:))you just check the input and output of each module. Since the module is common for its function, other programs can also use the function. resulting in a savings in programming and debuging time.

DON'T REINVENT THE WHEEL
This is why Open Source is the future of the industry. Use the widgets you need and only write what isn't available elsewhere.

When you eliminate the redundent redundency of repeated repetion you have more time for other, more important, activities