Shorter hours in software

(continued from previous page)

the same amount of work as those who put in 36 or 37 hours.

"There's nothing to be gained from the extra hours," he said. DeMarco argues that there are limits to how much people can churn out without adequate breaks, and companies with cultures of long days tend not to run meetings in a disciplined fashion.

DeMarco's logic makes perfect sense to Fog Creek Software founder Joel Spolsky. It would be rare to find Fog Creek's five full-time employees working more than 40 hours a week, Spolsky said. Despite--or perhaps because of--these traditional hours, revenue at the maker of bug-tracking software has more than doubled every year since its inception five years ago.

"You don't see the cars in parking lots all night. You don't see people sleeping at the office."

--Laura Roden
CEO, Silicon Valley
Association of
Startup Entrepreneurs

In Spolsky's view, pushing software developers to work long weeks for an extended period risks "negative hours" that actually cost the company. "Your productivity goes down," he said. "You start making mistakes because you're tired."

Spolsky knows a thing or two about long work hours from a stint in the early 1990s at Microsoft, where he worked for a time on the MSN product. "It was standard operating procedure to stay through dinner," he said.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how work hours have changed at the company. In a statement, the software giant said it does not have standard work hours, and hours change for various employees as products go through different phases. "These hours are typical for the software industry, and Microsoft is no different," it said.

Microsoft also said it "realizes that a good work/life environment fosters passion and creativity at work. We are dedicated to the success of our employees and, as such, provide them with a number of tools and resources to help them manage their lives at work and at home."

Flexibility on the rise
One tool Microsoft and others are using to help workers meet family demands is letting employees access computer networks remotely.

"The single biggest improvement to many people's lifestyles has been the fact that working from home is more commonplace," said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at research firm RedMonk. "Many major software vendors support and even encourage this practice, and it's having a major impact on the quality of life for employees while actually increasing the hours that they work."

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

--Tom DeMarco
Principal, The Atlantic
Systems Guild

Employee burnout and less job security also may factor in coders cutting back their workdays, said Diane Berry, an analyst at research firm Gartner. There's a "realization that if the company is going to have layoffs, many will do so irrespective of how hard people worked in the past," she said.

Microsoft's Barr, for one, is happier with his shorter schedule. Continuous 50- to 60-hour workweeks throw one's life off kilter, he said. "You're always missing dinner with your family, or you're always thinking that you should be at work," he said.

Employees in the software industry have seen their share of trouble in recent years, ranging from massive layoffs to the offshore threat. Amid the gloom, shorter hours are a development that's quite literally sunny for coders--they now have more time to spend in the great outdoors, away from their cubicles.

Years ago, when he was working on the Windows NT operating system, Barr canceled a weekend rafting trip with friends just in case he might be needed for any coding emergencies. As it turned out, nothing went wrong with the software. But Barr still missed out on the experience. "I wouldn't do that now," he said. "And I don't think I'd be asked to."

[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