[ryandrake]

Exactly this. I worked for a place long ago, where we had this junior guy who basically didn't have a life. He just wanted to code. He stayed late every day, and would occasionally come in on the weekends and code all day. He was not making any extra (in fact since he was junior he was probably making much less than the rest of the team). He was not angling for a promotion from what I could tell. He just liked to code and that was his entire life. Well, his manager gave him some public praise once over E-mail, basically saying the project was moving along much faster due to how productive you are. That's all it took. Suddenly, the whole team felt pressure to pull 60-80 hour weeks and burn themselves out. And we didn't really get that much more done, because it was 80 low-quality burned out, demoralized hours, not 40 high-quality hours. The team eventually disintegrated along with the company during one of the tech downturns. All that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family or hobby.

[9rx]

> All that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family or hobby.

It reads like the real problem was that the other developers fell into what developers seem to love more than anything: Pedantry. Instead of playing along with the false praise, they set out to prove the claim in the email wrong.

[pavel_lishin]

Regardless, there was a problem.

[9rx]

Yes, no doubt the person who sent the email ended up feeling a little silly when the pendants showed him.

[gedy]

There sounds a lot more issues with that team, personalities, and company vs "one guy doesn't have a family or hobby"...

[roguecoder]

This is what open source was made for.

I once had a coworker like that who hadn't taken a vacation in two years. I told him that vacation time was how the company funded his open source work, and suddenly he took his full five weeks off each year to recharge by coding different code.