| Let's suppose I was a manager who only cared about line go up. And let's suppose I was able to think about second-order effects. What would I do? I would care about not burning out my programmers. Burned-out programmers program slower, not faster. Slower doesn't make line go up. Sure, I could get faster... for a week, maybe two. After that it's counterproductive. If I don't really need it, right now, then I shouldn't do it. Same thing with workers leaving. Sure, I could hire more, but training costs. I spent a lot of money getting the ones I have now to learn what's going on well enough to be effective. If I care about line go up, I don't want to lose those people. Extreme Programming (XP) was all about going as fast as possible. One of their rules was "Never work overtime longer than one week in a row." Why? Because programming isn't an assembly line. Tired people miss things. They write more bugs. They just work slower. If you want to go as fast as possible, be rested. When you're tired, go home. Get some sleep. Come back with a brain that works. Look, a decent human being should have some empathy for other human beings. But even a manager with no empathy whatsoever, if they understand, still shouldn't be making their programmers work crunch time except in very short, rare amounts. The problem isn't just managers who only care about line go up. It's managers who do so in a clueless way. |