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When a company is bigger than about 15 people, you can longer know
intuitively who is pulling his or her weight. You have to rely on
observation and empirical evidence.
"Metrics" are a great disaster of the industry because they're so
easily faked or made vague. I wouldn't trust the spreadsheets of
project managers to be close to reality at all.
Often people look forward to all-nighters because it's a good way to
claim you're "working really hard."
I've seen many forms of fake work:
* Managers who dally over writing and re-writing emails that are of
dubious quality, or where the time spent on their edits produces
dubious reward.
* Workers immersing themselves in metrics, meetings, training, desk
organization, phone calls and other busywork.
* Teams overstating how deeply in trouble their project is, then
working several weeks of pointless overtime.
* Individuals who claim they're "swamped" and "busy" every day of the
year and can't take on new work, but are producing existing work
slowly.
All of these in my experience are signs of bad management and bad
individual work ethic. Eight hours a day is a lot of time. If you're
doing more than that, you need more people or it's bunk, but either
way, the signs of burnout will soon appear.
In my view, an intelligent manager steers away from potential burnout
by avoiding any kind of late work unless a radical, unexpected, and
unforseeable change to the project arrived in the last third of the
production schedule.
For every all-nighter I've worked, and there have been quite a few, I
can think of only a couple which produced a better result than going
home to bed, coming in at 8 and working four hard hours the next day.
I think most people work long and they work in detail in what they see
as their role, including busywork, but I'm not sure they work hard.
Hard means you're in a rush, but you're detail-oriented, and you're
slamming things off your desk as fast as you can so you can focus more
on the core roles you have, which are tied closely to ROI or support of
ROI-bearing roles (as in documentaiton).
Every time I say this, someone gets offended, and I don't mean to hurt
anyone or upset them. I'm not trying to say that every allnighter is a
loss, or every manager is screwing up, just that I think there is often
a better way that avoids the problem down the road of burnt out or
apathetic employees.
Just like an overzealous micromanager will cow employees into tacit
submission and acceptance of whatever they say, and so will create a
prevailing sense of apathy in the employee pool, a manager who delights
in late-nights and rewards time spent over effectiveness is bound to
get what he or she asked for -- mediocre work that takes ten hours a
day.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and work expands to fill the space given to it.
--- techwr-l-request -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com wrote:
> The team I work with is fairly experienced, most have pulled multiple
> all-nighters at startups, attempting to shore up the "killer app"
> that
> would make everyone millionaires.
>
> Once in a while, my boss comments on the lack of "fire" demonstrated
> by
> the folks on the team.
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