Developer Time
I find myself once more in a familiar environment though my familiarity with it makes it no less frustrating and uncomfortable. The CEO of my current company has made the statement that the software developers need to work more hours. He has said, “We’re a start-up and the developers should work like we’re a start-up.”
I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve heard this comment or something very similar. It always shocks me though you’d think by now I’d be so accustomed to it that I would expect it and its arrival would offer no shock.
I guess what shocks me the most is the naivety of the notion that a software developer can code as effectively in hour 10 as in hour 1. Perhaps because I have been managing software development for so long I just don’t have a lot of patience for this attitude. It seems like any reasonable person could intuit that a developer only has a certain number of productive hours in a day. After that threshold has been reached the law of diminishing returns kicks in and at some point the number and frequency of errors negates the additional hours worked.
Jeff Sutherland the CEO of scruminc wrote a really good post on this subject back in late 2007 called Why Time Sheets are Lamein which he shows with supporting data the adverse effect of trying to shove software developers into the clock punching box.
