My job has been an interesting experience over the last two weeks. The development team that I manage was asked to produce a complete product for demonstration to a client in a shortened timeline. So, we compressed four months of work into eleven consecutive days, and came out with a rather spectacular product. This week we will put the finishing touches on the product and I will fly to Sydney to show it off.

To do this my dev team and I gave up our lives and lived in the office. Some days I walked out of there at 4am, and was back in just after 8am. As you can imagine this was exhausting, and during the process all of our lives were frozen in time. I missed several important events, even spending my own birthday in front of the computer at the office. That pie with sauce was a great 30th birthday tea.

I have had two days to think over the whole process, and I think I have come to some important conclusions which I feel should be remembered for the next time someone puts a development team through this sort of agonising hell.

1) Everyone has a breaking point.
Considering that we worked around the clock, it was going to happen sooner or later. Initially, working double the hours gives a great boost of productivity. But over time we all became less and less effective in their jobs. At some point it was noticeable that we were getting less done in a day than we could probably have done in a normal 9 to 5 shift.

2) Balance your customers expectations.
One of the issues that pissed me off the most was that this whole process occurred because there was a change to documents that we submitted in a purchasing process that was obviously going to cause us heat. This could have been solved if the documents didn’t lie so much with what would be available, or allowing the development team to grow with more developers to accelerate the development process. When the development team thinks the boss is the root cause of the stress they are going through, the boss will be the target of resentment. You won’t keep employees acting this way.

3) People working crunch need to be isolated.
The most rediculous process that occurs during crunch is that during the day, developers are thrown in with the other employees. Typical companies suffer from every employee thinking that his or her work is more important than the rest. During crunch time, this isn’t different, except that most of the employees who aren’t in crunch think they are still important. We lost heaps of hours dealing with retards in the office who were trying to get us to do completely irrelevant work. Thankfully between 5pm and 4am we managed to get so much work done that it made up for it. This, in my opinion, was directly a problem of the highest levels of management. In no uncertain terms all employees should be told to leave the development team alone during this time. If this cannot be achieved, the development team should be given an isolated place to work (possible offsite) that will allow them to work at their best. 

4) More than the cost of wages.
Some of us in the group managed to get a bit of extra pay for the work. Some of us didn’t. But what is rarely recognised by the powers above is that the cost of doing these hours is really far more than the actual cost of the wages. Pushing a group of developers in this way causes issues in their personal life. Family and friends get neglected and its hard for them not to question the loyalty that is being shown to the company.

5) Crunchers get burnt if ignored.
The absolute worst thing a boss can do to a development team in crunch mode is to ignore them while they work. I’ve worked crunch for several bosses, and the good ones come in at the middle of the night just to see how the team is going. It’s amazing how much of a boost this gives to a development team, as it makes them realise the bosses care. Unfortunately in the company I work for, I had to spit the dummy before anyone noticed us. This is very bad for the team, and I think it will have longer term reprocussions.

6) Employees should not be expected to care as much as an owner.
My biggest greif with the company I work for is that the top tier of management do not realise that everyone else doesn’t care about the company as much as they do. No employee should ever have to care as much or work as hard as an owner. Employees work because we earn a wage. We will work more if we are looked after more. To suggest that we should work as hard as someone who owns part of the company is totally nieve, and unfortunately has been mentioned in my time in the office. The expectation of the employee to give everything, even when the bosses manage to dip the company is a bucket of hot oil is just a terrible way to work.

OK, so that has been my thought process, and is more of a rant than anything else. I’ve learnt a lot from the process, but at the same time I have realised that this is a reoccurring problem with the company I work with, and it might be time to find another income stream. If anyone has any good ideas then feel free to let me know what’s available.