Overworked?

One of the most abused practice of XP has been Sustainable work week. Pretty much everybody agrees it is the right thing to do, but nobody actually does it (or that’s what I’ve seen)
The XP book talks about 40 hrs work week, but most people dub it as Sustainable work pace. This gives people the ability to set their work pace at 50 hrs a week or less or whatever, but it also acknowledges the fact that people are different, and one rule can’t fit all.

I ❤ programming, so I spend a lot of time writing and thinking of writing code, and making myself a better programmer.

IMHO, Writing more code, and spending more time writing code does not make you are better programmer. It is the practice of programming by trying different approaches to a problem and experimenting with tools (and adding to your toolkit or discarding them) that makes you better. The analogy being, driving to work and home does not make you a better driver.

So I definitely do lot more than 40 hrs a week, sometimes 60 hrs a week, not sleeping by the excitement of implementing a faster way of finding Recommendations, or different way of Visualizing an interesting data set, or some silly stupid hack that has no value. I like it that way. Is it sustainable? I’ve been doing this for a long time now and have no intention to reduce it. (I know what you are thinking!!! Yes I am a pretty slow). Is it ideal, heck no. But I believe (and I may be completely wrong on this one) I’ve developed workarounds to deal with the side effects of “Unsustainable pace”

What definitely helps is doing stuff that exerts the body, like running, cycling and playing squash with friends. Fitter people are anecdotally better equipped to deal with mental stresses of work and broken code. And yeah that constant dose of mindless Telugu movies with my wife.

One of the big things that helps me is taking longer breaks from work, like going out traveling for a few weeks or months. Invariably I have come back refreshed and with new and interesting ideas. This trick always works.

What’s your strategy to cope with excess time at work?

Standups

Most teams that i have worked with have a standup every day in the morning. One issue each team has faced is what time to have the standup?  I have seen teams that  have standups as early as  8.30 AM to teams that have it as late as 11 AM. Generally speaking teams with earlier standups have lesser attendence than the later standups, This obviously is empirical, and it would be interesting to actually do this survey in teams with different standup times. I personally prefer later stand ups, that provides me the chance to turn up for a standup, that i would otherwise miss.

Typically people want it to be the first thing in the morning because it sets the tempo for the day. I disagree whole heartedly with this approach. I think that people are either morning people or evening people. And  starting early in the morning is highly overrated. It comes from cultural preferences that have drilled into our brains that mornings are productive and evenings are less so.( Same lines as how people think being Right handed is better than Left Handed). Teams should pick their time by past experiences and individual preferences rather than being dogmatic about the timing based on some baseless beliefs.

I have one other issue with standups, this is something i have seen spread recently, being late to a standup gets you a monetary punishment. I have a lot of issues with the ways standups are conducted, but the one i violently detest is monetary punishment. On my project we pay 100/- for coming late to the standup.

It immediately reminded me of the example from Predictably Irrational, where the author talks about the  Kids’ Creche which imposed fines on parents that came late. This experiment is well known, there were a couple of things i did not know about, and the author goes on to explain in a much better way than i could ever do, But i will give it a shot…

The story goes on something like, a kids creche was trying to make parents come in time to pick their kids, they figured that imposing a fine would make them puntual. On the contrary the number of people coming on time dropped. What was interesting was when the fine was removed again, the number of people coming late stayed almost the same. Dan Ariely explains it as the transition from Social Norms to Market Norms. The former is  based on friendly requests and where money is not required, stuff like asking your friend to pick up dinner for you. The latter on the other hand involves money transaction such as paying for food at the supermarket. The author posits rightly that using money is an expensive and ineffective way of motivating people. Instead relying on social norms, like having a conversation with errant person would be a lot more effective in dealing with this sort of situation.

As soon as we have turned the stand up  into a market norm, we are doomed, it will definitely bring less people into the stand up (which means less information sharing), because we put a monetary value to it. And people can payoff not coming to stand up in time. Instead, PM’s skirt the real issue by applying a fine rather than having the right conversation.