• Pjrz (unregistered)

    Guess the secret is out.

  • Cronker (unregistered)

    More the zeroth but less than second comment

  • someone (unregistered)

    "Your secret's safe with me," Rina said, copying the line and pointing her browser to thedailywtf.com

  • Derek (unregistered)

    So you're in a position to go to their company and rat on 'Rusty'? No, I think the secret is pretty safe.

  • Brisbe (unregistered)

    I may have submitted, during my training period, code that included the line: 1.ToString(); I still do not know what fugue state I was in when that happened.

  • that other guy (unregistered) in reply to someone

    Seems legit...

  • (nodebb)

    18-hour days ==> outside the hours when public transport actually works ==> See Figure 1.

    But also...

    18 hour days ==> Illegal where I live. And anyway that would make two days per week = the whole week's working hours.

    But also...

    Even if I lived right next to the office, God forbid, 18 hour days ==> See Figure 1.

    			---------------------------
			!            -            !
			!           { }           !
			!           | |           !
			!           | |           !
			!        .-.! !.-.        !
			!      .-!  ! !  !.-.     !
			!      ! !       !  ;     !
			!      \           ;      !
			!       \         ;       !
			!        !       :        !
			!        !       |        !
			!        |       |        !
			!                         !
			---------------------------
				  Figure 1.
  • rosuav (unregistered)

    Your secret's safe? Must be some new meaning of the word "safe" of which Arthur Dent was not previously aware...

  • (nodebb)

    Yesterday, i asked for integer addition. I didn't get that yet but integer equality is great, too!!!

  • Dude (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    Glad you're able to cap your work week to 36 hours. Not everybody has that luxury. It's not unheard of for developers to have to put in 80 hour weeks in times of great importance, especially in less well-managed organizations and/or startups.

  • Kashim (unregistered) in reply to Dude

    My current record is a 115 hour week, but that included 2 trans-Atlantic flights during which I was mostly sleeping.

    Meh, he was just preparing for some idiot to change it to a float down the road, or so tired he forgot it was an int.

  • William F (unregistered)

    TRWTF is finding this in code review and not while delving in a legacy codebase years later.

  • (nodebb)

    That line got caught before going too much further

    If the line didn't get "caught", the code would still have performed in exactly the same way. Sure, it's worthy of a question in code review in the lines of "what were you thinking" but it doesn't introduce different behaviour or a bug per se. All possible unit tests would have passed also that would pass with the "improvement". It's production ready.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Dude

    It's not unheard of for developers to have to put in 80 hour weeks in times of great importance, especially in less well-managed organizations and/or startups.

    Let me fix that for you:

    It's not unheard of for developers to be punished for their management's incompetence, especially in less well-managed organizations and/or startups.

    If you're working 80 hour weeks, somebody fucked up somewhere, and you are paying the price.

  • RLB (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    At which point:

    • get another job;
    • tell your manager's manager why;
    • join a union. (No whining about unions from countries where the last point is widely derided, please. Feel free, if you're in that situation, to replace it with:
    • start a union.)
  • The Truth (unregistered)

    Stephen hawkings killed stan lee

  • Little Bobby Tables (unregistered) in reply to Brisbe

    I've seen things you wouldn't believe, based on this sort of paradigm:

    String errorString = new String ("Error occured in BadModule" + errorCode + "Report unexpalined bug to developers").toString();

    except with even more spelloes.

  • Little Bobby Tables (unregistered) in reply to RLB

    "Yes but, yes but, unions make it more difficult to fire people!"

    "And your problem with that?"

    "Well, one day I might be a boss, and I don't want it to be difficult to fire my staff!"

    "Okay, and where do you stand as regards taxation?"

    "We must totally not tax the rich! Because I'm going to be rich one day, and I don't want to be taxed!"

  • Brian (unregistered) in reply to Dude

    It's unheard of for me to work 80-hour weeks. 10 hours a day is my limit, and even that is rare. A good manager knows that any more than that just leads to burnout and all the problems that come with it, as evidenced by this article. I guess I've just been fortunate enough to work for companies that actually respect my personal time (or consider me indispensable enough to put up with my insistence on respecting my personal time).

  • Anon -- because (unregistered)

    I've worked 80-hour weeks. In fact I just finished one, with ten other people, complete with the dedicated meeting room and pizza delivery and people crashing out on couches. In fact 80 hours is a lower bound.

    It wasn't management's fault, though, and they paid for the pizzas, and they will pay for the overtime and probably for a bonus.

    It was someone's fault, sure. We know whose fault it was. That person is no longer working for the company.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Little Bobby Tables

    More like:

    "But the scientific evidence shows that unions have zero effect, but all the costs, in a competitive market."

    Which, admittedly, most people know subconsciously rather than explicitly.

  • DrPepper (unregistered)

    When I'm working with power tools, I know when to stop. When I start being less careful, and doing less planning of my cuts, and worrying just a little bit less about cutting off my fingers, I stop and put the tool down and go inside for a refreshing beverage. Because not stopping at that point is dangerous.

    A lot of people (managers) don't understand that at some point, software engineers go from being positively productive to negatively productive -- actually writing code that will later need to be remediated or removed; producing negative work. I also know where that point is, and I get up from my desk and walk around for a while.

    One sign of a senior developer is understanding when you've reached that point, and stopping work at that point. Because going on is just going to cause problems for everyone.

  • (nodebb)

    Oh ye almighty zealots, who always know how much time it will take to finish that next release, and who never experience any unexpected issue along the way! To heck with the miserable customer, who does not deserve to have the product at the promised time, or yeah, even at all! No force in heaven or earth will ever cause you to work beyond the mandated maximum hours, beyond which even the most energetic and callow among you shall surely perish!

  • Chris (unregistered)

    I always notice the point where I've been working too long, and it's usually comes at the realisation that I've spent the last 2 hours going round in circles trying to find and fix some bugs in my logic which I can't for the life of me work out. Then I get some sleep, and in the next morning the problem gets solved in under 5 minutes, and it will be some stupid little typo.

    I can barely do more than 9 hours in a day, 10 at a stretch, so long as I only do 7 the next day. My work is a combination of programming and maths, so it doesn't take long for the brain to wear itself out. I'm grateful that my work doesn't expect me to pull 60+ / 80+ / whatever stupid unreasonable number+ hours per week.

  • Decius (unregistered)

    I've had 86-hour work weeks. It was in shift work, so only some of the weeks were that long; the average week was merely 60 hours.

    But that was with 12 hour shifts, not 18.

  • sizer99 (google) in reply to mozzis

    As other people have said, that is all because management f@#$ed up. What are you doing promising a delivery time to customers when something fundamental isn't working yet? Failing to manage. Yes, I will do the 60 hours sometimes - sometimes because we're doing something really cool and I want to, but usually because management f@#$ed up. 80 hours is just abusive and counterproductive. You're just there to look like you're doing something when those last 20 hours are just making things worse.

  • Pedro (unregistered)

    "18 hours days", you mean, you get shorter days? Makes sense, time is really crunched then...

  • Monte (unregistered)

    The code could actually be simplified further.

    The "count" variable isn't even needed.

    See:

    if(stackRepository.getQueryCount(queryPredicate) == 1) { stackEngine.process(); }

  • RLB (unregistered) in reply to mozzis

    @moziss: there's a difference between working reasonable overtime once in a while and getting paid decent overtime rates, and having regular 80-hour-a-week crunch periods where you get paid zilch extra and everybody delivers faecal matter because nobody is concentrating anymore. This article is clearly about the second situation.

  • Your Name. (unregistered)

    Should have coded: if (count * (count - 2) == -1) {…}

  • Ouatte & Veure (unregistered) in reply to Your Name.

    Obviously suboptimal. Try

    if !(count * (count -2) - count) { ... }

  • smf (unregistered)

    If that is the worse thing that happens during a crunch then they're doing pretty good.

    Coasting for most of the time and then crunch for a short time is kinda normal too. I tend to draw the line at 60 hours for a week & only when I'll be able to super coast afterwards. Otherwise you're just dumping hours on a project for no benefit.

    The alternative is crunch all the time, which is a sign of a death march & nothing good comes of it.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    18-hour days ==> outside the hours when public transport actually works ==> See Figure 1.

    Not at all. Start work at say 1600, finish at 1000. As a bonus, your commute is in the opposite direction of the main flow of traffic, and if you need to do any errands on your way in or out the shops are open. You just have limited options for lunch.

    Ouattre & Veure:

    if !(count * (count -2) - count) { ... }

    Uh, that also accepts 0. Perhaps you meant if !(count * (count - 2) + 1) {...} instead?

  • Tim! (unregistered) in reply to Scarlet_Manuka

    Implicit coercion of int to bool is the devil.

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to Brisbe

    Depending on what language that was in, that can actually be more performant since it avoids boxing and unboxing.

Leave a comment on “An Equal Crunch”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article