10,000 Foot Developer

Recently I was helping out a team that was on a death march.  They had all the great things a high energy project requiring dedicated developers employs into the project methodology:

• Unpaid overtime, lots of it.
• Moratorium on vacation time – none allowed.
• Vacation time does not roll over at year end.
• Mandatory weekends and late nights.
• Short notice on certain late nights, as much as (gasp) four hour notice for having to stay late Friday or work Saturday-Sunday.
• Zero, ZEEEEEE-RO, project plan and schedule.

You might think this is crazy.  I am thinking that this is more likely the rule now rather than the exception; I’ve been talking to my colleagues and all of us are having this problem:  poorly planned projects intent on destroying our outside lives; the reasons many work in the first place gathering cholesterol in their ateries by sitting still in place for 8-12 hours a day.

XP addressed this by calling out for the value of  “sustainable velocity.”  It did this by allowing developers to gauge their NORMAL velocity via estimates, and then to use that to predict the amount of software they could do in a short iteration.

Recently I was asked — “golly Journeyman if you are such a great developer then why is amangement never happy with the work?”  It’s because managment only wants one thing — to paraphrase Jackie Mason:  MORE.

Now I am not going to blame them but at some point we have to ask ourselves the simple question that if work is so great, why do they call it work?

Note, I am not saying don’t love your professions or what you do.  By all means do it.  But recently I was pitted against a another less experienced developer.  He billed 38% more than me — 55 hours to my 40.  He made roughly 2/3 as much per hour.  I produced twice the software with 1/5  less bugs.  The bugs took up an average of 50% of the time of the original story (due to requirements).  (This is all from a project tracking tool.)  So, in simple math it took him 110 hours to produce the original software, if we even out the bugs ( it wakes him 4/5 more to do the bugs thats 50% time 110) then it takes him 165 hours to equal my output.  Multiply by 2/3 the pay, he costs 109 hours in my dollars. 273% more expensive than me.

Management though only looks at hours on certain projects; not quality and planning.   So, a person who works more hours is of course more productive — in the new PM Agile world.

Now last wek I was at an Agile conference, and one of the vendors helped me figure out — the change was when Scrum came along. Like in 2007 it made Agile widely adoptable to management — SCRUM did this.  And in Scrum, with a tracking tool that many companies now use like MS Project manger — hours are more important than results.   Estimates are used against developers as accountability, instead of as an aid to get better estimates.   It changed EVERYTHING.

Sooo . . . anyway all my musings aside is why, young or old grasshoppers, we should avoid projects that say “High Energy” or “Want Dedicated Developers.”  Because here are the formulas to calculate the meanings of these terms:

High Energy Environment = poorly planned requiring lost of unbilled hours by task people.

Dedicated Developers = developers willing to work tons of extra hours for free.

Its as simple as that.  I am not saying don’t work hard.  I am just saying, work smart.  You will be taken advantage of if you don’t, your life will become miserable, and your productivity will drop.   70 hours of a burned out developer’s time with 30 hours unpaid on a meangingless project is way less productive than 45 paid hours of a developer’s time on a well thought out, superbly executed project.

And remember — management are negotiators.  Sales.  Compromisers.    They have to be because they work people jobs.  But its up to us to call BS on them:  poor project plans are not negotiable.  Life sucking jobs are not negotiable.  The way to stop the machine, is just to take your toys home and don’t play with them.