Comment by fnimick
2 years ago
> Teams that attempted to measure the points in good faith were stessed and most of them showed signs of burn out. They regularly worked 60 hours a week.
So in the short term, the company benefited, yeah? They got more work out of the same people than they would have if they didn't apply the pressure.
Reminds me of an old boss I had who would flat-out say that to get a project done we would "hire someone and burn them out" - he planned to only get six months of useful work out of someone, and if they were stupid enough to stick around for high stress and low pay, that's just a benefit to the company.
(I didn't last very long there either)
The question is whether you get more volume but lower quality: a team doing 60 hour weeks on a regular basis tends to be a team baking in lots of technical debt and skipping “slow” things like “do we really understand what our users really need?” or “did we correctly architect this?” Everywhere I’ve seen this there’s been a lot more rework and things like high infrastructure bills because people have [correctly] learned that the business doesn’t care about quality.
"So in the short term, the company benefited, yeah" In hind sight, they did not. The company is publicly traded and recently sold itself for parts to avoid bankruptcy. They are in a very niche industry and are notorious for their production environment going down, and massive data corruption in their clients data set. There are worse things as well but I am trying to be at least a little anonymous here.
Sure, if they were going to do layoffs in 6 months anyway, I guess this anti-pattern was coporate's wet dream. them quitting means they don't even have to bother with severance packages.
But it sure is a shame we're past the days where you actually want to retain and nurture tribal knowledge. imagine if other engineering disciplines simply hopped companies every 2 years, or if they cut half their civil engineers for a better earnings call (thankfully, he government doesn't have "shareholders". just taxpayers to disappoint).
I don't think they did. If churning out low-quality code for 6 months was good project management, the Linux Foundation would be doing it.