People have a maximum of four to six really productive hours a day in them. Yeah they can push it longer but after a while they get sloppy, angry and stupid.

Push your people, test them and challenge them but don’t burn them out.

It’s just so damn unintuitive that I think for the foreseeable future it will be an uphill battle convincing management. And ten times as hard convincing over enthusiastic grunts not to work themselves to death.

Personally I now work in patterns similar to Ryan, what I like to call “bursty” But I was one of those over enthusiastic knuckleheads in years past, but as time has worn on the rest of my life has gotten more important to me and I’ve experienced the impact on quality, team morale, and personal health that 12+ hour days every day can bring. But it was only through experiencing it that I finally understood, 10 years ago you could have preached to me all day and it wouldn’t have made a dent.

Joel Spolsky is a highly respected developer who worked for a variety of companies including Microsoft and now runs his own software hour in New York called Fog Creek. He’s blog and books are excellent, witty and insightful and his rationality refreshing.

He rarely lets his developers work more than 40 hours a week and believes that every hour worked after that results in two hours of bug fixes. I’m sure the quote from Fury was meant as a good thing but it takes a good leader to know that lettering your devs work such long hours is often counter-productive.

I’d like to meet someone who can honestly concentrate and code ‘in the zone’ for 14 hours straight every day.

And, the faster I use up that passion, the sooner I’ll become less productive, even if I’m still enthusiastic about what I’m doing. It’s like being a mage–I can cast a bunch of spells, but as soon as all my mana is used up, it has to recharge. And, the way I work, the lower my mana bar is, the longer it takes me to get back 1% of that mana.

So, I’ve learned to pace myself. While at work, I’m like a Warlock on an Onyxia raid. I have to let myself charge up a bit before MORE DOTS NOW! I’ll take things pretty slow to begin with, then in a spasm of productivity I get a ridiculous amount of work done. But, it’s time for me to hold back for a little bit and get that mana back. When my mana is all back, MORE DOTS!

It sounds silly, and it is silly when I call myself a Warlock and use mana and all the rest, but it’s the way I’ve found myself to be most efficient. How do I recharge? I read blogs, I read forums, I read books that can help inspire or teach me, and of course I play games. As long as you work for a company that is willing to measure your success by the quality and volume of your work overall and not on your everyday habits, you are on the golden path.

This seems to have gone on a bit of a tangent, but it all relates back to the overtime madness. If you make me work for 60 hours a week instead of 40, I won’t be significantly more productive unless I have a rare burst of energy and creativity. If you make me work overtime for too long, I can’t replenish that much-needed mana and will not be able to produce quality work much, if at all.

Not to mention the wife factor. Back in the day, I could work insane hours without really caring. I was only hurting myself. Now, if I work for too long, it’s impacting my wife and my time with her. That is where the line gets drawn for me–keep me from my lady without good reason, and I’m going to become disgruntled very quickly.

OK. Keep them, treasure them, lavish them with your love.

I think the best thing you could do for them would be to retrain them to work like human beings and equip them to go the whole 50 years of game development they’ve got ahead of them.

Failing that… even if they’re burning themselves out without being asked, they’re still not doing you any favors.

We’re all much better off without the guys that will never have more than 5 years experience before they are replaced by someone with 0 years experience. We’re better off with the guys who will have decades of experience in game development and also decades of experience in living life like a normal human being.

And quality goes out the window within two months, even if morale is sky-high.

The manufacturing industry went through all this about 100 years ago – and back with the USA knew a thing or two about manufacturing. It’s not even a sort of hypothetical deal any more. Companies with many, many different manufacturing plants learned this stuff through trial-and-error, implementing various and sundry schemes and keeping careful notes for comparison.

‘Cause yeh, it sounded ridiculous to suggest that 8 hour days would be more productive than 16 hour days to them, too. But they tried it both ways and dozens of others.

What they found was that after 8 hours of work, you should kick your employees out of the building. Make them leave, even if they don’t want to.

And that was mostly for factory workers: assembly-line stuff. I have a real hard time believing that work which requires more brain activity is somehow effected by over-work in a completely opposite manner…

You can make use of ~2 month bursts of overtime. There’s an increase in productivity with returns that start to diminish immediately, until at that 2 month mark when it will have overtaken all of the productivity gains you were able to create.

But you can not make strategic use of that 2-month-bump if some of your knuckle headed employees have already been in overtime-mode before you needed them to be.

Even if they cheerfully volunteered to do it out of love: those employees have actually just robbed you of the ability to make strategic use of productivity bursts.

That’s not even to mention the negative stress they create for anyone not working 16 hour days around them. There’ll be a pressure for those people to work more, too – no matter what you do.

So even just letting people work hours that are bad for your business – and never making them do it – still results in people working hours that are bad for your business.

And!

Whew, look at me rant, here.

And! Well… what has been the point of all these technological advancements these past, oh, thousand years or so, if we’re all still workin’ hard as ancient Eqyptian pyramid developers?

You know, at some point, I think we might want to stop aiming exclusively for having more stuff, and maybe shoot to spend some of these productivity dividends on having more time to play with our stuff.

An 20-ish kid fresh out of college walking into the first job of his whole life might disagree with me, there… but what does he know about it anyway? Nothing.

Anyway, this quote sounds like business-code for “We can’t afford to pay a full staff, but the people left over are enthusiastic, if overworked!” Yeah….