I started at a new client yesterday, and we had a great conversation on my thoughts about working overtime. Anyone who has worked with me in the past knows that as a principle, I heavily dislike working overtime. I think I provided some pretty good reasons and thought I’d write about it.

I am a big believer in the “Sustainable Pace” concept because I think that quality software development is a limited resource. Even though I dislike working long hours, they’re inevitable because of various reasons, and when I’ve worked long hours, and witnessed other working long hours, I’ve observed developers get tired, and when they get tired, they get sloppy. For a project that will be running for a long time, you really don’t want that.

The reason I think of it as a limited resource is because if you have ever done solid software development, you will find it requires constant judgement, thinking and in general just solving problems and puzzles all day. It requires a large number of micro decisions and is a tiring exercise with a physical limit for how well you can sustain this before quality starts to suffer. Imagine playing sudoku all day long and see how long it is before your brain starts to tire (and I just did that with the amount of flying I recently went through!)

Of course some people handle this differently. Some developers I know, prefer to spread out this thinking with various breaks of checking email, surfing the web, etc. I’ve heard of stories where some developers will do these bursts in a series of several consecutive long days, but have lots of down time in between. These developers should never be confused with developers who are just lazy and continually check email, surf the web, or better yet “work from home”. I also think that the latter developers have no pride in their work and should not be in our industry.

I do agree that in some circumstances, it is important to be able to tap into “extra hours” and that it should be exceptional circumstances. The illusion that needs dispelling is that there are no “extra hours”, and that at some point, developers will need to rest and to be effective.

I suggest to business people who I’ve worked with that it is better to maximise the value you can get out of the limited resource, instead of trying to mine more of the resource. Oh, and did I mention that maximising business value is what agile is about?