Sure everybody knows who I am talking about, i.e. those programmers who, while reflecting on their latest death march project, brag about having worked “day and night” for many weeks or even months in order to make that particular project a success. At first sight, they appear to be quite happy with their performance during that long periods of working overtime.

When looking at those projects from the outside, you'll get a slightly different impression, however.

Here's what some of the most respected gurus of our industry have to say on that issue:

• Ed Yourdon (Decline and Fall of the American Programmer): Caspar Jones claims that the average American programmer works 50-hour weeks ... But I have to say that I have not been impressed in the vast majority of DP shops I've visited in the United States. Most of them have a difficult time remaining in an upright position all day.
• Steve McConnell (Code Complete): This lusty tribute to programming machismo is pure B.S. and an almost certain recipe for failure. Those all-night programming stints make you feel like the greatest programmer in the world, but then you have to spend several weeks correcting the defects you installed during your blaze of glory. By all means, get excited about programming. But excitement is no substitute for competency. Remember which is more important.
• Chad Fowler (My job went to India): You can't keep up the pace of a sprint and finish a marathon. Though your short-term productivity will significantly increase as you start putting in the hours, in the long term you're going to crash so hard that the recovery time will be larger than the productivity gains you enjoyed during your 80-hour weeks.
• Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister (Peopleware): There Ain't No Such Thing as Overtime. Overtime for salaried workers is a figment of the naive manager's imagination ... Throughout the effort there will be more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of overtime. The trade-off might work to your advantage for the short term, but for the long term it will cancel out.

Apparently, for many of us it seems to be too hard to admit that we've sacrificed values like family, friends, youth, home, etc. for ... well, for nothing.

Does money matter to us? Stupid question, might be our initial reaction. Of course, all of us do deserve more, much more money than we're actually earning. But let's be honest. Nearly all of us working in the software industry are in the comfortable position of having more money available than we actually need for a living. Sure, our perception might be different from time to time, but in the end, we have to concede that for any serious software developer who really cares for her craft, getting more money is no incentive to be more motivated, working faster, smarter, better, ...

Chad Fowler put in in Eight-Hour Burn in My Job Went To India that way:
When I was a teenager ..., I would have been happy to live off of the amount of money that I waste now ... Apparently, when money was scarce, I found ways to be more efficient with my cash. And, the end result was essentially the same.
Joel Spolsky goes one step further by stating Incentive Pay Considered Harmful. Tom De Marco and Timothy Lister devote an entire chapter of Peopleware on the teamicidal effects of annual salary or merit reviews, awards, prizes, or any other kind of bonuses tied to performance.

So let's not fool ourselves or our bosses by announcing that we'll be performing much better once we've got a decent salary. We are lying - we know it, and, unfortunately, it's very likely that our boss knows it too.

Does that sound familiar to you? Nearly all of us do agree that it's a good idea having some versed guys around dedicated to keep all system components going: database-servers, application-servers, network-components, workstations and all the other devices and system components software-developers need to get their job done. However, every now and then they mistake their job with that of a police officer, reminding - sometimes even threatening - innocent developers to stick to some dated rules being laid out more than 10 years ago. Joel Spolsky has that telling story:
At my last job, the system administrator kept sending me automated spam complaining that I was using more than ... get this ... 220 megabytes of hard drive space on the server. I pointed out that given the price of hard drives these days, the cost of this space was significantly less than the cost of the toilet paper I used. Spending even 10 minutes cleaning up my directory would be a fabulous waste of productivity.

People hate change . . .
And that’s because people hate change . . .
I want to be sure that you get my point.
People really hate change.
They really, really do.

Steve
McMenamin
The Atlantic Systems Guild
London (1996)

Once we accept that this is always true, being aware that the fundamental reason for opposing change is emotional and not logical, it becomes a lot easier to act accordingly. As Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister put it in Peopleware, it is frustrating and embarrassing to abandon approaches and methods you have long since mastered, only to become a novice again.

Nonetheless, You never improve if you can't change at all.

Kudos go to Chad Fowler for his excellent book My Job Went To India. I urge everyone working as a software professional to read this book, even without having any idea of going offshore. He offers 52 Ways to Save Your Job, all of them pragmatic, full of anecdotes, and fun to read. It will definitely change the way I'm approaching my job and serves as a perfect companion to the wonderful classic The Pragmatic Programmer, another must-read which should be readily available on everybody's bookshelf.

I just came across tip #37 - Let Your Voice Be Heard: ... Start on the Web ... Now open your own weblog ... the most critical tip of all is to start sooner than you think you're ready.

OK, so here we are ...