THE BEST SOFTWARE WRITING I

ea_spouseEA: THE HUMAN STORY¹

There is a major school of thought in software development, of which I am a member, that says that programmers who work more than 40 hours a week for extended periods of time actually get less work done than programmers who are not in crunch mode all the time. This is well studied and documented in books like Peopleware² by Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco. When people work more than about eight hours a day at programming tasks, the quality of their work suffers so much that they need to do two hours of bug-fixing for every hour of coding that they do. The work they do after eight hours is actually negative work.

Another core belief of mine is that an experienced employee is worth much more than a new employee, and ...