Today I was using Google Reader and it suggested a new Blog that I’ve not read in a long time. I checked it out today and it had an excellent post about “The Case Against Overtime“. This could not come at a more valuable time for me to reflect back on this. I’ve had the best development team working on our Product at VCG but lately the team, including myself have hit burnout!
I 100% believe that it’s all the overtime and weekends constantly getting ready for a demo, a conference, the launch and more demos! However, this week I and apparently the team has had enough. One of the partners for the product wanted everyone to work hard the next couple of weekends to get this great demo ready for a potential client. I could see (including myself) the energy of the team drop! Yes, I’m convinced we’ve hit burnout!
Last month it was another demo where the development team worked a few weekends to get ready. The month before that was a launch, the month before that was a demo, the month before that was a conference! You see the trend here! I feel that this has become extremely unhealthy to the team. So we’re not working this weekend or next weekend. It’s time to stop burning the midnight oil all the time.
The guys and I have been working 60 hour weeks for months now and it has to stop! The team needs a break. We need time off, we need to spend time with our families and most importantly, we need to fall in love with developing again!
Here is his 7 reasons why not to do Overtime:
Lost Opportunity Costs in Professional Growth
I could not agree more! We’ve been so stuck on getting the API working and finding workarounds to PerformancePoint Server, that the team has stopped looking at new technology in their free time to take a different look at things!
Increased Professional Risk from Lack of Diversification
Again because all we’ve done is BI, by working weekends and overtime, has stopped several programmers from doing their own pet projects to diversify their skills.
Decreased Professional Passion
The fire needs to be relit so we can love what we do. I think limiting the overtime hours (to none if possible) going forward will do this!
Lost Productivity and Poor Code Quality
I combined these two together because one totally affects the other. The law of diminishing returns is at work here. I know myself that if I work more than 12 hours, the work I do after that, usually has to be redone because I hit the wall. Instead some additional sleep would have been more helpful to attack the problem. This would have benefited everyone (not just myself).
Remember, when you’re working on a team, and the quality goes down, it effects everyone. The spiral continues because you’re tired the next day. I can always tell when I give the guys off a few days for working overtime (which I probably have upset other managers because I gave my people some time off that does not go towards vacation time), they’re much better and productivity goes way up.
Lost Personal Revenue
When you start hearing comments that they are working for next to nothing and make less than the noobie at the office because they are calculating their overtime hours with their base salary, you know you got problems! I can almost guarantee when you have this, you’re weeks or maybe a month away from losing key members. This happened to my team. I tried to make it right but when it gets this far, you’ve lost them!
The Usual Personal Reasons
Family and outside life suffers! And we forget sometimes who we’re working for to keep happy! When this suffers and your teams starts to stress and their health begins to go, what the hell good was it?! I don’t want to get there and I don’t want my team to ever be in that place either!
What to do about?
So as a manager, if you’re starting to see these signs, seriously consider changing your methods because it’s only a matter of time before burnout hits and you’ve lost your good people to someone else! I’ve now seen it and I’m going to do my best to make sure we keep it to a minimum! This business is extremely hard to find good people and its even harder to find developers that totally understand BI like mine do. I can’t afford for this to happen! I’ve seen the signs and its time to fix the problem!
