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>For someone who thought of themselves as an empathetic dev overworking myself FOR the end users and product, this hurt and I’m not sure I ever really recovered
by johncessna 6y ago
>For someone who thought of themselves as an empathetic dev overworking myself FOR the end users and product, this hurt and I’m not sure I ever really recovered.
I think everyone remembers the time when they learned it's not worth it to work insane hours to make some sort of launch just so you get to do it all over again in 6 months.
I worked 22 straight days to meet an insane deadline. I delivered my stuff 4am the morning of only to be told that every other team was late and the inflexible due date that couldn't be changed, got pushed back 6 months.
- oAlbe 6y agoWhat was your reaction to that? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never been in the situation and wouldn't know what to do.
- johncessna 6y agoConfusion, mainly. Part of me didn't understand why everyone else didn't commit to the team effort. Ah, to be young and have no responsibilities. Another part of me was genuinely confused how an immovable date got moved. It wasn't until later that I understood that there's no such thing as an immovable date. What keeps me from being jaded (I think anyways) is being able to recognize when an extra push is all that the project needs and when a project is so doomed that not even a heroic effort of a small team will cause it to hit the target. I also worked with a CEO who purposely gave tight deadlines just to get engineering to finish the work. He said if he gave us more time, we'd just ask him for more. Counterintuitively, I enjoyed that. It was certainly a lot more honest, and you knew the expectation wasn't perfection, it was to release something.