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Kirk: Scotty, fix the warp drive. Scotty: It'll take me two days. Kirk: You have two hours. Scotty: No, it will take two days since we need to do it in a cle

by senko 4y ago

Kirk: Scotty, fix the warp drive. Scotty: It'll take me two days. Kirk: You have two hours. Scotty: No, it will take two days since we need to do it in a clean and maintainable way and not cut corners and don't want to leave the ship in a worse shape. Our planning poker says it's two days and our engineer's show of hands confirm everyone's most confident in that timeline. Kirk: ??? Klingons: (proceed to blast the Enterprise off the sky) It takes common sense to distinguish between "life or death do it now and damn the consequences", and "steady as she goes" cases. It takes some nerve to say Scotty is the one who made a mistake if he says "yes". While it works (and is needed to keep the action moving) in a TV series, Kirk putting the ship constantly in the position where Scotty must perform miracles is a very bad way to run a ship. IOW perpetual crunch is bad, mmkay?

lumost 4y ago
> IOW perpetual crunch is bad, mmkay? This is more or less the crux of it. If you work on a service/product with many users (or no users at all) then there may be pressure to do something right now. A crunch every now and then is a necessary evil - a long-term crunch will just burn people out. Anecdotally I notice that my productivity falls after 6 months of crunch and fizzles out after 10-12 months. Companies can vaguely sustain this effort only by recruiting aggressively.
- senko 4y ago
  Wow I would not want to be in a 6-month crunch let alone longer. Besides the human toll, frequent (or perpetual!) crunch(es) are also bad for the codebase, and not only in "burnt out people are not productive and instead produce bad code". In addition, the code never gets cleaned up and all those temporary workarounds become permanent architecture choices. Everybody knows it's bad but there's no time to go back and fix it. That is, crunch makes not only adds to tech debt, it's like "tech debt go brrrr" (to borrow an inflation meme).
b3lvedere 4y ago
CEO's/managers of big company game developers may have missed that memo
ceejayoz 4y ago
To be fair, Star Trek episodes focused around a couple weeks of quiet time to fix all the emergency stuff would be pretty boring. I presume Scotty gets time to go back and do it properly, given they're on a five year mission in unexplored space and the ship remains in pretty good working order.
- shagie 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel) > The Intrepid takes on five new ensigns including Andrew Dahl, an expert in alien religions and xenobiology. Dahl quickly discerns that the crew is extremely phobic of being near the senior officers and of going on away missions due to their high fatality rate. Over the course of several missions, various crew members suggest that the deaths are due to incompetence, superstition, or cosmic forces, requiring "sacrifices" of some crew members so that others will survive. > After several close calls, Dahl meets Jenkins, a crew member who offers a different theory: their reality and timeline are under periodic influence of a badly written television show from the past. As the writers create the plot, characters' free will temporarily ceases in order to progress "the Narrative" of the show. This is why otherwise good officers are occasionally incompetent, Ensigns make poor decisions, and the ship has mysterious technology on board to produce last-minute inventions and medicines which would otherwise be impossible to produce: the narrative is subject to the skill of the writers, who are not military or scientific experts and need to artificially maintain a high sense of drama with on-screen deaths. Jenkins explains that Dahl and the other Ensigns' routine duties and colorful histories will inevitably make them targets of "the narrative" when the writers need "glorified extras" to kill for emotional impact.
- senko 4y ago
  Absolutely. Not fun to watch but cruical to keeping the whole thing going. Quick Google[0] says the average time (in-universe) between TOS episodes (ignoring the pilot and movies) is around 10 days. So for each crunch-day or so, Scotty and the team have a week and a half to fix things the "right way" (and presumably not much else). I could live with that.

by senko 4y ago

lumost 4y ago

> IOW perpetual crunch is bad, mmkay? This is more or less the crux of it. If you work on a service/product with many users (or no users at all) then there may be pressure to do something right now. A crunch every now and then is a necessary evil - a long-term crunch will just burn people out. Anecdotally I notice that my productivity falls after 6 months of crunch and fizzles out after 10-12 months. Companies can vaguely sustain this effort only by recruiting aggressively.

senko 4y ago
Wow I would not want to be in a 6-month crunch let alone longer. Besides the human toll, frequent (or perpetual!) crunch(es) are also bad for the codebase, and not only in "burnt out people are not productive and instead produce bad code". In addition, the code never gets cleaned up and all those temporary workarounds become permanent architecture choices. Everybody knows it's bad but there's no time to go back and fix it. That is, crunch makes not only adds to tech debt, it's like "tech debt go brrrr" (to borrow an inflation meme).

b3lvedere 4y ago

CEO's/managers of big company game developers may have missed that memo

ceejayoz 4y ago

To be fair, Star Trek episodes focused around a couple weeks of quiet time to fix all the emergency stuff would be pretty boring. I presume Scotty gets time to go back and do it properly, given they're on a five year mission in unexplored space and the ship remains in pretty good working order.

shagie 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel) > The Intrepid takes on five new ensigns including Andrew Dahl, an expert in alien religions and xenobiology. Dahl quickly discerns that the crew is extremely phobic of being near the senior officers and of going on away missions due to their high fatality rate. Over the course of several missions, various crew members suggest that the deaths are due to incompetence, superstition, or cosmic forces, requiring "sacrifices" of some crew members so that others will survive. > After several close calls, Dahl meets Jenkins, a crew member who offers a different theory: their reality and timeline are under periodic influence of a badly written television show from the past. As the writers create the plot, characters' free will temporarily ceases in order to progress "the Narrative" of the show. This is why otherwise good officers are occasionally incompetent, Ensigns make poor decisions, and the ship has mysterious technology on board to produce last-minute inventions and medicines which would otherwise be impossible to produce: the narrative is subject to the skill of the writers, who are not military or scientific experts and need to artificially maintain a high sense of drama with on-screen deaths. Jenkins explains that Dahl and the other Ensigns' routine duties and colorful histories will inevitably make them targets of "the narrative" when the writers need "glorified extras" to kill for emotional impact.
senko 4y ago
Absolutely. Not fun to watch but cruical to keeping the whole thing going. Quick Google[0] says the average time (in-universe) between TOS episodes (ignoring the pilot and movies) is around 10 days. So for each crunch-day or so, Scotty and the team have a week and a half to fix things the "right way" (and presumably not much else). I could live with that.