4 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoWow 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).