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I haven't been specifically in a 7-day situation, but was at an early stage startup where the founder/CEO expected us to work Sundays. I think this was intended
by abeppu 2y ago
I haven't been specifically in a 7-day situation, but was at an early stage startup where the founder/CEO expected us to work Sundays. I think this was intended to be a temporary thing due to the company not having found product-market fit. But the company never produced a product that had any traction, and folded.
In retrospect, the company made a lot of choices about how we worked that were rather inefficient and arguably we would have moved faster by abandoning some bad practices. These included:
- Diluted ownership meant that too many people were involved in each discussion. This included backend engineers being in meetings on relatively aesthetic design considerations (e.g. color schemes, rounded vs angular graphical forms).
- The founders wanted the team to have an engineering thought-leadership brand and position, and a non-trivial amount of attention was paid to separating out libraries which could be open-sourced and polished.
- Meanwhile, the code for our specific product was quite tangled. We worked in clojure, and did a terrible job creating clear definitions, so to understand what keys should be in some map received by a function, one would typically need to read the full pathway that created it. Naturally, this made it quite challenging to make rapid changes.
- And because we were always trying to hack together new functionality as quickly as possible, we rarely had the time to go back and rewrite a cleaner version of anything.
- Perhaps most surprisingly, a large portion of the work was done in pair programming.
So we worked more hours than we should have but the way we worked as inefficient, and not even consistently directed at solving the problems the company needed to solve to succeed. I might be over-indexing, but I now treat long hours demanded of engineers as an indicator that something else in the organization is probably broken, desperate, or ill-considered.