Situation of a programmer

It’s definitely not something we do all the time.

There are three situations where it happens:

• Some people are naturally not “morning people” - so they sleep til noon and work afternoons and late into the night. But they’re maintaining a healthy amount of sleep - so they don’t suffer and actively prefer working like that. Most software companies recognize this and offer “flex time” working - where so long as you put in enough hours during a given pay period, they don’t care how you spread them out through the week(s). I work 9 hour days and take every alternate Friday off - which suits me very well…but I’m a “morning person” - so sometimes I’ll start work at 5am and finish mid-afternoon.

• The infamous “crunch time” - which used to be ubiquitous in the video game industry. Because a video game has to launch “in time for Xmas” or it’ll be a complete bust - you tend to get into a situation around June or July where you absolutely MUST get the game done by November 1st or you’re doomed. So people are pressurized by management to work increasingly crazy hours (70 to 100 hours per week was not uncommon) without overtime pay. Sure, we’d get free food, free sodas and snacks - places we could go and take a quick nap - “quiet rooms” with cots and blankets if you go too tired to safely drive home, video games, a ping pong table, a pool table so you could unwind for 20 minutes…that kind of thing. Well - it turns out that working as a programmer for more than about 60 hours per week is counter-productive. People get tired - they make more mistakes - so the rate at which bugs are fixed gets overwhelmed by the rate at which new ones arise - and clever new ideas become harder and harder to come by! As an industry, we’re getting better at program management in the years before we hit the release date. And there is a growing recognition that you have to avoid “creeping featuritis” and drop features that you don’t absolutely need. Features that seem to you (after 3 years of living, thinking and breathing the game) to be important are often completely unnoticed by the buying public and can be safely dropped without impacting the sales of the product.

• People get “in the zone” and quite literally lose track of the passage of time. This tends to happen with me once in a while…often with projects I’m doing for fun at home. I’ll be working late - and want to do “just one more compile” or add “just one more feature” or “just nail that one last bug” before heading to bed…and after a few rounds of that, I’ll notice that the sun is starting to peek through my home-office window and I’ve blown away an entire night! But this is of course entirely my own fault…and my wife is well-aware of the problem and calls me on it if it stretches much into my sleep time.

That said, a few video game companies gained a reputation of putting programmers through “perpetual crunch time” - as a way to save on employing more people! (Id - the makers of Doom and Quake - and Electronic Arts (EA games) were particularly notorious for this…and for all I know may still be doing it.)

So, yes it happens - but it’s never really “A Way Of Life” - except in a few particularly abusive video game companies.