"Incidentally, this is one of the reasons that crunch time is a failed development methodology, as I’ve mentioned in past posts on this blog; developers get tired and start making stupid mistakes."
Totally. Strangely enough, Founders at Work (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...) is chock full of startup founders extolling the virtues of overwork. Is this some survivorship bias or does overwork in startups really lead to shipping sooner and achieving product/market fit faster?
It's never been my experience that sustained overwork of software developers leads to actual, measurable productivity increases due to the "two steps forward, one step back" phenomenon. Yeah, you can ship a feature "sooner" but it'll be buggy and disappointing to the end users (probably causing them to hesitate to pay - are you really achieving product/market fit with a buggy product?)
We encourage every developer to find a sustainable pace (it's different for everyone) with the guidance that it's almost always less than 50 hours a week. Why is it that software companies think that overworking software developers is a net positive?
I think it's important not to reason in absolutes. Taking an obviously multi-person, multi-year project like Starcraft and arbitrarily setting a 2-month deadline "because some code is there from Warcraft II" is not good use of crunch-time. If you and a friend have an idea and can pull out a prototype in a week, then overworking that week may be not a bad thing (as long as it's not followed by another such week).
That's a good point. I believe the research (and my experience) suggests overwork can provide benefit in the short run (2-3 weeks) but much after that and you get diminishing and then negative marginal returns - followed by a "time off" recovery period.
Strategically used, overwork can provide benefit but it sounds like Starcraft was a year-long overwork, which is a disaster. Many of the "Founders at Work" stories glorify overwork and make it sound like it was part of the norm of the culture, so it seems like it was much longer than a few weeks.
Which is why I'm confused - either long-running overwork caused these companies to succeed, or it was not bad enough to cause them to fail?
Or maybe that's your moat. "The only people who'd even be capable of competing with me have to have a team of people willing to work 140 hours/week with no pay for 9 months - once I crack this I'll have no competitors!"
Totally. Strangely enough, Founders at Work (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...) is chock full of startup founders extolling the virtues of overwork. Is this some survivorship bias or does overwork in startups really lead to shipping sooner and achieving product/market fit faster?
It's never been my experience that sustained overwork of software developers leads to actual, measurable productivity increases due to the "two steps forward, one step back" phenomenon. Yeah, you can ship a feature "sooner" but it'll be buggy and disappointing to the end users (probably causing them to hesitate to pay - are you really achieving product/market fit with a buggy product?)
We encourage every developer to find a sustainable pace (it's different for everyone) with the guidance that it's almost always less than 50 hours a week. Why is it that software companies think that overworking software developers is a net positive?