esmale

I've been in panic mode trying to figure out why our applications have gone down. At least now I know why.

Unfortunately there is a long history of management viewing overtime as equivalent to a person's 'dedication' to the project.

One of my college Computer Science professors, the one I liked and respected the most, worked at Novell for quite a while back in the day. Not sure if his entire 20+ year programming career was spent there before going back to school to get his PhD. In any event, at one point he was a team lead at Novell. He made sure to hire, train and develop the right kind of programmers for his team. The kind that write tests, solid code, and practice good engineering principles.

To my memory, when he was telling us this story, the overtime he and his team worked was somewhere between minimal to non-existant. Their code was clean, well-tested, and worked. So at 5pm they would go home.

There was another team that was always scrambling at the last minute, and clocking lots of overtime.

When it came time for company/management recognition, which team received the accolades? The team that clocked all that overtime, because they MUST have been working harder to get things done than the other team. Right?