Overtime is Morphine, Ernie Miller:
A developer who is truly concerned about the health of his or her company also must be careful to ensure the "patient" isn't developing an unhealthy dependency on their heroics, allowing the company to limp along without experiencing the pain that should accompany unwise choices. Pain is how we learn to avoid repeating mistakes.I've seen too many developers put in a heroic effort, only to repeat it the next day, sometimes without sleeping in. That's "killing the patient", to extend Ernie's metaphor. It's not the natural state of a business to notice the human cost it might have. The people inside the business have to assess that cost and do something about controlling it.
If your business, or the one you work at, requires regular heroics, consider that it is a broken system. Luckily, software developers are well equipped with mental routines for diagnosing and patching broken systems. Time to hack the organization.
