I’m a bit of a workaholic, so that tends to lead to painfully long hours on whatever I’m working on. I try to keep my hours at work in the 40-50 range, but in the last few weeks, I’ve been working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

I’ve found myself taking the role of a project manager more often recently, so I do certainly understand the forces at work. The unfortunate thing is that I don’t have the authority to implement many of the suggestions I made in this article.

There has to be a balance, where a developer can be productive, but still have a life; and management can see the progress they need. I just wish more managers would look for that balance, instead of looking for ways to push their developers harder.

I have long thought about this problem, discussed it with many other developers.

Regarding your point about the hours worked, after hearing various co-workers and friends gripe/complain/bitch about it, the only way to make it stop – is to stop doing the hours.

As you rightly pointed out, why pay for two people when you can ride one for all its worth. I’m not suggesting that you don’t put in a good effort; I don’t honestly think there would be many software developers around that do a 38 hour week. So while it is essentially expected that a software developer do more than the required hours, there has to be some limits put on it – you don’t and shouldn’t be doing more than 50 hours per week all the time in my opinion.

As you pointed out, when the time comes to put in the effort and hours as a major project comes to an end – by all means, bust your arse. However, when that isn’t the case, I don’t think it is fair of the employer to expect that volume of an employees time back to back – everyone is meant to have a life outside of the work environment.

While this all sounds good in theory, its actually quite difficult in practice and I’m still working on keeping my hours inside what I’d consider reasonable when we’re not pushing hard for something.

How do you handle this particular problem?

Al.