Another thing worth mentioning is probably that you are mistaken if you think that the ’sender’ issue is solved by using the google apps version of gmail. If you ever set up additional email addresses in one account (in the same way you did in the ‘other’ gmail) the ’sender’ header will again be added with your account address in it.
This a bit less annoying than the original issue (since it is a email@yourdomain.com rather than …@gmail.com address) but still a sucker. I, for example, free lance for a number of different companies and pool all the work related email from all of them in my google apps account, say, jobs@mydomain.com Now these companies expect me to use their corporate email addresses to send email related to their projects and I wish I could send emails without letting anybody too obviously know that I am using a jobs@mydomain.com account to send it. Especially since obviously quite a number of people send email back to that account and not the corporate address there’s supposed to use. Annoying.

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.

I missed that, I wish I had noticed that sooner. I’ll probably be sticking with The Bat for awhile, but I will have to play around with that and see if there are any other similar gotcha’s.

@Jordan,

Indeed, while it’s not really Google’s problem to deal with a ‘feature’ of another (competing) product; to me it seems that they could greatly increase the value of the product by making that single, small change.

In general I love anything Google releases, and I’ve found Gmail to be the best (by far) web-based email client available; but that one feature, and the lack of interest (or even a useful response) on the topic from Google makes me want to shy away.