Clean Agile: Back to Basics by Robert C. Martin

Author:Robert C. Martin [Robert C. Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Published: 2019-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Sustainable Pace

“The race is not to the swift…”

— Ecclesiastes 9:11

“…But he who endures to the end will be saved.”

— Matthew 24:13

On the seventh day, God rested. God later made it a commandment to rest on the seventh day. Apparently even God needs to run at a Sustainable Pace.

In the early ’70s, at the tender age of 18, my high school buddies and I were hired as new programmers working on a critically important project. Our managers had set deadlines. Those deadlines were absolute. Our efforts were important! We were critical cogs in the machinery of the organization. We were important!

It’s good to be 18, isn’t it?

We, young men right out of high school, pulled out all the stops. We worked hours and hours and hours, for months and months and months. Our weekly average was over 60 hours. There were weeks that peaked above 80 hours. We pulled dozens of all-nighters!

And we prided ourselves on all that overtime. We were real programmers. We were dedicated. We were valuable. Because we were single-handedly saving a project that was important. We. Were. Programmers.

And then we burned out—hard. So hard that we quit en masse. We stormed out of there, leaving the company holding a barely functioning time-share system without any competent programmers to support it. That’ll show ’em!

It’s good to be 18 and angry, isn’t it?

Don’t worry, the company muddled through. It turned out that we were not the only competent programmers there. There were folks there who had carefully worked 40 hours per week. Folks whom we had disparaged as undedicated and lazy in our private late-night programming orgies. Those folks quietly picked up the reins and maintained the system just fine. And, I daresay, they were happy to be rid of us angry, noisy kids.

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