Excessive Overtime Isn't Productive!

Much has been made of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter (and this is somewhat personal to me having once managed many talented engineers there).

Elon claims to want “extremely hardcore” software engineers at Twitter 2.0, by which he apparently means working a lot of hours and sleeping at the office. You could see people bragging about this to impress the new boss.

But does that even help velocity and product outcomes at the end of the day?

You could argue that 90s Microsoft set the standard for long hours in software. We definitely spent a lot of time at the office in those days. But we also spent a lot of time playing foosball in the test lab and playing video games on our office LAN. Looking back, big milestones excepted, I'm not convinced we often worked for more than 40 hours a week.

Studies have shown that overtime is compensated for by undertime. If you've ever worked all weekend and then gone to the office on time on Monday, you know this firsthand.

Excessive overtime means time away from family and hobbies. It doesn't necessarily mean you get more done.

There are many better ways to work smarter and improve the productivity of your dev teams without burning anyone out. Let me know if you'd like to hear more about them!