Vampire Programmers
"Real" programmers - those who chose the profession out of love - tend to be night-owls.

I discovered this phenomena in college. The professor asked for a show of hands, saw that something like 90% of the class categorized themselves as night-owls rather than "morning people," and mentioned that this was typical. The professor himself was an exception, but he was a weird bird anyway.

I don't know why this is. Maybe its how our brains are wired. Whatever part of the brain is attracted to generating instructions to make a computer work is maybe also that part which rides the inertia of activity later in our cycle or something. Or maybe whatever attracted us to programming was also attracted to the romantic vision of the hacker toiling away into the wee hours, driven by adrenaline and caffeine (in which case, I expect this trend to be diminishing over time as the image of programmers becomes more that of a white-collar professional, like accountants).

This can cause a couple of problems.

First of all, there's the problem of programmers working with non-programmers. In many businesses, management is not pulled from the ranks of programmers, and it seems many managers are those "cheerful morning people" who can't seem to understand why EVERYONE isn't at their best productivity at 8:00 in the morning. This can cause a great deal of friction. Said management can get extremely frustrated with lazy programmers who often don't show until the exact moment they are required to by their employment contract. This sort of management is also often the type that goes home right at 5:00, oblivious to the fact that several of their programming team won't be leaving until hours later.

Then there's the opposite problem, found more commonly in the videogame industry, or any other software company managed more by programmers and who do not interact directly with non-night-owl customers on a day-to-day basis. We geeks have our own little hierarchy, and it tends to be based upon our own estimation of merit. One of those little geek indicators that tends to be used is, "Does this person work harder than me?"

Since it's hard to tell how much harder someone works, the rule-of-thumb that gets applied is, "Does this person work LATER than me?"

You end up with this whole peer-pressure thing going on where nobody wants to be seen as being one of the first people to go home for the night - at least not on a regular basis. People stay later and later. Since the folks in the trenches rarely have time to pay attention to what time their coworkers come into work in the morning, what often happens is that people end up slipping their work-shift (when allowed to do so) into later on in the day to improve that perception of their effort without having to unduly burden themselves with actually having to work all that much harder.

This is one reason why the game industry tends to be dominated by younger, less experienced developers. Those old farts over 30 (that would be me) often have wives and children --- assuming they managed to sneak in a social life earlier in their career --- which puts a damper on those kinds of cycles. When the kids have to get up for school, so do their geek parents. Its rough enduring the gentle-but-present pressure of being "that guy who goes home early" each day.

One of my favorite managers (yes, I've actually had many bosses that I've really liked - I've been fortunate in my career) was one of those weird early-morning people who tried to combat this simply by setting an example. He was in at around 6:00 in the morning every day. He was GONE almost every day before 4:00. He never expected anyone to keep his schedule. He quietly set a counter-example, and made it clear that he wasn't going to know who was leaving at 5:00 and who was staying until after 9:00.

Many companies have "core hours" - usually a 4- to 6- hour block of time - where employees are expected to be at work. This is pretty key, as programming is much more of a group effort these days that requires communication between team members. This helps the window from sliding too far in either direction.


(Vaguely) related pseudo-fluff:
* Seven New Classic Software Development Mistakes
* What Kind of Entrepreneur Are You?
* A Pirate Story
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Labels: Biz, programming

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:56 AM (Permalink)