

Ask HN: Are the long hours required to deliver a good piece of software? - fosk

This is a question asked by Peter Seibel  to Jamie Zawinski in "Coders at work", and made me think a lot.
Not sleeping at night, not eating well, working for more than 15h at the end will it be rewarded? Will it take less at the beginning but more time then to fix what we did wrong?  And what about health damages? Is it worth it? 
I'd like to share some thoughts about the topic.
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antareus
> Is it worth it?

No. Health is far more important.

> Are the long hours required to deliver a good piece of software?

Be suspicious of anyone who tells you they are/are not required. You have to
put in a certain amount of time in order to really understand what's needed.
Whether you put that in over the course of the project, or all at the end is
up to you.

When implementing, I put pressure on myself to find insights that greatly
simplify the code. It can be as simple as a unified way to organize code, or a
messaging subsystem. This isn't terribly surprising, but it requires thinking
very clearly about the problem and reflecting on it often. You're not going to
be in this state of mind if you're developing in a purely reactive, omg-
deadline-in-one-hour style. You may not arrive at these insights quickly,
however. So you need to be willing to invest time at the offset, working on
the hard parts, and be open to tweaking the program's structure until it feels
solid to work with.

