- Five months 80+ hours/week on my first video game
- Nine months of similarly insane hours shipping a consumer PC platform
- Well over a year of crazy on the Apple Newton, including six back-to-back 100+ hour weeks
- A couple more for Microsoft, on various things, including a few of those century weeks (my wife called me "broken" on the last one)
In each case it took me 3+ months to recover, probably more.
Last year, faced with the "opportunity" to do another one, I resigned. By all accounts I made the right choice.
A death march is a sign that something is seriously no-kidding broken in planning and management. It may be necessary to actually do a DM to recover from the situation you've dug yourself into, but organizations should learn from this.
But instead of learning, companies come to depend on them. The expectation develops that the technical staff can be leaned on to rescue bad decisions. One of my ex-cow-orkers likened it to an addiction.
The price? Loss of good talent, bad morale that leads to mistrust, even poorer decisions, a sense of powerlessness at the worker-bee level, and lack of continuity in follow-on products because of turnover.
I will say that I've made fast friends and learned a hell of a lot about people during DMs. But I'd much rather work in a place that does a DM, learns from it and adapts.
I worked 100+ hours for 9 months straight on a game :(. The biggest part of the burnout for me was that halfway through, I realized I didn't even believe the product would do well (it didn't).
In retrospect many things could have gone differently. I know now that the desire to do a death march from upper management was really a sign of immaturity on their part.
So, I think I can give some much shorter and better advice for how to survive a death march, in the form of a flowchart:
1. Do you excel at your job?
- Yes: Ask around and get a job somewhere with management that isn't shit.
- No: Change careers, goto 1.
Although I appreciate, and read with interest, articles such as "how to survive in a POW camp" or "How to survive in prison", I don't really see why you would need that advice if POW camps and prisons were voluntary and you could freely leave.
(The reason I say change careers if you are not good at your job: Good management will be able to tell you aren't good and they won't hire you, or if you do get in the door it won't last. Being bad at something means your entire experience of work is necessarily at the kind of place that hires bad people, which is not how you want to spend your short experience of being alive)
Death marches are sometimes necessary (or at least useful enough to be worth the inconvenience) even in careers you love, though.
Two weeks before the launch of a book/film/whatever, for example, would be a classic time when burning the midnight oil is actually a good idea - if you know you can take it easy afterward...
(Edit: I'm strictly speaking about short-term "crunch" here. Crunching for max a few weeks - sometimes useful. Crunching for months - no, that's a terrible plan, and an indicator of terrible management.)
That's not a death march insofar as I understand it. Crunch time happens, emergencies happen.
Death marches are where overtime becomes normal time, where crunch mode becomes normal mode. Going full-speed on the home stretch for a few days isn't necessarily bad, but a death march is when that turns into weeks, or months.
I agree. Crunch time happens. (I'd argue that in rare cases, it can last up to a few weeks - like, say, if you're launching a film you've spent years on.)
Months of crunch time, though, is just a Bad Idea. I actually cover this in the article - it's a bad idea because, apart from anything else, it's actually less productive than working sane hours.
And yes, if you're stuck doing that regularly, I'd recommend some serious consideration of alternative employment options...
What if I told you it's incredibly risky to rely on a miracle in the last 2 weeks, and it would be much better to properly manage the project and have it completed in plenty of time, rather than being inefficient in the early part of a project and making up for it when the pressure of a deadline forces you to face reality?
The world is more complex than that. Sometimes there is a hard deadline (those do exist for a large number of completely legitimate reasons) and even though the "must have"s are done and dusted, you know you won't have the opportunity to launch/go to print/present again for a good while, so you cram to really, really make the product shine and impress (any mildly intelligent and creative person who enjoys what they're doing will never run out of ideas for improvements, big and small, no matter how well a project is managed).
Sometimes an opportunity comes out of left field - "prestigious conference X just had a cancellation, so we got a slot to demo not-quite-there-yet feature Y. Do we cram to build it, or do we pass on the slot?".
Of course, as mentioned, you can't have this becoming the norm, and it might not be for all temperaments to work in a company where it might happen - but it's not in an of itself a bad thing.
There is no good advice for someone in that situation. The best advice for someone in that situation is to not get into it next time, if there is a next time, because you are totally fucked up and down and sideways right now.
Now, if you are obsessed with death marches to the point of replying to every comment on this thread, like thenomad, my advice is stop spending all day hitting reload and waiting for someone to post on hackernews so you can jump in and defend death marches, and go read a book on project management or study or work or do anything besides procrastinating, which is probably the root cause of why you end up in that situation all the time. Learn to do work when there isn't a gun to your head.
Not sure there's really any need for the ad-hominem, is there?
I'm replying to comments on this thread because I'm the author of the original post, and it's polite to respond to people commenting on your work :)
I suspect that we largely agree on the subject of death marches and their advisability, actually. Certainly, I'd say that as soon as you're doing death march hours for longer than about 3 weeks, or more frequently than about once a year, that's a Very Bad Idea.
Sometimes you are assigned to a death march by management. Not everyone lives in a place where there are 10 employers waiting to immediately hire you if you quit on the spot. You need to figure out how to live with the death march and be supportive of your teammates while finding greener pastures.
Although if you only work 60 hours a week instead of 80, your boss is not likely to fire you in the middle of a death march, since you'd still be more productive than anyone he could replace you with. (There's no spare time to bring new employees up to speed when you're doing a death march.)
Besides, working only 60 hours might make you more productive than all the people who are working 80 hours (better focus, fewer mistakes).
However, it's good to be able to recognize one coming on, so you can get the hell out of there. And if you haven't been through that before you need someone to tell you what it looks like. At least once I've looked at the work slated and the time allotted, and said "hell no" because I recognized the signs.
Exactly what I'm doing right now. I work a 9-5 but there is so much pressure and everyone usually ends up staying longer. Read my previous comments on conditions at my workplace.
On any off time that I have I research current job postings of lucrative startups and compiled a list of all the shit I have to learn and excel that.
I have 3 months left until the end of my contract in which I'm coding the most I possibly can. In the past 3 days I've coded two side projects in mongo/angular/express/node and a bunch of other tech.
I think those extra hours for free are his offtime. In other words, he's a contractor in a bad position. In his offtime, he's learning new skills and building an online presence in order to get a better position next time.
I'll vouch for everything in this article [1] and add: if doing this, sleep consistently every day.
If you're in the middle of something, just drop it and go to sleep. If you've been working on something all week, you're not going to forget something or lose your place or indeed, if done right [2], even lose your 'flow' by sleeping.
Getting 80-100 useful hours out of an 168 hour week can only come if you use a good chunk of the other 68+ hours sleeping - but even moreso than getting enough hours of sleep, getting them at roughly the same time every day can make a big difference.
[1]: Having learnt most of this the hard way.
[2]: As inadvisable as it might sound, working immediately before bed is the only way I've found that ensures this.
Absolutely agree. I'm in a kind of death march of my own, since my exams start tomorrow and yet I haven't asked for days on my full time job (as a software engineer, i.e., a completely brain-oriented job). For the last 15 days I've done basically nothing but studying, working and satisfying vital needs like eating... or sleeping. Not for a single moment have I thought of sleeping less than 7-8 hours a day, since I know for past experiences that it would be the stupidest thing to do. Anyone advising to undersleep, especially when you have to do a lot of work, is completely clueless (or worse, wants you to fail). I'm so concerned with not undersleeping that I'm getting up extremely early, so that if my body is asking for more than 8 hours, I still have plenty of time to sleep before going to work.
(This break, that I'm using to write this message, will be the last one until the end of the next three days, which include 4 exams)
Definitely! I really should have put that in the article: sleep is vital.
What I've been doing on my current death march is ensuring that the only non-working time I'm taking is right before bed: just long enough to watch an episode of a serialised TV show or otherwise unwind a bit. That seems to work well in at least minimising the amount of time I spend lying awake at bedtime.
> minimising the amount of time I spend lying awake at bedtime.
... this being the reason why it's conventionally inadvisable. :)
I think that unwinding like this before bed does work well for many - personally I've found that if I end my day in the middle of solving a problem, I am able to pick up and continue much more rapidly in the morning if I don't interrupt whatever I was working on before bed.
For similar reasons, I try to take out time to exercise and really move about just before midday/lunch, usually about the time that I've started to feel myself naturally slowing down and losing focus anyway after a few hours (even with breaks) of working.
I agree with and can vouch for every one of these points - particularly when working is isolation.
Thing is, every death march I've been on has been a group effort where appearing to suffer for whichever executive dropped the ball at the onset is at least as important as actually producing. In these situations, appearing healthy much less taking breaks will be taken as a lack of effort.
The guide I could really use is one on how to manage "up" and limit the effects of or outright avoid working for the panderers and incompetents who create death marches in the first place.
Ugh. I feel for anyone stuck in an environment where appearing ill is actually considered a positive sign. Pretty much the definition of a toxic workplace?
">Pretty much the definition of a toxic workplace?"
Yes, definitely.
To try and start answering my own question above, I think there were two main factors that created that situation.
* Lack of Accountability - Our deadline didn't really matter, it wasn't tied to anything concrete and the project wasn't backed with a very strong case either. It was an arbitrary promise at the executive level, a resume builder. Failing to meet it would cost at most some amount of internal embarrassment at the CXO level.
* Loyalty as Currency - Like I said in the first post, we had to appear to suffer for the executive. That's what the place was about, serving the person you work for. Not necessarily being faster, smarter or even genuinely working harder, just being a "team player" and "on board" with the vision from on high.
(Every time I hear someone talk about the importance "culture fit" in reference to start-ups I'm reminded of this.)
Make-up. Buy make-up and give yourself bags under the eyes. Make sure to bathe semi-regularly, and never wear new clothes. If you have weekends off, wear your washed clothes on the weekend at the gym (or just do light exercise in them at home), so they'll be pre-sweated when you come to work the next day. Do your breaks in the restroom if you have to - since they're just 5 minutes every half hour, people shouldn't really notice, unless you have a tracking system.
Maybe putting on make-up isn't something you can pick up in a day (though you're trying to make yourself look bad, not good), but the rest of it should be fine. Basically - if you have to game the system to succeed, then think like a lying asshole sociopath. If you don't have a healthy management->employee relationship, I don't see any reason to try and maintain a healthy employee->management one.
People repeatedly assert, without ever citing anything, that 40 hours/week is some theoretical max on your productivity. Can anyone provide some actual citations on this?
Robin Hanson did some investigation and found little empirical support, and his data put 60 hours as the optimum (for construction, not knowledge work).
So productivity per worker rises until around 60 hours per week, but productivity per worker hour is decreasing the entire way through.
What this means is that 60 hour weeks only make sense if your labor cost per worker is fixed, not your labor cost per worker hour. It doesn't make sense even without overtime pay, but if you're paying someone time and a half to work 60 hours a week, you're paying for 80 hours and getting 50 in return. You'd be much better off paying two workers for 40 hours a week each and actually getting 80 hours of work for those 80 hours you're paying for.
As an individual, working 60 hours per week regularly makes sense if you're a self-employed author and can't hire someone else to get the extra 10 hours of productivity, but if you're the average salaried slob working for the average company, it's a terrible bargain. You make the same pay, and the company gets 10 hours of extra work while you lose 20 hours of extra time. Why the hell would you agree to that?
>The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.
I tried to follow the links in that article to primary sources and was not able to find a single one (though the article links to some blogspam for the Business Roundtable study).
A search for the title of the original study did turn up this meta-study:
It has various narrow (i.e., really industry-specific) results that suggest you can have 6 week sprints of 50 hour weeks and gain productivity. Nearly all of it applies to construction.
Overall, I'm still not understanding why people are so confident that 40 hours is the True Answer across all industries and all people, as is commonly asserted.
Perhaps, but if the same conclusion holds for salaried workers outside construction (huge if, obviously), then you do want 60 hour weeks. The hourly case is also made more complicated by benefits.
The only thing I'm actually trying to say is that I don't know the right answer and I'd love it if all the people who do seem to know the right answer would cite some sources.
From memory (I don't have my copy of "Peopleware" here), there was an large IBM study in the '80s that showed 40 hours as the practical optimum work week.
Rule 0: don't participate in death marches. Seriously. Death marches mean that management has no idea what it's doing and you would be better off quitting and getting another job. Then again, I am an old and bitter programmer. :/
They're useful occasionally - at least, when working on one's own projects. Certainly, as an indie filmmaker, there are times when temporarily doubling my output is vital, usually in the run-up to a launch (like now).
If you're doing them over any great duration or with any frequency, though, I'd agree that's a very bad sign indeed.
Honest mistakes and unforeseen circumstances can necessitate death marches. I've been in a few situations where they were "necessary" -- some opportunity arose, or something happened that required the march. But it's also an issue of experience and repeating patterns. If death marches are a part of the culture, I'd definitely say get the hell out.
From a management perspective, you can heal some of the wounds inflicted by a death march by offering verbal and written mea culpas, and by giving real compensation to the people you forced on the march: extra paid time off, bonuses, significant gifts, etc. And then follow through by never doing it again to your employees.
When I was starting my career, I think I read so much about death marches (including the book called "Death March") and crunch time that I strenuously avoided both. It's been about 10 years and I've still never worked more than one late night sequentially, and in the times that did happen I took off the day following or the day after that. No weekends or 50 hour weeks or any of that shit. It just ain't worth it.
Today I completed a difficult five days and the blasted thing works and I hope I never see this code again. Before you laugh because you've all pulled off 9 months without sleep or whatever manly chest beating, hear me out, because its all fresh in my mind (obviously, with successful completion being today).
1) WRT athlete, your brain is overworked. The most important thing leading to the quick(ish) resolution of the redesign was doing absolutely nothing on Friday. If I hadn't done that, it would probably be another week... or two... until I got this thing done. After the first ten hours on Wednesday and Thursday I was making, in retrospect, provable negative progress at the rate of about five hours of re-work required per hour of work.
2) Never deviate from procedure. When you're sleepy, cranky, panic, and tired, skipping unit tests or a sort of individual code review is an excellent way to make negative ten hours progress. If you know how to do it the right way, do it that way even if its not immediately the fastest. I've never wasted so much time as when I've tried to speed things up (this applies to general life, now that I think about it).
3) Explain the whole thing as if to a noob or a coworker, over and over, until you find the bug. So this case class inserts into that db table using ... uh.. that code that doesn't exist. Yeah. (Edited to emphasize "the whole thing" means to find and fix major system design issues... the compiler will do a fine job of finding missing semicolons, but entirely missing flowchart boxes can only be found via systems analysis, and this is probably not the ideal time for it)
I can mathematically prove that working 13+ hours a day results in about as much net forward progress as working 4 hours per day. I would probably have been done on Friday if I had just stopped early on Wednesday and Thursday, but instead it took till Sunday afternoon. People who claim to work 90+ hours are probably doing the mental equivalent of ditch digging or are only getting net 10+ hours per week forward progress.
Back to easy, much more productive, shorter hours next week...
Good advice. I work with groups (LSAT and SAT students) who almost inevitably end up in death marches in the weeks leading up to their exams. They need to be told this.
I would add: delegate those things in your life that are work, but aren't contributing to the objective of the death march. For instance, I work from home, and certain administrative tasks are a thorn in my side. I now have someone cleaning my place, and scanning documents, two of my least favourite jobs.
This has increased the hours I can work in a week without feeling worn out. This stuff can also be scaled up in a death march. I once spent a month writing, and produced 50% more than my normal output.
But I felt more relaxed than normal. How? I was staying somewhere where the hosts cooked, cleaned, and ran errands for me. I had zero responsibilties apart from work. I think I worked 60 hours a week for a month, but I cut out about 20 hours a week of tedious chores, and so I didn't notice the difference.
One of the most productive things I've done in the current crunch time has been to spend a bit more money on buying pre-prepared vegetables and meat during crunch. Extremely simple, but (given I cook all my and my gf's food from scratch) a surprisingly substantial saving in time.
I wouldn't want to do this all the time - I like preparing food, and freshly chopped onion tastes nicer - but in a crunch it's fantastic.
It's not necessarily a very good idea (although death marches, used judiciously, do work)
No they don't.
Or that is: they sometimes work for your boss (or your customer), in the short run. But they don't work for you.
And when push comes to shove, that's who you need to look for, right?
There's no reason, other than a feeling that you're expiclity under the client (or employer's) thumb -- e.g. a short-term financial emergency; or you're feeling very early in your career, and that you can live without a shining reference from them, after you've made your way through the tunnel of pain they've laid out for you; or you just didn't vet the other party properly, and weren't aware of their manipulate (and perhaps sociopathic tendencies) -- to put up with death marches, ever.
All you have to do (absent one of the above-mentioned emergencies) is say, "I'm sorry about the external pressures you're facing, but asking me to put in these hours this doesn't seem to be in line with the parameters we set up at the outset for this project/job. It's also just not going to be good for your working relationship, in the longer haul. So either you're going to need to find additional resources to help you, or I'm going to have to pass."
It's not easy. But it's doable. And trust me, you'll respect yourself a lot more in the morning.
For further guidance and inspiration on this topic, please see:
My advice would be: starting dead march anytime sooner then last week and half is irrational. I do not believe authors estimate of three weeks 80 hours, that is too long too much. It may feel good, but it is not a good idea. First, you need to keep clean head and think eg.)
* prioritize and cut everything non-essential,
* being organized is not waste of time, but do not overdo it,
* prioritize again and cut everything not super essential,
* sleep enough hours,
* eat regularly and real food,
* take short break after every longer subtask (!short - measure it!),
* be conscious: if you find yourself staring at the screen or procrastinating, then it is good time for short break,
* use the above breaks for short but intensive physical activity,
* socialize less then usually, but find some time to socialize anyway.
Important:
* have good testers and let them check for regressions as often as possible. Really, they are more valuable then new programmers on team.
If you need to achieve something exceptional, you need to think clear above all. The idea "wait we do not have to do it at all" saves more time then all clever hacking in the world. And if you do not sleep and do not eat, you will not be clever anyway.
As for last point, most people need to talk. If they do not get to talk out of work, they tend to get more talkative in work. That means a lot of wasted time. The last thing you want is to unconsciously use team meetings to satisfy your communication needs and waste everybody's time.
It is ok to bundle things together eg. run to grocery store for food (3 in 1: physical activity and break and food).
Pretty sensible advice for dealing with long hours over an extended period, but I was confused by the use of the term "death march" which in terms of software development is known as an anti-pattern:
I think the author of the article used it intentionally. The premise of the article is that sometimes developers find themselves having to or choosing to do a death march despite knowing it's unsustainable long-term, and there are ways to make the death march more productive and mitigate the negative effects.
"But you can work 80 hours a week for the next three weeks and double what you get done"
That seems rather optimistic, since your productivity and focus will probably drop sharply after about 40-50 hours. So you're probably lucky if you're getting 1.25 or 1.5 times more done by working twice as many hours, and sometimes your total productivity will even decline.
For example, after 50 hours, a developer might be coding more bugs that they'll have to spend time fixing the next day. If it takes longer to fix the bug than it did to write that code, the productivity of the time spent writing the code will have been negative - you would have been better off going home and getting some sleep.
Thanks for the kind words and advice. I'll keep these minds.
The hardest part is how tightly coupled this project is with myself. If it fails, it's me failing, not the team or the project.
Given the fact there were 4 UX people and a project manager. I'm the one doing the death march at the end when all their work was done.
I need advice on how to properly deal with that.
It falls on me.
Managers don't like hearing "no" but they love dollars and cents and being a "decision maker". "I hear you'd like this done in a month... well its going to take me two months if I work alone. The good news is I know two consultants and the three of us can do it in a month for $abcxyz. Why will it take 50% more labor hours to get it done quickly, well much like nine women can't pop out a baby by cooperating in a month ... and BTW here is a nice book for you called the mythical man month and it would be well worth your reading time. So get back to me on that decision"
- Five months 80+ hours/week on my first video game
- Nine months of similarly insane hours shipping a consumer PC platform
- Well over a year of crazy on the Apple Newton, including six back-to-back 100+ hour weeks
- A couple more for Microsoft, on various things, including a few of those century weeks (my wife called me "broken" on the last one)
In each case it took me 3+ months to recover, probably more.
Last year, faced with the "opportunity" to do another one, I resigned. By all accounts I made the right choice.
A death march is a sign that something is seriously no-kidding broken in planning and management. It may be necessary to actually do a DM to recover from the situation you've dug yourself into, but organizations should learn from this.
But instead of learning, companies come to depend on them. The expectation develops that the technical staff can be leaned on to rescue bad decisions. One of my ex-cow-orkers likened it to an addiction.
The price? Loss of good talent, bad morale that leads to mistrust, even poorer decisions, a sense of powerlessness at the worker-bee level, and lack of continuity in follow-on products because of turnover.
I will say that I've made fast friends and learned a hell of a lot about people during DMs. But I'd much rather work in a place that does a DM, learns from it and adapts.