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I don't care what methodology you're using, if it includes crunch then it's broken.

Proper, grown-up coding on a business application is incredibly wearying on the mind, and results have shown time and time again through research studies and professional management that past 8 hours coding in a day the average programmer's code quality starts to deteriorate. Past 10 hours it goes negative - at this point the code base is actually being damaged.

"doing what needs to be done to fulfil the promise" is actually alerting the team that you've made a poor estimate of the effort required for this feature and need to recalibrate. It is absolutely not sticking with your poor estimate and delivering shoddy code to the project.



The next time I hear "crunch" from a PM type, I'll publicly invite him/her to lead by example and deliver a bunch of features over his weekend.


Be careful what you wish for... I know several PM types that can match you insane hour per insane hour - some had skin in the game (part ownership), others were just overzealous and I know at least one burned out.


"I don't care what methodology you're using, if it includes crunch then it's broken."

Rather than saying it is broken, it needs to be said that the team needs to improve. Continuous Improvement, it's where it's at.




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