Total and Absolute Commitment

The stereotype of the programmer working 12 to 16 hours at a time contains more than a grain of truth. To be an effective developer, you need to be able to concentrate exclusively on the programming task. That concentration exacts a penalty. While concentrating on a programming project, you lose track of time. One morning you look up, and it's 2:00 p.m. You've missed lunch. One Friday evening you look up, and it's 11:00 p.m. You've stood up your date or neglected to tell your spouse you were coming home late. One October you look up and realize that the summer is over and you missed it again because you've spent the past three months concentrating on an interesting project.

The Pony Express ad at the beginning of the chapter could be applied to some of today's software developers. It can be hard to have a family, friends, or other social ties when you work as much as some software developers do. Here is Pascal Zachary's description of programmer commitment on the Windows NT project:

Work pervades their existence. Friends fade into the background. The ties of marriage fray or rip apart. Children are neglected or deferred. Hobbies wither. Computer code comes to mean everything. If private dreams are nursed at all, it is only to ease the pain of creating NT.^[12]

At the end of the NT project, some developers left the company. Some were so burned out that they left the software field entirely.

Recognizing this phenomenon, some experienced developers have difficulty signing up for new projects because they know that in so doing they will once again choose to lose evenings, weekends, and summers.

This pattern is avoidable by moving to an engineering approach to software development. The average project spends 40 to 80 percent of its time correcting defects.^[13] With software engineering, the team doesn't create the defects in the first place or it positions itself to eliminate the defects more quickly and easily. Eliminating 50 percent of the work is one quick way to reduce the workweek from 80 hours to 40.

Developers' high task completion need creates an unusual relationship between their commitment to their projects and their commitments to their companies. In my experience, no matter how much software developers dislike their companies, they rarely quit in mid-project. Workers in other fields would say, "I hate my company. I'm going to wait until right in the middle of the project, then quit. That'll show them!" Software developers say, "I hate my company. I'm going to finish this project to show the company what they're losing, then I'll quit. That'll show them!"

Programmers also seem committed to their occupation. One difficulty companies have in enforcing nondisclosure agreements is that many programmers feel more loyal to their colleagues at other companies than they do to their own employers. I have observed that software developers routinely discuss company confidential material with colleagues who are not covered by nondisclosure agreements. In their judgment, the free exchange of information between companies is more important than any one specific company's protection of its trade secrets. Programmers in the Open Source movement apply the idea more broadly and advocate that all source code and related materials should be disclosed for the public good.^[14]

I think this loyalty to a project, tendency to work long hours, and high need for creativity are all related. Once a programmer has visualized the software to be built, bringing the vision to life becomes paramount, and the programmer feels tremendously unsettled until that can be done.

This ability to make a strong commitment to a vision bodes well for the establishment of a profession of software engineering. Programmers have a desire to commit to something beyond themselves to their colleagues on a project or to other colleagues industry-wide. A profession of software engineering and its related professional societies can provide a constructive focus for this occupational commitment.