Quantity over Quality

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season, well, our between season, special little episodes, one-offs. In this episode, we're going to look at quantity over quality. Not vice versa, not quality over quantity, but when does it make sense to do quantity over quality? Now, by this, I'm really looking at things like the amount of time we spend working on a project. This project may be something we do on the side. More often though, in this case, I want to talk about what we do for an employer or a This is where we look at when are we doing what we need to do and when are we maybe being taken advantage of. Or maybe that's a little strong, but we are paying the price for someone else, either drawing a line in the sand or maybe even mismanagement. This is where by this, I mean, when we're getting a situation where there's a project or product that needs to be done, it needs to be done by a certain time for whatever reason, whether somebody drew a line on the sand or maybe there's a regulatory issue or some business reason or something that says we have to have this by such and such a date, such and such a time. There are a myriad of these kinds of situations. We may have a situation where, for example, high trust compliance or PCI or HIPAA or you name it, some sort of compliance issue that's coming up that kicks in by December 31st or some sort of date like that. There may be some sort of a target, a business-based target. We have to release this in time for the ABC conference or something like that. Those things are real dates. There are reasons and legitimate reasons for us to have to get work done in that amount of time or by that date. Now, sometimes we have situations where there's really, I guess, three different situations that exist. One is that the date, whatever it is, is imposed by something outside of our organization and we just have to deal with it. It may mean that we have to go all hands on deck. We have to work our butts off and get the thing done. It may be that that thing comes up and our organization waits to deal with it. It gets pushed off and pushed off and pushed off. That's actually a problem of our own making. It may be that somebody sets that date and it's really not needed. It's not a set stone kind of thing. There's other dates we could do, but it's just put there, maybe even potentially as a way to push the resources we have as much as possible. situation where you have a team that is under-resourced. They're understaffed. It's obvious that the amount of work that they have to do and the amount of people they have is not equivalent and nothing is done. It's just, hey, the team can work overtime and extra hours and extra hard and they'll just find a way to make it work anyways because that's what we need them to do. There are times when that's okay. If you're some sort of ownership or you get bonuses or something like that, then okay, so you work overtime, you work extra hard, you get that stuff done. If not, if you're salaried and you are being overworked, your scheduled work is 50 hours a week for your 40 hour week, then you're being taken advantage of. At that point, you're basically being used for free work that over time, you're not getting paid extra for it. You've got a manager or situation where they're actually pushing extra work on you just because they can. That's a situation where you're being taken advantage of. Now, I want to go back to the whole quantity over quality. Early on in our careers or when we are new to an environment, a technology, a line of business, at those times you lack skill, you lack experience because you haven't been around that stuff. It makes sense that while your work is not of the quality that you would like it to be, you can make up for that by working extra hard, working extra hours. That is how we start our career. We start off working harder because we don't know how to work smarter. We put more hours in and part of that, particularly in the technical world, is the extra time we do to learn things, to maybe practice it. Maybe we're not as fast. We don't have these things just off the top of our heads, so it takes us longer. We have to look into it. We have to ask for help. We do these things that help us grow, but it's a cost to the company as a resource while we're doing this. We're learning on the job. perfectly valid, I think, to offset that cost of training or learning on the job with putting some extra hours in, working longer hours and not trying to keep your schedule down to that 40-hour work week. You want to provide more to your employer than they pay for you. If what they're paying for is for you to be effective for that 40-hour week and you're not because you're not up to that skill level, then you offset the lack of quality with quantity. Put some more hours in. I think we get used to that because that's how we start. We all start that way. We all start working our butts off and long hours and just trying to keep up plus learn plus do the right stuff and really hit the cadence or the rhythm that a mid-level technologist probably would do. If they could get five things done in a 40-hour week, we want to be able to get five things done in a 40-hour week. For us, when we're new, it may take a 60-hour week to get those five things done. That's okay. The problem is that I think we have to regularly assess where we're at and what we're providing. Sometimes it is better to push back and say, wait a minute, we're overloading the team. We're stretching people too thin. We're putting too much on them. What happens is that, we've talked about this, is that you end up spinning your wheels a little bit. Once you get beyond a certain number of hours, usually beyond 40-50 hours a week, something like that, there's definitely a degradation of your productivity. I don't care who you are. I don't care what you think about yourself. There is going to be a decline in how productive you are as you get deeper into a week. The further you go, there's exhaustion and things like that that can kick in. Now, not all the time. You'll get a week or two here or there where you're pumped, you're excited, you've got something really cool that you're working on, you've got something that is fulfilling. In those situations, you can keep going because your adrenaline basically keeps you going. Over time, there's going to take a toll. If you're in a situation where you've got a team that is being overworked on a regular basis, then that's going to take a toll on the team. Eventually, what's going to happen, the good people, the people that can, will leave. There's a certain point where they're going to say, hey, I can go somewhere else, maybe make the same amount of money or more, and work less hours. That's not going to help. It doesn't help the company to wear their people out. Some companies do that, but you find over not a very long period of time usually that they really struggle to get and keep employees because it becomes known that they overwork their people. What is actually a service that you're providing your employer, especially if they don't seem to understand that they are overworking a team on a regular basis? They may think that, oh, it's no big deal that we're working all of our staff 60 hours a week and just ad nauseum and there's no end to sight and we just keep pouring on. At some point, somebody needs to bring that up and say, hey, wait a minute, this is not viable. There needs to either be an adjustment in the work that we're expected to do or go hire more people. This is where it becomes dicey, I guess, or a challenge. I've definitely been in those situations where a company says, okay, really we need to have an extra resource for this team, but the team is doing okay, in quotes, they're getting the job done because they're working late and working on the weekends. If you end up doing something to show appreciation for that as an employer, that's one thing. They're doing this partially because they love the company, because they believe, and because they're getting something out of it. But if it's just, hey, we don't really need to spend this extra money because we've got these people that will just carry the load for us, then that's not a good situation no matter to be in on either side of it. Because if you are the employer and you're putting that kind of weight on your resources, when one leaves, you cripple the team, basically. If everybody's already working more than they can, they're beyond their limits, and then somebody leaves, you have no way to pick up the slack. And you get in a situation where when somebody leaves, because they will, when somebody leaves, you've already got these people that are overtaxed, so they don't have bandwidth to train up another resource anyways. You get in this really bad situation where you've got everybody overwhelmed, and you don't have a way out of it, and even bringing in new resources may not be effective unless you do so, you bring in enough resources to make it worthwhile to say, okay, let's slow down, let's invest some time, let's train some people up. We're obviously going to slow down our productivity for a while, but we're going to do that so that we can become more productive in the future and reduce everybody's workload. That kind of situation is something as an employer, or as an employee, you can just say, okay, that's acceptable. We're going to spend some time, we're going to work extra hard because we need to invest in our future. We need to position ourselves so that we can either train up a resource or add another essentially, so that we will eventually be properly staffed instead of understaffed. In a world where the business is changing as fast as it is, you've got a lot of startups and things like that that are always cash strapped, they're always going to run lean, you need to be aware of that both as a, whether you're an employee or as an employer. It's very easy to just get into the mode of, okay, we're just work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. Give 110% all the time. There is a point where that becomes detrimental. It really is. It's quantity over quality. We're going to pour hours in, but the quality is not going to be what it would be. Honestly, in a lot of cases, I see people work 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and you look at what they actually produce and the quality of their work, and it's really no better than if they just worked 40 hours. I've seen way too many situations where once you get them particularly beyond 55, 60 hours a week, all those other hours are basically wasted. It's just not, for the most part, and especially if you're doing it multiple weeks in a row, months as the months go on, it's just not sustainable. I think we need to be realistic about that both, even as an employee. I know it's hard to go to your boss and say, hey, we're working at this really high pace, I don't think we can sustain it and not feel like you're saying, hey, I'm not able to do the job. There's a certain point where it's like if the job is really something two people should be doing instead of one, then yeah, you shouldn't be able to do the job. They should need a second person. I think in our world, with technology, there's so much we deal with that is not physical. The amount of workload and the things that we produce is not physical, so it's not as obvious. If you wanted to move a big piece of furniture, it is obvious to everybody that something may be too big, too heavy, too bulky for one person to do it, where it has to be a two or three or five man job or five person job, however you want to look at it. In technology, we don't see that as much. We just see that, hey, there's a bunch of stuff that needs to be done. We've got some people sitting in front of a screen and they're working on it. If you're in a situation where you're constantly missing dates, if you're constantly having to adjust stuff, if you're constantly having to readjust expectations, if you've got people that are taking a lot of days off or things like that, these are all signs that maybe you're running at a higher rate than you need to. If you're yourself as an employee, if you find yourself dreading each day, particularly if it's a job that you liked and you're getting into a situation where it's just like each day you feel like you're stuck in some sort of bad movie, Groundhog Day or something like that, not that that's a bad movie, you're stuck in some sort of thing where you're just like every day you're stuck in this loop. You get up, you work, you collapse, and then you repeat, then maybe that's a sign that you're going at a rate that is not sustainable. You'll also see this in your individual work. If you find yourself regularly having to review, reread, rewrite your code because you're mentally having a harder and harder time to stay on track, then you're probably at a point where you've gone beyond being productive. You're in a situation where you're just burning hours and you're not actually being that productive. Yes, you can make a little progress along the way, but generally speaking, you would be better off to go step away for a while and then come back and be at a higher productivity rate and you would get more done and possibly even more done in less time. There's definitely a diminishing return on investment when you start pouring hours and stuff. This is something that early on in our careers and our jobs, this is I think acceptable and we should expect it. While you are learning on the job, we've got on the job training that you're going to put some extra hours in. But as you get further along, you should see that decrease, those extra hours for a given product project should get back to something that's more normal. There's a point where you should be able to actually enjoy your life outside of your work. I do this particularly as a, hopefully for some of you that it gives you permission to push back and say, hey, wait a minute. We are overwhelmed and we have been overwhelmed. Things aren't getting better, they're getting worse. We're still getting the same amount of work or more work than we ever have and we don't have the resources today. But then we're going to have more work to do next week and we don't have any more resources coming. Things aren't going to add up. There's a certain point where you have to push back. Some of it may be, you just say, look, as an employee, you may have to say, I'm not going to work every weekend. I'm not going to work through every weekend just so we can keep up with whatever this pace is that we've set. It's a situation where you have to be confident when you're doing that, that the work that you're putting in, the hours that you work, you are being productive. You're doing what would be reasonable for that position, for that title, for that role. If you're a junior developer, I don't know how much is really going to be expected for you to produce in a short period. It's a 40-hour work week. It's basically going to be expected that you're going to put some extra hours in just to keep up. If you're a senior level and you're in a situation where you're basically pushed to work large amount, over time every week, unpaid overtime every week, you're probably being taken advantage of. Now, of course, as always, maybe you have some ownership in the situation, stuff like that changes the dynamics quite a bit. But there's a certain point where it is, maybe it's worthwhile to take a look at what your compensation is compared to your hours and see what kind of an hourly rate basically are you getting paid. When all of a sudden done, if you're sitting there and you're a senior and you're essentially making minimum wage, it's time to move. It's time to go to a different job to push back, to use that kind of stuff, to use those numbers and those calculations and talk to your boss, your manager, whoever it is, and say, hey, this is not right. What you guys are asking does not match the market. It does not match how we could be treated in other places. And either you need to make some adjustments or you're going to start losing staff members. It doesn't have to be you. You can say, hey, look, I love it here, but it just makes sense. And if you're working people to death, then if you're not paying them what they're worth, then they're going to end up leaving for something else. They're going to get a better offer somewhere along the way. So that's the quantity over quality thing. I wanted to touch on it a little bit because, like I said, I wanted to give permission to people in a sense that are seniors to sometimes say, hey, you got to push back. And I would actually say as a senior, you're probably uniquely qualified to have a good view into are we overwhelmed? Are we having too much put on our plates? And then as a junior, say, hey, realize that the quality of your work is not where everybody would like it to be. And so you're going to have to make up for it in quantity. That's just sort of how it goes. There's probably some sort of a curve that if you look at your career early on, there should be a lot more hours poured into it. But as you get further into it, you're going to be able to pour less hours into it because you are able to work smarter rather than harder. After the week, how are you doing on this? Are you underworked, overworked, just right? And if so, whichever it is, what are you going to do about it if you need to change? Something to think about and see if maybe there's some adjustments, especially since I'm sitting here and we're getting towards the end of the year. Maybe next year is going to be your year that you take advantage of a, you know, take a different tact. That being said, however you get through the rest of your year, I hope you do go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go. Developer Noor podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developernoor.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.