The Third Bit: Crunch Mode

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2025-01-04 19:30:15

I’m supervising some undergraduate students at the University of Toronto this semester. It’s the first time I’ve done this in almost 15 years, and it’s giving me a chance to re-think and re-write the advice I used to give when I was doing this regularly.

My starting point is [Sedano2017], which found that software development projects have nine types of waste: building the wrong feature or product, mismanaging the backlog, rework, unnecessarily complex solutions, extraneous cognitive load, psychological distress, waiting and multitasking, knowledge loss, and ineffective communication. None of these are software issues, so if you only think about the code in your project and not about the people writing it, everything will take longer and hurt more than it needs to.

I used to brag about the hours I was working. Not in so many words, of course—I had some social skills—but I’d show up for work around noon, unshaven and yawning, and casually mention how I’d been up until 6:00 a.m. working on some monster bug.