Thread by @SebAaltonen

Huawei's VP of Cyber Security was interviewed by @KauppalehtiFi. He proposed 7 day (80h) weeks with no weekends. He hasn't got a summer vacation in four years. And he is worried that Finland can't compete with China / Silicon Valley without doing the same.

Thread...

I can only talk about programmers here, as I am not familiar with other people. Programmers write bad code when they are stressed out. They can still write a lot of code, but the architecture designs are terrible and there's lot of technical debt.

The only way to make programmers thing about the architecture (bigger picture) is to give them some breathing room. People I know often get their best ideas outside the work (walking the dog, swimming, biking to home, etc). Best ideas never occur during stress.

If the whole team is doing 80 hour weeks regularly, the amount of technical debt will be massive, and it will require a massive amount of people to maintain that code. If you do it like this for many years, it will definitely feel that nobody has time to idle. So many bugs to fix

And nobody has the energy or motivation to do big technical changes to get the company out of this situation. It's a spiral of death. No exit. Everybody things they are doing lot of work, but that's just busy work. With better design, none of this work would be needed.

If you really want good long term velocity, you need to give your programmers breathing room to make good architectural decisions. If you are measuring lines of code written, you are doing it wrong. More lines is almost never better. It just needs more maintenance.