All Nighter

After my important bug fix was complete, it needed urgently testing, so a Tester worked overtime on Friday night and Saturday.

During testing, he found a bug, but it was completely unrelated to my fix. Still, he wasn’t to know that, and so when he raised it as an issue, my manager was panicking and trying to contact  some developers.

I didn’t see the message until Saturday 11am, but when I logged on and investigated it, I saw another message from my manager to liaise with Colin. Colin loves his overtime so had jumped at the chance to get involved.

When I managed to contact Colin at around 11:45am, he sounded like he was falling asleep. He then told me he was working 10pm to 4am to work out what was happening.

To be fair, he didn’t have the advantage of knowing what the original bug was or the impact of my fix, so I assume he spent a lot of time investigating that. The thing is, the only conclusion he had was that “it wasn’t caused by your change”. I worked that out within 30 mins; I didn’t need 6 hours.

The thing is, there’s no way you can work effectively that late at night; given that you have already done 9-5, and you have it in your mind that it’s now the weekend. To get back in “work-mode” and look at code through the early hours of the morning – it’s just madness.

The thing is, I worked on an important project with Colin a couple of years back. There were major problems with the code which were often caused by Colin. I fixed them during work hours. Colin was spending a few hours extra each night in overtime fixing other problems. He would then turn up late the next day, looking completely tired, and then wrote more crap code… then had to sort it out in overtime. Then it’s an endless cycle. If you want quality code, then overtime is not the answer.