Work/Life Balance and Quality of Life for Programmers

I was happy to see a text version of this open letter from the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) in my InBox this morning:

http://www.igda.org/qol/open_letter.php

The letter is titled, "Quality of Life Issues are Holding Back the Game Industry." I don't work in the game industry, but it does not surprise me at all that game developers are making noise about this issue. It's been an issue for software developers at large for some time.

A colleague wrote to me today after reading this open letter: "That's true in our industry too. I've seen it way too often where people bust their ass because they just know the company will make it worth their while and it almost never happens." Indeed. It almost never happens, and it's not just the gaming industry that has a problem.

Yeah, there are a few dot-com millionaires out there, and Microsoft is purported to have made a lot of their original employees quite rich, but for the rest of us, chances are we'll never make any real money from those stock options, and chances are that bonus you were promised either won't be there or will be a lot smaller than you were hoping. Working for a company is about a simple exchange of time for money. If you're looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you should probably be working for yourself.

So why are we working all these hours?

I applaud the efforts of the IGDA to send a message to employers in the gaming industry that there is a business case for making an effort to provide a balanced working environment. As the letter says, "Despite the continued success of the games industry, the immaturity of current business and production practices is severely crippling the industry." I don't doubt that one bit, and I support any efforts to encourage companies to make things better. I encourage you to support organizations like the IGDA as they try to make things better for all of us.

But I see a larger theme here. As I said in a short article about Ed Yourdon's view of offshoring a few days ago, it's an illusion to think that the company you work for gives a damn about you. It does not.

It does not give a damn about your desire to be trained on the latest technology. It does not care about your wife and four kids who wish you would come home. It does not care that you don't like working long hours. It does not care that your back, neck, and wrists hurt from sitting in that cheap chair at that desk that's not even a real desk. It does not care about your quality of life.

Maybe one day long ago, in some idyllic time, IBM or Chrysler or GM (in the U.S.) would take care of you for decades until you retired fat and happy with a pension. But even then, these companies were only doing this out of a feeling that they could not compete otherwise. As soon as the Hero CEO, Jack Welch of General Electric, showed everyone in the 80's how much fun layoffs are, that game ended quickly. Today "job security" simply does not exist.

Don't get me wrong: the people you work for might care about you. Your boss may be really cool, and when your wife's sister was in town last Friday your boss gave you the day off, and he finally scared up the money for that training class you've been bugging him about. But unless you work for a very small company, a company is not a person. A company is a machine--especially if it's publicly traded, aspires to be publicly traded, or aspires to be bought by another company. A machine does not care about you, any more than the programs you write care about you.

Remember the old kids cartoon, The Jetsons? It was set in the future and everyone flew around in little space ships. Mostly it was a terrible cartoon, but I love the two big companies that everyone worked for: Cogswell Cogs and Spacely Sprockets. It was far in the future, but all the people were still just working stiffs. A perfect metaphor. We are merely cogs and sprockets in the machine. If you can find a cheaper sprocket, you buy it and throw out the old kind. If you can make that old sprocket limp along for one more month before it wears out, you do it; and then you throw it away when it's worn out.

Am I complaining? Not really. I am at peace with my relationship with the machine. It get something out of it, and the machine does too. All things considered, everyone is happy. But I think this peace comes, at least partly, from two sources:

First, low expectations: I don't expect the machine to give a damn about me, so I'm not upset when it doesn't.

Second, I've worked hard to build up a resume that allows me to feel free to push back at the machine. If my current machine spits me out, another machine will be happy to have me. I've worked very hard to get to this place, but I am fully aware that a lot of people reading this are not so lucky. A lot of people reading this live in countries where you are lucky to have a programming job at all, where choice and freedom are not the norm. A lot of people reading this have no power against the machine. I feel for you, and I wish that I could relate better to your circumstance. I encourage you to add your comments below.

Quality of life, though, is not only about how many hours you are working or how long you spend sitting in your car every day: it's also about your health. Our minds may excel at the work of software design and programming, but our physical bodies are not optimized for sitting at a desk typing all day under flourescent lights looking at a CRT monitor that wears down the eyes. When we sacrifice to the machine, we are not only sacrificing our time, but also our bodies.

A couple years ago I wrote an essay, published in developer.*, called "Altar of Sacrifice." In it I wrote the following:

If you are young, do not let your youth deceive you and lull you into a false sense of security. Health is fleeting, and must be attended to. If you choose to work extra hours on a death march project, as all of us probably will at one time or another, so be it. You are your own master, and I am not trying to sit in judgment of anybody. But make balance the norm, and take time to enjoy life. Go home at night, leave work at work, and get a good night’s sleep. Take the weekend off, and go do something fun.

A few years ago, a programmer friend of mine ran into a guy in line at a conference. The guy was telling my friend that he used to be a programmer, but could not write code anymore because he could no longer type. He had developed carpal tunnel syndrome, and it had gotten so bad he had to give up his favorite thing in the world: writing code. This story scared the hell out of me, and if you love this game called software engineering as much as I do, it should scare you too.

A final thought: that same colleague I mentioned earlier also wrote to me today, "People just don't realize they can say No." I could not agree more. Practice saying No. It feels good.

Programmer empowerment will continue to be a theme here at developer.*.

Dan