Remote working sounds great in theory, but it turns out to be longer working hours in practice

The software development world is suffering from a meeting epidemic with the only time for development after work when the meetings and teams' messages stop

In the triple peak day, developers get work done at night when the chatter of Teams/Slack finally dims. Instead, developers are trying to get through their workload by working longer into the night.

Was the great resignation about the stress caused by the pandemic or the stress caused by ever increasing working hours for developers? The reduction in the quality of life outside of work as work expands into social time.

The move to remote working has seen commuting times go down, but the number of meetings goes up. The holy grail of working from home isn’t quite turning into the dream scenario it was advertised as.

There are lots of developers who remember the good old days when they used to have a lunch break instead of a Teams meeting.

Having too many meetings sounds a trivial problem, but it's a reduction in time for development but with developers expected to deliver the same amount of software in less time.

The common solution to this problem is developers attempt to outwork the problem, working later into the evening when the meetings finally stop and you can get some work done.

This resulted in an increase in burnout — 83% of Developers Suffer From Burnout and 81% Said It’s Gotten Worse During Covid

Doing more with less

What I like about scrum as a framework is it makes the rules of development clear to developers and customers. If you want to add more work to the sprint, then you have to take something of equivalent value out (PSST story points are really days).

It allowed the developers to be not be blamed for reject requests to add extra work to the sprint, but say they couldn’t do it because of the rules of scrum.

Before Scrum, customers and managers believed developers could always squeeze more work in. This squeezing was code for developers could work extra hours to do more work.

Many not-technical people used to grumble at the capacity of developers was 6 hours a day to accommodate the various meetings we needed to have before the developers got down to coding. They grumbled but conceded communication was important and 90 minutes of non-development was reasonable.

Remote working recently seems to have moved away from this and now projects are run in mixtures of Waterfall and Agile. They want fixed time lines but with Agile delivery and the rules have been thrown out of the window.

Meeting madness

Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything. John Kenneth Galbraith

Is Meeting Overload the Cause of Increased Burnout in Developers? The meeting epidemic leaves developers with less time for development. Developers work in their own time to hit deadlines, leading to increased levels of burnout — 83% of Developers Suffer From Burnout.

Teams meetings have replaced the previous idea of seeing developers sitting at desks and customers feeling they were getting value for money.

Instead of seeing them in person, they want to see/hear them on teams meetings.

It’s increasingly difficult to shield developers from teams meetings and slowly more of their time is being consumed by teams meetings. Developers time is like the rain forests being slowly consumed and shrinking.

When do you work?

You are at work all day, but what time is most productive? A Microsoft study finds there were two peaks before the pandemic, but now there are three peaks. The article — The Rise of the Triple Peak Day (microsoft.com). The graph below shows the peak times of knowledge workers. It’s sad to see the keyboard events don’t stop and alarming to see the third peak.

Remote working has destroyed the concept of a lunch break. Meetings are regularly put over lunchtime and I have to grab lunch when I can around lunch time.

I invested in bluetooth headphones so I can leave my computer to get drinks and snacks during the day.

Developers disruption

Meetings are more disruptive to developers because it breaks their focus and concentration. Developers need focused time (Maker’s schedule, Manager’s schedule) to understand requirements, to create solutions and solve problems.

Software development is a creative process, it needs uninterrupted time to create, test, fix and get code working. Once the code works, it’s needs to be simplified.

Why is this bad?

It’s not just meetings are bad because they take time. The interruptions such as email, teams messages, meetings and other distractions. Developers need focused uninterrupted time to create software/write code.

Interruptions cost time because the developer needs to work out where they were, what they were doing, the problems they were solving. There is a switching cost that drains time away from development.

Meetings, teams' messages, interruption costs and other distractions leave developers less time to write code/create software. The time for development has gone down, but the project plans haven't changed.

The short-term solution used by many developers is to work longer and get the work done when the teams/slack chatter has stopped and the meetings have ended.

Conclusion

Keeping Developers Will Be the Priority in Great Developer Resignation Next Stage and reducing burnout of developers will become a priority.

This is likely to be a transition period as developers and customer understand how to work effectively remotely. Trying to out work your problems is a short-term solution and has contributed to many developers escaping this by quitting their jobs.

Developers find one job is like another and the longer hours of remote working follow them to the new job. It’s not the developers' jobs that need to change but the culture of working on software projects.

How does this play out? Will developers go back into the office and trade remote working for seeing colleagues in person, lunch breaks and not working late.