swestrup | Why Excessive Time spent at the Office is Bad.

There has been a certain amount of contraversey brewing about Electronic Arts and how it manages its programming staff, ever since this entry by

ea_spouse got such wide reknown. Having gone through my share of death marches and impossible crunch deadlines I must say I am glad to see articles like this are carefully pointing out that putting in large amounts of overtime on a project can actually be harmful to that project. Its a thing I've long found to be true. If you are too stressed, or don't take enough time for yourself, or are dealing with problems at home as well as at work, your work suffers.

Managers are often to blame, but sometimes programmers are too. I would like all of my hard-working programmer friends to ask themselves if they are pushing themselves too hard at work, and if that is having a bad effect on the amount and quality of their output. If so, you should consider taking it easier, both for your own health and for the health of the company and project you are working for.