A lot of people quote about Henry Ford’s remark, “If I ask my customers what they wanted, they will say faster horses”. We do not know if he really said those words but it is true that many of the ideas will always be incremental and not inventive, be it technology or ways of working.

If you ask bosses what they wan’t, everyone unanimously says “Longer working hours” especially more vehemently in the software development industry. My observation has been that with lots of automations and tech abstractions, the time taken to develop software has come down by a few magnitudes, compared to what it was a decade ago. What needed large teams with extensive management overhead can be done with smaller teams with fewer oversight.

In mature domains like mechanical and civil, breakthroughs are very less frequent; hence templating the work into easy to do steps that are verifiable by non techies is very productive. An abstract requirement will be translated to actionable steps, broken down into units of work and assigned to people to complete. Once the task is complete, it is very easy to verify by anyone else and the end of construction phase is typically the end of the project. It makes things rigid and predictable, so it has a linear relationship between number of people, number of hours and dependencies.

Software development on the other hand is very difficult to convert from abstract to concrete, any infusion of rigidity risks not getting the intended outcome. The combination of ever improving tech landscape, difficulty in communicating what a working software should do, the nature of knowledge work which degrades when stressed, makes it very hard to have a proven relationship with working hours, number of lines of code and number of people.

When dealing in a dynamic environment, there is more than one way of doing things, sometimes exponentially time saving ways can be found if we strive to make the design simple. One personal example I had was to write a program to convert roman numbers to decimal. I wanted to shake off the inertia and start writing code, I dived deep into the code thinking in terms of objects, writing a lot of tests and completed it after a few hours when I was convinced that the solution is complete and clean. The next day I realised that I was constrained by the need to keep going, that I never questioned if my solution could be simpler. I just spent 20-30 minutes to rewrite it in functional paradigm and got that done under 10 lines of code in one file which was 100+ lines across multiple files. For an outsider, thinking hard about the problem looks like inactivity, wasting time and not showing urgency; to me it came down to a super simple solution that is very easily be read and maintained by others.

Bosses are often tuned to look for urgency and activity as indicators of productivity. Also in the software service industry irrespective of the productivity, the number of hours billed directly impact profits; hence bosses love long working hours. In the software product industry though billing hours don’t matter a lot, the apparent busyness of people is expected. As a result, no major improvements happen as it is always business as usual sometimes even slowing down overall, creating physically and mentally unfit individuals over the long run.

On the other hand if teams are given freehand, then they also tend to extend the thinking phase into analysis paralysis. This can be broken down by mandating outcomes and impact on fixed timelines than output and effort. It is an art and takes a determined effort to build high performing teams that keep punching above their weight. The easy way out is demanding long working hours.

If you are engaging a knowledge worker on physical effort, then you are buying into mediocrity