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The recent news about overwork death in one of the organisations ,reminded me of some episodes overwork health issues in my work and my friends’. Given a choice everyone wants to get things done quickly, so that either they have a lot of time for leisure or can do a lot more in a short amount of time. When I transitioned to work from college, one major shock was the amount of time that I have to spend at the office even when I did not have much to do. Presenteeism was encouraged, people walking around visibly unwell, staying long hours, eating fast food at desk for lunch.

What people did was just hustle, when what they really wanted was to expedite work. This resulted in chronic overwork, under productivity and poor health (both mental and physical) which was impacting businesses far negatively. When I went to Europe for an assignment, I was so surprised when my client had working hours of just 10 to 5 including lunch and breaks yet that was one of my most productive stints ever.

As orgs grow, workplace dynamics become very complex. A nimble startup growing too fast will lose its nimbleness, it becomes an empire from a small tribe. What contributed to a startup’s success was expediency and fluency.

Expediency is the ability to find a quick way to address a solution which is simple, effective though not a complete one. Richard Gabriel talks about this in Worse is better, it is particularly very helpful in first mover advantage situations and product market fit cases. The simplicity of the solution will also make it easy to amend and extend based on the feedback. Communication and shared understanding across the entire group is the key to expediency and that is where a small team always excels at.

Fluency is the capability to do the right things fast. It is the ability of the people to do things repeatedly without getting fatigued or bored by a healthy blend of capabilities of people, process and engineering. If the team has a robust continuous delivery pipeline, they would not worry about making frequent changes to production. If the team members are highly skilled and disciplined you need less management oversight to make them to follow the right things. If the culture is established that visibility of work is a right and people have a good degree of control/autonomy over how work is done then we have a lot of motivated individuals to realise the goals.

A lot of leaders like expediency alone and it gives them results, they are not able to build on top of it because of poor investment in fluency. This results in a hustle culture with declining return on investments and creating fatigue. On the other hand, leaders focussing only on fluency will create a lots of bored and frustrated teams. Scrum though intended to bring teams to a productive sweet spot is misinterpreted and often ends up creating fatigued teams or indifferent ones. A good focus on the value and intent behind the agile practices like XP and constant questioning & improvement is the key to ensure that the teams are both fluent and expedient.

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I read the book Maverick by Ricardo Semler and learnt that every one wants to do well by themselves instead of a supervisor telling them what to do and watching them closely. It was a very new concept, though I was not able to influence my managers, I was able to follow this for people whom I had to lead. The results are often that people end up punching above their weight most of the times, people who try to game are often exposed within a few weeks and they themselves are not able to continue to work with our teams. I also stumbled on his second book The seven day weekend, which was more thought provoking on how to approach life in general and not to differentiate work and life as two different identities.

While I was in college, I learnt a lot and read a lot of books even though I spent a good deal of time commuting and playing. When I moved to be a full time worker, I found that my time for reading and learning quickly dried away. My managers insisted that I spend 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in order for me to meet expectations. What I observed was that most of the work got done within a heads down time of 3-4 hours. If I was stuck, no matter how hard I tried, I could not make headway until I got some focus time away or sleep. My attention span also varied throughout the day and throughout the week.

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In the course of time over a few work years, I also forgot about leisure reading, arts/crafts and exercise/sports. This led to only two outlets, food and media. No matter how hard I tried, I was always finding excuses to eat out and binge watch. One fine day, I got to work with a new team. The rule of the team was, we stop working by 6 and go out to play. This was different from what I was used to before, it worked wonders because it forced me to come out of the work mode and unwind and find friends in a non eating/drinking setup. The self formed XP team ensured that the peak productivity window as a team is aligned for team work and the rest individual contribution can come at a different pace.

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This blended work/life mode was unnerving as there was a feeling that I was not doing enough. At the end of a release we retrospected along with the client on how did we do? Our client said a similar complexity and scope that was delivered by 40 people from another team, this team had done it with just 11 people. As I grew in career, non linear working mode was the norm. I always carried a pen and paper with me, ideas struck me when I least expected, solutions appeared out of nowhere while waiting at traffic lights, cooking, gardening, having coffee….

My experience was also validated when I read the book The pragmatic programmer where the author talks about linear mode and random mode in one of the chapters. Don’t listen to ideas like 996 working style and promise of progress that comes with it, they are not fit for collective knowledge work. It also drains the mind and the body, because of the constant war mode that an individual will live in. As I read in the books and experienced, I have not been able to separate out my life and work as two separate jobs, it is what I am. So instead of talking about balancing two different jobs, I look to plan my days as a whole.

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A lot of people irrespective of their role at work, be it devs, managers, executives or architects often misunderstand what is to be called as tech debt and end up classifying cruft as tech debt. Management loves the concept of debt, often when it is easily available. The debt metaphor means, management can borrow from the future at cheaper interest rates and repay easily when they are able to multiply their capital acquired through debt. Debt is intentional, needs to be repaid, has to help you achieve more than you will repay in interest.

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What people talk about technical debt in the day to day work is not tech debt but cruft. None of that is intentional, it is purely poor practices, bad engineering and accidental. If we want to take an analogy to explain the difference between the two- a family of five people, parents with three kids is having a hatchback.They find it hard to go on their vacation trips and rely on rental vans. Most of the days mixing use of public transport and sharing the car helps them gets through the day. They keep considering about either buying another car or upgrading this one to a larger one but put it aside due to financial constraints. This scenario is what we call as tech debt. What is cruft then? If the same family who has a hatch back, never cleans the car, neither changes oil, does not fix dents and scratches which cause metal rot over time is cruft. Eventually even the small car they have will become unusable.

Tech debt has a benefit, it is always helpful until you hit the next magnitude problem while cruft is always damaging and drain on time and energy. You neither plan nor ask for permission to avoid or clean up cruft. It should be part of your every day job to leave the code in which you live in a clean and well tested state. If you have to keep defending cruft in the name of tech debt, you are in the wrong place.