The Dark side of being a Software Developer

IBM launched a campaign almost five years ago : „Where teams are heroes“. On conferences they distributed light blue t-shirts on whose back a team of software developers was pictured as super-hero cartoon heroes. We all want to be such heroes don ‘t we? Be famous like Kent Beck, Martin Fowler or Uncle Bob Martin , Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Hanselman and others, don’t we?

And we all kinda live and work in that dream. The long hours and efforts spent on last ditch deadlines, the lengthy and emotional discussions about a problem and our effort to be just the man who saves the team and the project. We all like to be the person people go to fix hard problems.

I lived the dream also. I worked day and night, fifteen hours a day weekends and holidays on tough projects which needed to be finished by a certain deadline or the client and our company will be in grave peril threatening their very existence. Does it sound familiar? I even worked several times from dusk till down, twenty four or even thirty hours consecutive too meet a deadline and afterwards I felt like a god. I’ve leaded a team to hell and beck and completed those damned screens just in time for the client presentation in the morning. And I’ve been doing such shenanigans for some time now.

What is the cost of such a way of life? What is the price we as people pay for doing such a service for our company and our clients?

What is the dark side of being a software developer?

SAS Special Forces WWII (Africa)

Let me tell you my story. Something that happened to me at the turn of the millennium.
  Let me tell you what price I paid for my way of life.

My wife threatened to divorce me a dozen of times, threw me out of my bedroom (temporarily thank God) , yelled at me continuously and generally made my life a living hell. Often I was made to choose between my family or my work. And both seemed critical at that moment. And I really wanted her to understand that what I was doing was important and critical and serious consequences will happened for multiple people if I don’t deliver. And she would yell at me and tell me that I’m not a soldier, or a doctor or a policeman that I do not work 24h a day and I’m not on back and call every day of my life. The situation was more drastic when my son or her were sick and I had to work.

Ultimately I tried to work from 5 a.m to 17 p.m , but the stress and the long hours and the lack of sleep just put me into bed for a couple of weeks. What a bummer.

Not my health, not my wife were the most horrible, most darkest and vilest price I had to pay. It was my four year old son.

One day he just wouldn’t budge from me after lunch. He cried and clinged to my leg and didn’t want me to leave. And I didn’t, but started to play with him. During the play he said to me that he had a dream : “Daddy, I dreamed that next time you will go to your work I will not see you for a long, long time”.

My work gave my son nightmares that he is going to lose me.

When my mother put him to bed one night he asked to her if I’m going to come to bed next him when I stop working for the night and why is daddy working during the night after working the morning and the day and the last five days like that.

My soul froze and my eyes started crying and my scream stopped in my mouth and I cursed my self for being such a monster to my family.

Is it really all that important?

The client set a deadline but made thirty percent change on its original request all which was accepted by us and the deadline slipped day by day into oblivion and often we would rewrite the same feature or screen several times. The work would just pile on with an even increasing defect rate due to long hours and stress and the dead line would remain the same and my colleagues and friend and I would soldier on trying to fix that which was already broken.

During that time I told my self that in the end it will all be worth, everything will pay out and my family will live better and all the people around me told me that I’m being stupid and an idiot.

But I stopped for a minute and made a mental calculation. It just didn’t pay out. The amount of personal loss compared to the business gain I expected and received where just not comparable.

Yeah sure the business is important. It puts food on our table and we must live by our word to deliver something to certain day. I believe it still and live it still. But you know, being a software engineer is just part of my life the other is my family. I still work in the evenings, but not all evenings . I work because I like it, and enjoy it and I get to learn something , not because someone made me. But my place and my obligations are to my family also and that is an area I really, really messed out.