[MUD-Dev] Crunch time

[Amanda Walker]

On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 10:28  PM, ceo wrote:

> I find it interesting that respondents have largely ignored the
> point about aggressiveness, which suggests people are replying
> slightly by rote in a discussion that I'm sure most have had many
> times before.

Eh, not exactly.  In my experience, aggressiveness is a function of
size, not of domain.  Small companies can be (though are not always)
more focused than large ones, and hungrier.  Both aspects increase
aggressiveness.

> Other industries also have similar fundamentals - but very few
> have them in such strength or extremes.

This is where I diagree.  I was working at Lucent when they got
clocked (probably fatally) by the expectation that the "big iron"
telecom market didn't move that fast.  The project I'm working on
right now (for a much, much smaller company) has changed hardware
platforms twice in 9 months because of hardware advances (OK, it
does involve compressing and encrypting real-time video, one of the
few applications that's even more cycle-hungry than gaming, but my
point stands).  Every piece of the IT hardware market is moving just
as fast as the gaming platform market (and being driven by many of
the same forces).  Networking has hit 10Gb Ethernet; 2TB file
servers are now standard items; DSL-speed consumer wide area
wireless coverage is in field trials (with industrial stuff hitting
gigabit speeds); people are replacing special-purpose video wall
controllers with PCs because graphics cards have gotten good enough
to do all the compositing in software; and so on.  That's just in
the last 6 months.

*Nobody's* hardware platform targets have windows any larger than 6
months these days.  Some of them are as small as 90 days.  One
project I'm pitching in on is having to solve an unexpected problem:
the custom hardened field enclosure they ordered 3 months ago is now
2x too big because the hardware requirements dropped in half while
it was being manufactured.  Love that Moore's Law...

Anyway, I don't mean to get into a "mine is bigger than yours"
argument here.  But anyone who believes that non-game marketplaces
move any slower than the game market simply has not experienced
those other marketplaces.

Back to "crunch time" for a moment.

There's good crunch and bad crunch.

I like "good crunch".  I'm reasonably distractable, so I actually do
my best work when I am feeling some time pressure that can keep me
in the hyperfocus "zone" while I work.  I am definitely one of those
people for whom it can be said, "if it weren't for the last minute,
nothing would ever get done."  I'll eat the company-provided pizza
and drink the company-provided caffeine, and get more productive
hours out of the day.  I've pulled some amazingly large rabbits out
of very small hats in my time, and a certain amount of pressure
serves as a useful motivatiing factor.

I have come to hate "bad crunch".  Death marches do not get products
out any faster, or with any higher quality.  Quite the opposite.
I've been part of several death marches where it would have been
much better for all concerned to stop, declare the current product
"a useful research prototype that taught us a lot of things", and do
it over from scratch with the newly acquired knowledge factored in.

I'll add a book to Tamzen's list: "Deadline", by Tom DiMarco.


Amanda Walker
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