[MUD-Dev] Crunch time

[Alex Chacha]

The original post is something that is mostly incorrect.  You
automatically brand anyone that feels passionate about their work as
a geek.  People who work long hours are geeks, people who keep up
with technology are geeks.  Then most top notch programmers are
geeks.  Some people program because the means justify the ends
(8to5ers), some program because they enjoy it (geeks).  While many
8to5ers have "hobbies", to many of us this is our hobby.  To tell me
that given one cold-hearted manager and a group of 8to5ers you can
deliver a product on-time is pure rubbish, and I would like an
example of when that actually worked for you or are you just
speculating. Road to failure is paved with 8to5ers and their
cold-hearted managers.

I've worked in the software and game industry for the last 14 years,
and to my experience most of the project failures were due to the
8to5ers and their lack of passion about their work.  When a non-geek
product manager dreams up a useless feature that no one will every
use and requires way more work than it is worth, the 8to5ers put
their time and constantly ask for extensions because they don't
care, they just want to meet the bare minimum required, so they can
go home at 5pm.  Someone who doesn't live to program should not be
programming anything serious (such as games, servers, etc).

I can list far too many of projects in which I was involved and the
8to5ers went home friday 5pm and the deadline was monday morning
with work not being done.  Their reply was that they would need to
meet at 8am on monday to discuss timeline changes.  It was way too
many times that I would work the entire weekend to make sure that
the code is delivered on-time and I don't have to sit in 6 hour
timeline restructuring meetings.  In the end the 8to5ers get the
glory for finishing the project on-time which they did not care to
finish on-time.

Sure there are good 8to5ers out there, but I haven't met many.  If
you like what you are doing, you are going to do more of it than you
are "required".
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