Don’t crank out code at 2AM, especially if you’re the CTO

Dear HubSpot CTO,

Yesterday over on the social medias you wrote that there’s “nothing quite as satisfying as cranking out code at 2am for a feature a customer requested earlier today.” I’m guessing that as CTO you don’t get to code as much these days, and I don’t wish to diminish your personal satisfaction. But nonetheless cranking out code at 2AM is a bad idea: it’s bad for your customers, it sets a bad example for your employees, and as a result it’s bad for your company.

An invitation to disaster

Tired people make mistakes. This is not controversial: lack of sleep has been tied to everything from medical errors to the Exxon Valdez and Challenger disasters (see Evan Robinson on the evils of crunch mode for references).

If you’re coding and deploying at 2AM:

  • You’re more likely to write buggy code.
  • You’re more likely to make a mistake while deploying, breaking a production system.
  • If you do deploy successfully, but you’ve deployed buggy code, you’ll take longer to fix the problem… and the more time it takes the more likely you are to make an operational mistake.

And that’s just the short term cost. When you do start work the next day you’ll also be tired, and correspondingly less productive and more likely to make mistakes.

None of this is good for your customers.

Encouraging a culture of low productivity

If you’re a random developer cranking out code at 2AM the worse you can do is harm your product or production environment. If you’re the CTO, however, you’re also harming your organization.

By touting a 2AM deploy you’re encouraging your workers to work long hours, and to write and deploy code while exhausted. Which is to say, you’re encouraging your workers to engage in behavior that’s bad for the company. Tired workers are less productive. Tired workers make more mistakes. Is that really what you want from your developers?

Don’t crank out code at 2AM: it’s bad for you and your customers. And if you must, don’t brag about it publicly. At best it’s a guilty pleasure; bragging makes it a public vice.

Regards,

—Itamar

PS: While I’ve never cranked out code at 2AM, I’ve certainly made my own share of mistakes as a programmer. If you’d like to learn from my failings sign up for my newsletter where each week I cover one of my mistakes and how you can avoid it.


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