I'd bet money that most of those managers weren't even in the building for most of that death march.
I have a standing rule. If I work overtime it's because I fucked up. I said something would be done by Friday but I goofed off, I'll work.
If I'm working nights and weekends for business reasons, then my manager is in the building the entire time. A lot of them tone down their rhetoric when you make them put skin in the game. All of a sudden some of the scope gets negotiated down.
It’s funny to tell this story in a thread about bad incentives, but the “managers not there” part reminded me of it.
I worked at a startup that did citizen identity management for government (think SSO for an entire province). Because of gov’t IT policies, we often had to deploy after hours, in a kind of weird “managed IT” process. We still automated the process, but couldn’t press the button without being on a conference call etc.
Anyway, we had a deployment go south on Friday night, rolled it back, and decided to come back and try again Sunday. The CEO himself showed up about 10 minutes after we did with a big box of Dilly Bars. Normally that would put this in the category of this thread: “thanks, I’m working overtime for ice cream...” but what he said made it all better: “I know this sucks to be here today. Help yourselves to ice cream. And I’ll be in my office all day, stop by if you need anything. And please let me know when you’re done so I know I can go home.”
Yes, having a manager just be there showing appreciation is huge. My story is trying to crack a hot, high-impact bug that got reported days before product launch. Daily 8:00AM and 5:00PM status meetings on Saturday and Sunday reporting to multiple VP's kind of hot. So the debug lab manager had little clue how to hang a logic analyzer probe any more, and no clue how to read the traces. But he brought in take-out 3 meals a day and did whatever else to keep us well-fed and caffeinated during the ordeal. And if we wanted to consult with somebody, he tracked them down and got them on the phone. Basically just hung out and said "Thanks" often.
That is 100% awesome. I've had a few managers over my career that got that.
The counterpoint (funny enough, at the same company as the ice cream) was a different exec who came close but just missed the mark. Weekday evening deployment (started at 5:30pm) and he orders pizza. A lot of pizza. Things go smoothly and since we're just sitting and watching monitoring for a bit to make sure all is good, he decides to head out. Ten minutes after he leaves, we get a call about a third-party site that broke after the deployment... guess we're not leaving.
So the debugging drags on, and around 11pm we start getting hungry. AHA! Leftover pizza in the fridge! We go to the kitchen to discover... he took all of the leftovers home. Like 4 pizzas worth. So what's our conclusion? "Fuck it, we'll fix it in the morning. Let's go home."
I have the same rule. If I’m expected to come in on the weekend, my manager had better be there. If it’s important enough to ask me to sacrifice my personal time, then it had better be important enough for him to be there too.
Unless it’s because I screwed up and need to fix something post haste. In which case, he won’t have to ask me at all.
I have a standing rule. If I work overtime it's because I fucked up. I said something would be done by Friday but I goofed off, I'll work.
If I'm working nights and weekends for business reasons, then my manager is in the building the entire time. A lot of them tone down their rhetoric when you make them put skin in the game. All of a sudden some of the scope gets negotiated down.