Pedro is the author of The Insomniac Coder and is also Pedro Javier's dad. He is a web programmer and aspiring novelist stuck somewhere around the DC metropolitan area.
Ask anyone that works in software programming, and they will immediately confirm the following:
No real coding work can be done before noon on a Monday, or after noon on a Friday (weekends don’t count).
Monday mornings are crisis and regrup days. This is when all of your customers stampede in, each with a crisis that came up over the weekend that must be addressed NOW. While this is happening, you are also trying to get your weekly scheduled organized.
The lucky ones manage to look at code before lunch.
Fridy afternoons are HOLY CRAP THE WORLD IS ENDING afternoons. This is when all of your customers, some of which you have not heard of since, yeah, Monday morning, show up, each demanding that you drop whatever is it that you are doing so you can address THEIR needs.
My favorite is when a customer sends me a very sternly worded email demanding that I fix whatever, sometime before 5:00 PM. This sends me into a panic: I have to figure out what the hell is going on, then I have to figure out if it is a quick fix or if it is long term. If it is a quick fix, I jump at it and deal with it. If it is a long fix it means checking with dear Leader to make sure that I don’t commit to something that we can’t deliver in terms of our scheduled work.
My favorite? When I send my email reply, and I get an immediate out-of-office announcement that explains that this customer, the one that had just lit a fire under my ass on Friday at 5:00 PM, is on a business trip to Aruba for a week.
Or something like that. And worse, if you spend the weekend fixing the problem, they send you an email saying “Thanks, I’ll look at it on Monday.”
Grrrrr.
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