Don't Be A Hero →
Alex Payne:
If you’ve built a system that’s supposed to be reliable, you shouldn’t be up fixing it at four in the morning. You shouldn’t be getting paged at all hours. Sure, you might need to do some occasional planned after-hours maintenance, or some very occasional unplanned-but-process-driven disaster recovery, but you shouldn’t need a hero.
In the Computer Science school I’m currently studying at, everybody wants to be a hero: weekly sleepless nights, 20-hour days, late-night classes… I’ve found out the hardest is to learn to go to bed.
My girlfriend studies Architecture and last week she had to work three days without sleeping (I didn’t know it was even possible). While it proved her implication, it didn’t show anything else but a really bad project planning.
