I’ve always been a huge Pink Floyd fan. And Dark Side of the Moon is one of my top 100 favorite albums of all time. And Time is one of my favorite songs on it.
Here’s a snippet from the lyrics that I think serve as a fine entry for this post.
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
But I digress…
I’m mature, experienced, or old enough to remember a time when software development was treated as a time-based activity.
You were measured by—
How fast you typed
How many lines of code you wrote (per hour, per day, per project)
How many hours you worked (typing as fast as you could)
How much time you spend (not typing) in meetings, writing documents, etc.
How quickly you could hack-together a design
How many bugs you produced
How many times you had to rework your code
How many breaks (bathroom, lunch, etc.) you took and for how long
I believe the thought at the time was—the more time you spend working, the more value you delivered to the company, the more you earned your pay. The optimization goal in this case was on time and production.
Sounds like a really good model, doesn’t it? And I’m not joking with the above. This was real!