There’s more to caring than working long hours

I came across <a href="https://twitter.com/castillo__io/status/1656668605210320904" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">a tweet</a> by former Netflix engineer Alex Castillo that reflects on the value of caring at work. Alex recounts how the team he had just joined at the streaming giant discovered a broken legacy app on a Friday and managed to fix everything by the following Monday. The tweet attributes the quick turnaround to how much the people involved “cared.” But to me, the picture that emerges is one of unsustainable overwork. <h1>Does Working Through the Weekend Mean Caring?</h1> The legacy app Alex’s team inherited was so broken that they couldn’t even run it locally, let alone deploy a fix for it when short on time on a Friday. They decided to regroup on Monday to find a solution. Alex, eager to prove himself, spent the weekend writing a new app to serve as a drop-in replacement. “I was done by Monday at 8 a.m. Just enough time to shower and walk to the office.” Once there, he approached his manager to show off the fruit of his labor, only for the manager to share with him the drop-in replacement app another team member built over the weekend. Maybe the colleague didn’t bother with showering and so got to the office first. Alex gave his blessing to the other app being deployed instead of his. The tweet doesn’t say, but I assume they took the time to compare the prototypes and choose the best one. “This was the first time in my life that I felt a sense of belonging at work,” Alex writes, “I was no longer the only person who cared. Right then, I knew I only wanted to work with people like that.” Alex has a point. Working with people who care makes a huge difference. When everyone in a team is committed to the same goal and focused on unblocking each other, the results they deliver are greater than the sum of their individual capabilities. But let’s not equate working over the weekend with caring! Now, before continuing with my rant, I want to acknowledge that I don’t know the whole picture. I never met Alex or his teammates. I’m just reading a story that was condensed into a long tweet. Still, I’m concerned by how it conflates the positive value of rolling up your sleeves to come up with solutions to urgent problems with an overwork and hero mentality, which I find very dangerous. I’m picking on Alex’s story, but what I’m really getting at is the difference between caring by jumping headfirst into a problem and caring by taking a step back and thinking things through. <a href="https://betterprogramming.pub/theres-more-to-caring-than-working-long-hours-f64a89e9c718">Visit Now</a>