Does Working Hard Have a Benefit?
Yes It Does, Just Not For You
Whether you work in the retail sector or not, it is a known fact that closer you get to the holiday season more heated the things will be. It is the season where retail companies make most of their profits so a bit of crunch is obviously expected. Whether it is necessary or not is a different conversation.
Coming to this month the team was at its full pace. We had tight release windows and had to build new features with one hand while fixing broken things from the previous feature with the other.
Even though it did seem impossible to do it without crunching, I’m going to be honest, no one from the management was expecting from us to crunch and work late hours but we all did it anyway. Maybe it was the fear of losing your job you just got into for some of us or maybe it was just to prove themselves for the other. For me, it was the fear of blocking multiple people from working on their tasks simultaneously. I did not want anyone to get affected because of my poor performance so I worked late. I’m not proud of it but there was even a day where I got out of the office at 1 AM.
In the end the deed was done. Our hard work paid off and we had relatively successful releases. Everyone was happy and now was the time to reap the rewards. As it turns out we reaped the rewards pretty well. (Not us but the company of course.)
There was even a meeting where we learned: how we outperformed pretty much anything, were less than 1% off from our yearly goal and given that Christmas is still ahead of us that goal is way within our grasp, many other different teams that want to work with us -a team that did not have any roots just a year ago-. We were on the right track and now was not the time to stop it but to go even further. It was time to turn our project into something the whole retail site can rely on. Pretty encouraging stuff as you might suspect.
It looked like good news on paper. We, as a brand new team; formed from mostly new hires, managed to achieve something no one was expecting from us. We proved ourselves. Our hard work, blood and tears are getting appreciated. Going forward, what we have built and building could be one of the crucial pieces of the retail site world wide next year.
Focus on the last part. Being a crucial part of a retail site that server millions of people daily.
Imagine what does that mean for a service. How much technical cost it would bring and how many operational things need to be done. Now add this unknowns into our already planned and in motion yearly plan. Now add the other improvements we want to have and technical debt we created this year to this equation. And finally add the crushed dreams and hopes of developers that thought things would be a bit easier and they will have some breathing room for at least a while after this season. That is a good equation if I ever seen one.
So in conclusion:
By working hard we earned the privilege to work even harder.
Good job to us I guess!
