No, my developers have a list of tasks to do for the day, and if they finish it, I let them go home. It's that simple.
If you keep pushing work onto developers forever then you're rewarding hard work by giving them more work causing incentive mismatches.
This only works if management has the ability to evaluate the work by reading the code. I can spot when something has a bug in it just by reading the code, I can spot when an interface boundary has been designed badly, and I can spot when there's problems. I can evaluate my developers results, and I can evaluate the developers themselves.
So you hire good developers who have the right attitude and don't game the system for their own benefit, fire the under performers, then everyone goes home at 1PM on friday because their work is done and they are proud of what they built.
Lots of developers might find it hard to believe that everyone wouldn't just do something quickly and go home early, but thats because most developers are near burnout and they just need a break. If you give them 2-3 very light months of work, they recover and then start enjoying their work again ... then nobody games the system and puts their best foot forward.
If you keep pushing work onto developers forever then you're rewarding hard work by giving them more work causing incentive mismatches.
This only works if management has the ability to evaluate the work by reading the code. I can spot when something has a bug in it just by reading the code, I can spot when an interface boundary has been designed badly, and I can spot when there's problems. I can evaluate my developers results, and I can evaluate the developers themselves.
So you hire good developers who have the right attitude and don't game the system for their own benefit, fire the under performers, then everyone goes home at 1PM on friday because their work is done and they are proud of what they built.
Lots of developers might find it hard to believe that everyone wouldn't just do something quickly and go home early, but thats because most developers are near burnout and they just need a break. If you give them 2-3 very light months of work, they recover and then start enjoying their work again ... then nobody games the system and puts their best foot forward.