War Room vs Work Life Balance (Day 421)

What is the best way to get projects delivered?

War Room Style

When I was in the gaming industry, we set an aggressive deadline, teams often worked till 1 am in the morning. We did get the game produced. But not too long afterwards, we found out there's a scalability problem and delayed a major launch for 30 days. After we discovered the problem, the tech leads lived in the "war room" for a week to get to the bottom of the issue. It was really exhausting, took a toll on me, and I ended up selling the game to a publisher.

Work Life Balance

I have worked in startups where teams are more organized. We have senior level architects review all the codes right from the beginning, and throughout the process. We set up monitoring and QA testing properly, so we can identify issues early and get notified if anything goes wrong on production. While there's once in a while production push late nights, most of the time everybody on the team gets "work life balance".

I remember in the beginning of that project, we could've totally refactored a PHP site to NodeJS in a week or two, but it ended up taking about 2 to 3 months to complete the project. The trade-off is, the NodeJS platform created during that time is still in use after 5 years.

The VP of Engineering of that startup came from another startup where people routinely worked until 11 pm. He chose to implement a different working style in his second gig.

Which is better?

It is very hard to say which style is better. Maybe a combination of both. It also heavily depend on the team. If you hire people with things to prove and fewer distractions in life, they could dedicate all their time in your project. If you hire seasoned pros who already made it, they may not want to sacrifice work life balance regardless of the compensation.

I like the "top heavy" structure, from my personal experience. We hire architects who will oversee the projects and do scaffolding code to kick start projects. Then we hire a bunch of junior or mid-level engineers who are hungry and want to prove themselves or make a name in the industry. They will work on the roadmap like there's no tomorrow. Nothing more important than delivering the product. Remember to give them a break and celebrate after each milestone so it doesn't wear people out.

What is your experience? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!