Let me be clear: I later realized that this project would have been a soul-draining death march at many other places I'd worked in my career. Exhausted just a few weeks in, with management hounding the team for schedule estimates that can't possibly exist because management failed to fund maintenance for years.[2] (There were actually rational reasons for this, in this case. tl;dr the project got renewed interest and investment due to a new business case.)
To those who lament on this topic about "devs (in country X) just aren't motivated these days" or whatever, let me suggest something. If you have poor clarity of purpose, poor giving-a-fsck about humans, or a number of other culture failings then yes, you may encounter problems. Your solution is still not to tie your knowledge workers to their desks. You need to fix the root causes of your underlying productivity debt, not pave over them with an overwork-butts-in-seats mentality which just makes things worse in the long run (<--- read DeMarco).
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...
[2]: Pro tip: "evergreen" ecosystems, especially young and rapidly changing ones like early-mid Ruby/Rails and a lot of current npm/JS-based stuff, often have a wickedly non-linear cost curve if/when maintenance and dependency updates fall off. Some of the most expensive I've encountered of this ilk is when /test infrastructure/ incurred a lot of past churn that wasn't tracked, but suddenly (cough) needs to be updated.
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-De...
Slack is a great read for those responsible for managing software teams and illustrates that there are no new ideas under the sun; there are just repackaged ones.
[1]-https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...
[2]-https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/22/reading-list-fog-c...
https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...
If you've read and liked Peopleware, you should read Slack as well. If you haven't read either one then you should.
I try to do the same. I've often viewed my job as trying to eliminate my job by slowly delegating and having others able to fulfill my current responsibilities. Then I take on the next "level" of responsibilities and/or provide either more slack in my schedule or others. Slack is what allows organizations to operate smoothly and deal with change(s).
If you aren't familiar with the concept of slack, I highly recommend reading "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency" by Tom DeMarco
http://amzn.to/1sGWsWe (affiliate link)
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco is a great read.
http://amzn.to/1KGF8DG (affiliate link)
His book Slack is a fascinating read, and I'd recommend it to any HN'er who hasn't read it yet:
http://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Efficie...
Indeed. And this is a well understood concept. To the point that Tom DeMarco wrote an entire book about the importance of "slack" - over 20 years ago.[1]
From the description:
<DeMarco> reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...