My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder
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Sometimes you work late b/c business demands it. Others are your fault: through over-committing, frivolity, or incompetence.

The cool thing about self-inflicted overtime is you get to look like you're working harder than everyone else to management!

Because of these facts, I will write an email randomizer to send my project updates at odd times, so it appears I work around the clock.

@codeodor Sometimes I work late cause I'm more productive after everyone else leaves the office.

Good point, @QualityFrog. I hadn't thought of it because I come in early instead, for the same reason.

I'd really like to see a "Send Sometime In The Next 24 Hours" button in Gmail, but failing that, I'll just create a place for myself to store emails in a database until an hourly scheduled job sends them via Gmail at getdate() + rand()*23.

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Potential downsides:
* Your bosses might come to *expect* that you are available to them 24/7
* What if a recipient gets that email and immediately replies, "Oh, I'm glad you're awake! Can you ..."
* You may come across as less competent and less efficient than the folks who can get their stuff done and still go home before the sun sets.

IMHO:
* If this approach makes a good impression on your managers, you are working for people who value the wrong things
* If you're smart enough to write a cron script that can extract emails from a database and then send them via Gmail at randomized times ... well, I think that's a suboptimal use of your considerable talent

Posted by Joe Grossberg on Oct 20, 2009 at 01:43 PM UTC - 5 hrs

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