Re:Parent is right. (Score 1)

Unfortunately, people whose job is not IT-related have no idea of what it is like to fix a bug. Until you know exactly what the problem is and it's implications, there is no realistic way to tell how long it will take. The bad thing is, these people tend to call us slackers or treat us with disrespect if a problem is complex and requires more time to fix. Software is complex, and patching something can trigger unexpected consequences, that is why things have to be done carefully and step by step. And I don't know about you guys, but do you get paid extra hours or do you get any compensation at all for not sleeping, getting extra stressed trying to find the problem and having to subordinate your personal life to your job? Because you would be surprised to learn that lots of people just don't. Granted, we love our jobs, we love coding, most of the time we enjoy the thrill of debugging. But I don't think it is fair to have other people put so more pressure on us with unreasonable deadlines for bug fixes. The customer can just say "The system does not present this" or "I clicked and it didn't {whatever}..." A user could think "How long can that take to fix, come on it's just a {window/figure/formula/report... whatever}. But large applications can be thousands of lines of code long and very complex. We are the experts. We are the ones that know. We are the ones under pressure. They should treat us with enough respect and let us do our job. They should let us assess the situation and work on it. The more they back off and let us do our job, the faster we can fix a problem. Fixing a problem requires intelligence. If you want to be on the top of you game you have to sleep well, to be healthy both mentally and physically. Sleep deprivation, caffeine and long hours before the computer without rest don't precisely help. Question to managers: Is that so hard to understand? Lots of us work with mission-critical applications. Specially in that case, just to try to put it into perspective with an example, when doctors do surgery, their main concern is to fix whatever is wrong because if they don't the whole system could crash (circulatory, respiratory, etc.) OF COURSE if they have to spend more time fixing it they just have to do it or the patient might die. Some of you might think I'm exaggerating, but those who have worked with mission-critical applications know that sometimes they involve security issues that can have consequences on human lives as well. Don't get me wrong, whenever I have to fix a bug I put all my energy and put my entire effort to fix it as quickly and carefully as possible. But I do think that impossible deadlines are unfair. Just because people from other areas cannot understand what we are doing or what it takes, doesn't mean they can dismiss us as slackers when things require more time.