Work-Life Balance

Everything revolves around it. Whether you know it or not. Even for the people we call workaholics, or lazy. They find balance in their act, whatever us mortals think about them. Everyone is in their "happiness equilibrium", because if this balance breaks, you'll do something about it.

After all, why do you write good code? Why do you make your design solid? Why do you write unit test? All good advices of software engineering seems to be motivated by this. You do quality stuffs because you want to have a good balance in work and personal life. Want to have a better sex life? Write better code! Otherwise you have to spend the night stepping in gdb. Want to play with your kids once you reach home? Again, don't let bugs creep in! Want to do bird photography on weekends? Architect and design the damn thing well, so that you don't have to do another refactoring on the Saturday nights, and then you can't get up on Sunday 5:00am.

There are places which makes you a hero twice. First for rushing to write your feature (with lots of bugs) to meet impossible deadlines. You get a bonus for releasing before schedule. And if it reaches the customer, it is going to hit those bugs in critical time, and then another bonus for staying up overnight to debug them. Unfortunately such places aren't rare, and more unfortunate is they aren't going anywhere too. None in those companies have an incentive to do a clean job.

It is for your own interest, actually. If you didn't care about the pat when you finally debug that weird customer problem (rather be ashamed that there was a bug in the first place), go write un-buggy code!