I work a lot of hours. I work the kinds of hours that make people around me weep, and tends to burn out anyone who partners with me. Watching me go inspires a kind of guilt in people who work with me to push just as hard, and make commitments they can’t possibly keep. Then the guilt and the failure and the shame and the exhaustion piles on them and they break.
One ex-partner has been recovering for 5 years. I’ve began to wonder if he’ll ever pull out of it.
Another one - my current one, is considering a short-time exile from the job, to try and maintain his hold on his ability to perform.
My wife, on the other hand, is smart enough to let me run, and then catch up when I take down time.
Why can I do it? It’s not because I’m superhuman. Keeping up 18/7 hours for 6 months at a stretch isn’t magic. It doesn’t have to stress you or damage you in any permanent fashion. You’ll only get hurt if you don’t maintain focus and concentration. I have a system, and I work pretty hard to keep it running.
I was working on validation today. A lot of the data we get here in house is pretty raw. On the premise that having partial data that is correct is better than none at all, we allow the creation of records with missing non-critical pieces. Sometimes when an admin needs to clean something up, they have no choice but to save it incompletely. It’s not optimal, but sometimes we just don’t have the data, and saving needs to be done. The laziness of the admin isn’t being called into question - we just don’t have all the answers. The various maintenance scripts that share the same libraries have the same problem.
For this reason, the basic validation on our models is pretty loose. The views are smart enough that anything incomplete enough won’t display.