Playing to Win, Going Beyond the Call of Duty

I’m writing this up as advice to a rhetorical “you”, but it’s really written to a younger version of me.

Imagine that you are working on a project for a customer (or employer), who has a weekly or monthly budget limit. You are paid by the hour, for up to N hours per week; or perhaps you are paid a salary for full-time work, nominally 40 hrs per week.

You want to work on the project more hours than your customer will pay for. For example, maybe your customer can afford only 20 hours per week, but you have more time available that you’d like to spend on the project.

The most obvious path is to simply not work any more than your customer will pay. Go do something else unrelated instead, perhaps not even computer-related. This approach appeals strongly from a work-life balance perspective, and also has a “tit-for-tat” appeal along the lines of “I refuse to do anything that would benefit my customer unless I am being paid to do so”. However, it is a very bad strategy. Do not let your customers’s budget stop you from growing your skills and building something great.

A second path, at the other extreme, is to work all you want on a project, regardless of how few hours you are paid for. Simply don’t bill for the extra hours. This is an easy answer, and in spite of its appeal from my current perspective (as an employer and customer of software development work), I don’t recommend it. It will give your customer an erroneous indication of your productivity level, causing future problems for you (how will you live up to this apparent but false productivity in the future?) and for your customer (whose estimates and schedules will be fed by false data).

I recommend a path between these two extremes, a strategy by which you can do work that benefits you and your customer, now and in the future. Work the hours you bill, directly on your customer’s project. Then, if you have extra time available (that you haven’t filled with other, paying work), work as much as you care to, past those hours, on related activities that indirectly help the project and help you grow:

• Read about the development tools and technologies you are using. (Learn by reading.)
• Read about the project problem domain.
• If your customer project uses a DBMS, read about and experiment with that DBMS.
• Try another DBMS; port the customer project to this other DBMS. Even though the customer doesn’t need it, you can nonetheless learn a lot from the experience.
• Build an additional feature that your customer did not ask for (yet); the offer it to them if they want it. By the way, this is a great time to learn to use a powerful source-control system to manage a long-lived branch with such a feature.
• Start a second, sample project, which uses some of the same tools as your customer project. Learn by doing. Experiment on this sample project, practice using the tools. Try out options and feature of the tools that you haven’t needed yet on your customer project.

To me, this is a strategy for “playing to win”.

More About the Sample Project

By the way, the notion of a second, sample project is very powerful, for reasons far beyond your current project. Be careful to keep the real project code completely out of this sample project, and you will end up with a very valuable artifact: a working piece of software, built with tools you know well, which you own. You can use this project to help get future work, by offering it to future customers as a work sample, and by posting it on your web site to show (rather than merely proclaim) your expertise.