A team in crunch has a good chance of jelling, it is often during this time that a team can really learn more about each other and bond. Working long hours after many of the other employees have gone home does not feel quite so bad when you are not alone. It gives a better feeling of teamwork if you are all sitting together working away, bouncing ideas of one another and helping solve problems that is often more personal than during the regular work day.
This time can often generate some great war stories, I remember at a previous company one time another developer and I stayed up until 2 am Saturday night (Sunday morning) working away on some sync server integration. After banging our head against the wall of a server call that was blocking us, we went to the Subway for a midnight snack. When we came back, I began hacking into some server code (totally different language and code base than what we were working on) and hooked it up to give us the parameters we needed for syncing game elements so we could continue working. It was a lot of fun, and gave a great sense of accomplishment and while it was modified and properly “fixed” by one of the other server programmers the following Monday, it was great to remove the blockage to allow us to continue working and was rewarding to overcome these kinds of challenges together.
Until next time, try not to work too hard,
Michael Hubbard
https://michaelhubbard.ca