>Preach it brother.

These sorts of things that could broadly be classified as unexpected work are coming up with some regularity these days and I was complaining about it, as you do, while me and several folks from the crew I’m on were heading out to lunch at an entirely mediocre deli. The root of the complaint was, “Why?”. “Why are we seeing an increasing rate of unexpected work?”. Dark matter. Call it what you will, it sucks. It sucks your will to live. This tree search way of working gets tiring in a hurry. If you’ve been doing this for even a short while you know what I mean. How absolutely draining and demoralizing it is. How much it makes life, inside and outside of work, truly suck.

You know, you hit another problem you weren’t expecting, you traverse back up the tree, sit back in your chair, maybe take a deep breath, and stare at the screen for a few minutes because, now, with so many traversals these days, it takes a real act of will to go deal with whatever it is that’s suddently, annoyingily, in your way. This despite the fact that you’re going to fall behind in your current task, which is already behind because of unexpected work during your previous task and you should get on this right now. And, if you love coding, really dig putting things together, you take that sighing resignation home with you when you stop typing for the day. How could you not?

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=231225

And they they’ll ask when x,y and z are not done yet.