Working late? Probably you are incompetent, or someone is!

I have a colleague at my work place, he is a quite experienced guy and working on some complex algorithmic stuff in a complex team and I could throw in more complex shit but you got the point. He made a statement the other day, “I think people who work late are incompetent”.

At first glance, it sounded ridiculous to me, as I do work late sometimes! I do not consider myself incompetent, others might, but that is another story. I did quite a bit of thinking on this seemingly heavy statement of his, and you know what I partially agree to it. I want to tweak that statement a little bit, “I think people who work late are incompetent, or someone above them in the food chain is incompetent”. Just ignore the time when you were working late with pizza in one hand, when you had that zeal to finish a product which was cool and all. That was for you, I am talking about working late because someone asked you too. Either you did not plan your day well to finish that task in the 8 hours or, someone above you, got the estimation wrong, may be your manager spend a little too long smoking and lost the track of the timeline or whatever.

You see someone was surely incompetent due to which you are staying back late and completing your work.