One thing that may very well skew the results higher than you would think is folks who do side work. 60 hours a week on one job paints a far different picture than 40 hours on a day job and 20 hours of contract work on the side.
I'm employed full-time, but I'll be the first to admit that for not all of that I'm working. Outside of that I have projects I'm working on (which I'd be inclined to count as work) and a small business (which is definitely work though I treat that more as pleasure).
I guess if it's vague enough to just be anything not personal or sleeping then > 60 hours... but if it's constrained to that for which I am employed/get paid, then it's variable.
I agree. In reality, I have 3 or 4 hours of enthusiastic game-on work time a day. That is ok. I honestly don't believe anyone that says they can keep up concentration for longer than this (unless debugging). Here I am only counting "doing" not "dreaming" or "thinking", but I do that in my sleep.
I agree with you as well. Zone time is usually a 3-4 hour a day deal. Some people are honest about it, others aren't. There are short periods of time in which one can code at their top level for a long period of time but these are infrequent. In general I'd say that one can get a good 4 hours of solid work in on a given day. Once going beyond that time frame, especially on a regular basis just increases the chance of introducing errors into a system. The other time would be better spent thinking about the problems faced by the design and or relaxing to allow for ideas to form and work themselves to clarity.
When I used to work outside of my home this meant playing table tennis or fußball as a clearing ones mind method. Or going for a walk outside of the workplace.
The gung-ho brute forcing of a coding method is a dangerous path to traverse. I'm more for the cyclical clear ones mind, allow the design/ideas/concepts to brew. Commit to code the portion at hand then cool down and repeat the cycle.
Honestly, my best clarity comes at 2am, the shower and/or commutes >20 minutes.
Ditto. I actually spend long hours at home reading programming blogs, tech news, programming stuff or toying around with system administration tools and techniques I may use later in production. What is work? Am I working when I'm reading HN at the office waiting for some test to end ? Am I working when I'm answering support emails from home at 11PM while still reading HN ?
I spend about 35 hours a week at the office or customers premises. I spend 80 to 100 hours a week doing work-related stuff. I may pretend that I'm working even while I'm running in the woods, every morning, because while I run I'm probably rummaging about a couple of work related problems, even if it's on the back burner.
I'm AT WORK 45, sometimes 55 hours per week. Productivity comes in spurts. I'm basically working in a field that's also one of my passionate hobbies, so while part of my work day involves grinding through mundane stuff, I am often inspired and do things I love to do. Off the clock, I often come up with solutions that help me and my peers back at the day job.
Terrible fitness/physical stamina but I eat reasonably well.
Working in `internet infrastructure` (as a founder) my work week varies between 60+ hours per week and ~>80, that doesn't of course include dreaming about problems past or problems imminent or the false-positives in monitoring causing broken sleep.
After doing this for 8+ years and working myself into a position of financial comfort relative to my peers, I'm now questioning why I work so much and what's the point of working so much at the expense of quality of life and potentially how long that life will be if I continue to abuse my body/health.
At the same time after doing what I do for such a long period of time I find it very difficult to NOT work. I get fidgety and easily bored when having conversations (in real life rather than IRC), being able to trust in others to-do as good a job when I have cover and resisting `checking in` to see how things are doing.
I very much used to be someone who looked down on those who worked less hours as lazy and stupid, now I think they're the smartest people I know.
I've managed to arrange for one of my New Years' resolutions to be met: I'm working about 20 hours a week now. Let's see if I can keep it up for the year.
I work for http://pikimal.com/ . My official title is "General Technical Counsel," which is sort of what it sounds like: I advise them on technical matters. Right now, I'm helping them migrate a large codebase from a Rails 2.3.4 setup to Rails 3, which has been a pretty large undertaking.
I got the job by doing some consulting work, in which I dropped page load times about 4x on some pages. I also re-did their entire testing setup, taking a suite that spent about 15 minutes running on every iteration to one that took 3 on a normal run, and 10 doing full tests. After the consulting time was up, they asked me to stay, and so I negotiated my current situation.
> sustainable
Sustainability is a simple equation:
Cash in - cash out >= 0
As long as this is true, you're good. So, you can either increase cash in, or decrease cash out.
I was working as a cofounder of a startup before this, and was a student before that. I live in a 3 bedroom house with 4 people, and I don't want to own many things. I have my bicycle, my Macbook, and my Nexus One, and while I still pick up the occasional toy (I bought an eReader on w00t for $100 two weeks ago) I largely just don't spend a lot of money.
17 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadI'm employed full-time, but I'll be the first to admit that for not all of that I'm working. Outside of that I have projects I'm working on (which I'd be inclined to count as work) and a small business (which is definitely work though I treat that more as pleasure).
I guess if it's vague enough to just be anything not personal or sleeping then > 60 hours... but if it's constrained to that for which I am employed/get paid, then it's variable.
When I used to work outside of my home this meant playing table tennis or fußball as a clearing ones mind method. Or going for a walk outside of the workplace.
The gung-ho brute forcing of a coding method is a dangerous path to traverse. I'm more for the cyclical clear ones mind, allow the design/ideas/concepts to brew. Commit to code the portion at hand then cool down and repeat the cycle.
Honestly, my best clarity comes at 2am, the shower and/or commutes >20 minutes.
Eric codedevl.blogspot.com
I spend about 35 hours a week at the office or customers premises. I spend 80 to 100 hours a week doing work-related stuff. I may pretend that I'm working even while I'm running in the woods, every morning, because while I run I'm probably rummaging about a couple of work related problems, even if it's on the back burner.
What's work? Frankly, I don't know anymore.
I mean, often I find myself thinking about work stuff even if I'm at home playing WoW or reading a book or whatever...
Working in `internet infrastructure` (as a founder) my work week varies between 60+ hours per week and ~>80, that doesn't of course include dreaming about problems past or problems imminent or the false-positives in monitoring causing broken sleep.
After doing this for 8+ years and working myself into a position of financial comfort relative to my peers, I'm now questioning why I work so much and what's the point of working so much at the expense of quality of life and potentially how long that life will be if I continue to abuse my body/health.
At the same time after doing what I do for such a long period of time I find it very difficult to NOT work. I get fidgety and easily bored when having conversations (in real life rather than IRC), being able to trust in others to-do as good a job when I have cover and resisting `checking in` to see how things are doing.
I very much used to be someone who looked down on those who worked less hours as lazy and stupid, now I think they're the smartest people I know.
> acceptable
I work for http://pikimal.com/ . My official title is "General Technical Counsel," which is sort of what it sounds like: I advise them on technical matters. Right now, I'm helping them migrate a large codebase from a Rails 2.3.4 setup to Rails 3, which has been a pretty large undertaking.
I got the job by doing some consulting work, in which I dropped page load times about 4x on some pages. I also re-did their entire testing setup, taking a suite that spent about 15 minutes running on every iteration to one that took 3 on a normal run, and 10 doing full tests. After the consulting time was up, they asked me to stay, and so I negotiated my current situation.
> sustainable
Sustainability is a simple equation:
Cash in - cash out >= 0
As long as this is true, you're good. So, you can either increase cash in, or decrease cash out.
I was working as a cofounder of a startup before this, and was a student before that. I live in a 3 bedroom house with 4 people, and I don't want to own many things. I have my bicycle, my Macbook, and my Nexus One, and while I still pick up the occasional toy (I bought an eReader on w00t for $100 two weeks ago) I largely just don't spend a lot of money.