Fix employment and yeah it's a strain on my marriage. The business is going through a transition and needs some help. I'm doing what I can. It's just been a few months now and I've seen it at previous jobs. I don't mind a little extra here and there but I'm not sure if I should push back on work or on my wife's expectations of me being home more
I don't know about it being normal but it's not out of line. I tend to work 10 hours/day 5 days a week and have been doing so for the past 35 years. There have been times when I've worked 60-70 hours/week and I can tell you that's less productive than working 50 hours/week because fatigue makes things worse - those extra hours are actually working against you. As a result I've learned you can't work more then 10 hours/day and you need at least one day off per week. That means the max you can work is 60 hours/week, and that's not sustainable. You can do that a few weeks but you can't sustain that. 50 hours/week is both sustainable and doesn't work against you. As with anything, YMMV. 50 hours/week is what I have found I can sustain. Your sustainability rate may be more or less. You need to find what works best for you.
Early in my career, I routinely worked 50 hrs/wk. Not on purpose; I just preferred to get to the office early to avoid the morning rush hour, and I often stayed around late to get a drink with co-workers after work. I was always productive, and it wasn't until years later that I realized that 50 hrs/wk adds up to an extra 3 months/yr.
Same job, about six years into it, a major project came up that I had staked my reputation on. For almost six months, I was working 80-100 hrs/wk. It destroyed me. My metabolism shut down, my thyroid was damaged. My body temperature dropped from 98.6F to 97F, and overnight while I slept it dropped to 96F and I had trouble waking up in the mornings. I found out later that if it had dropped any lower than that, my body would not have been able to warm itself back up. It took about a decade for my temperature to return to normal, but I still need thyroid medication. And my ability to work long hours has never returned; it's a good thing productivity continues to increase with experience. I work a lot smarter now.
EDIT: the project was a success, at least. My boss was awarded employee of the year, but I was awarded second employee of the year, which was the only time they did that. I also got a little engraved glass plaque, the kind that comes from a corporate gifts catalog. Maybe a $50 gift card too. So worth destroying my metabolism for over a decade.
So much of “normal” depends what _your_ objective is.
If you are very career driven, work at a startup, or would like to generate additional opportunities for your own advancement - 60hrs a week might be normal.
In my own experience, you stop measuring work by hours at that point, and convert to measurement by results (which, if you are ambitious, leads to more hours actually worked).
If you want to work fewer hours because you don’t want to prioritize your work or career (to spend time with friends or family, other passions, etc), that’s fine. There are probably folks with that mindset who would view 30 hours as normal.
Personally, I am at my office working 12hrs a day 5 days a week. Then about 10 hours on Sunday.
But that’s because my objective at this phase of my life is to build a winning business and maximize the value of our equity.
Your objective is probably different from mine, but hopefully not different from those you are working with.
I’m a full time software engineer and it depends for me. Some weeks I’ll work 30-35 and others I’ll work 45-50, depending upon what projects are in flight and at what stage we are at in the project. I don’t mind the weeks where I’m working a little longer as my job is well-paid and flexible where I’m able to “leave” (I work from home) early for the day fairly often when I feel I’m at a good stopping point.
Used to work (IT, game/web development) 40h max a week. And could barely handle it. As I grow older (33) the tolerance is going down. My body asks for more exercise and less sitting (or standing doesn't matter) hours. So 40h a week is too much now. I'm at 25-30h tops. So I try to make the most with that time. Of course I must say that I have a condition, since I was a kid, that makes me feel terrible if I sit for too long (more than normal). Circulation or something. My pressure goes way down I guess when I'm concentrated (going to the movies was hell). So I learned to be effective and do a lot in less time. I now only work at home. Thank god. My goal is to work 3, 4 hours a day tops.
Can you elaborate on how you learned to be that effective? I’d much rather work less, but I find I can’t get work done in 40 hours, and my coworkers doing the same work can. I often need to put in some extra hours here and there.
I'm also working part-time, although I had a lot of full-time jobs with varying intensity. I noticed for me most time gets eaten by tasks that I'm either stuck on or that progress really slowly for various reasons. E.g. something I do all the time is too slow like the editor, the build/test cycles or finding the reason for an exception because there are no logs. Usually I always make myself time to also optimize these things and also communicate that in meetings. And when planning of tasks happens, I try to get involved, understand what kind of work that would mean and discuss that. (Estimation is undervalued I think) And of course get a deep as possible understanding of the core technologies, that makes work also more fluent in the long-term. This way you also have increased idle times between tickets/pull request and it's possible to put more time into such general optimizations.
At least that's my strategy. It's definitely not a career-booster but the results are good.
Well, I think there's some factors. I can focus really easily into something and get completely absorbed in it. That helps immensely. There's a huge part of your mind that only activates when you're completely shutdown from outer stimuli and completely focused into something. That part of your mind is hundreds of times more powerful and efficient than your normally used part. If I can't focus like that my productivity drops drastically. And that can happen any time for a variety of reasons.
I aim for four chunks of pomodoros per day, split in two sets by a long two hour lunch (plus gym some days). So that’s about 8.66 hours of focused work time per day.
But in reality I miss about 1-2 pomodoros every day due to unforeseen events, procrastination, latenesss and so on.
I work mostly 5 days per week, but sometimes I’ll work on Saturday too if I’m feeling good that day and nothing else better to do.
50ish hours give or take 10. I'd say a good 10-15 of those hours are researching and studying material on how to improve current projects and my own development. It's greatly beneficial for the company I work for and myself in my opinion.
A good example is gRPC. We all can use it no problem, but using it correctly and efficiently is outside the scope of some teams so I like to spend the time to understand it deeper and spread that knowledge within our groups.
40 hours most weeks but when a project deadline is nearing then it might be 45 hours. You don't generally get any utility from working longer and actually are more productive with a lesser schedule. Burn out is very real.
I work from home, and typically I’m “In the office,” about 32-40 hours a week.
I find that I can sustain a max of about 4 hours of focused work (programming) a day before I’m just mentally worked over. If there isn’t more project management/coordination work to do, then I’ll just call it a day.
There have been short seasons where I’ve averaged quite a bit more, but I don’t know that I was ever actually more productive. For me it feels like I hit a point at which there is no more work to be wrung out of me, no matter how long I sit in a chair.
At the same time, I find that work is often on my mind during the rest of my life, and here and there an idea pops up while I’m engaged in another activity.
I used to do contract programming and found that was the hardest part - my brain was at work a lot of the time outside of “work hours,” but how was I ever going to Bill the client for that?
I'm a student having summer holiday. Right now I'm programming 10-12 hours every day trying to launch a MVP before I start Uni in September. I basically only take time off if I have to visit family or friends.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadIf you're working that long, I feel the other parts of your life may be suffering. Do you have a fixed time contract or are you contracting?
Same job, about six years into it, a major project came up that I had staked my reputation on. For almost six months, I was working 80-100 hrs/wk. It destroyed me. My metabolism shut down, my thyroid was damaged. My body temperature dropped from 98.6F to 97F, and overnight while I slept it dropped to 96F and I had trouble waking up in the mornings. I found out later that if it had dropped any lower than that, my body would not have been able to warm itself back up. It took about a decade for my temperature to return to normal, but I still need thyroid medication. And my ability to work long hours has never returned; it's a good thing productivity continues to increase with experience. I work a lot smarter now.
EDIT: the project was a success, at least. My boss was awarded employee of the year, but I was awarded second employee of the year, which was the only time they did that. I also got a little engraved glass plaque, the kind that comes from a corporate gifts catalog. Maybe a $50 gift card too. So worth destroying my metabolism for over a decade.
Since perma-WFH, I "work" for maybe 65 hours and get at most 15 hours of actual work done.
If you are very career driven, work at a startup, or would like to generate additional opportunities for your own advancement - 60hrs a week might be normal.
In my own experience, you stop measuring work by hours at that point, and convert to measurement by results (which, if you are ambitious, leads to more hours actually worked).
If you want to work fewer hours because you don’t want to prioritize your work or career (to spend time with friends or family, other passions, etc), that’s fine. There are probably folks with that mindset who would view 30 hours as normal.
Personally, I am at my office working 12hrs a day 5 days a week. Then about 10 hours on Sunday.
But that’s because my objective at this phase of my life is to build a winning business and maximize the value of our equity.
Your objective is probably different from mine, but hopefully not different from those you are working with.
I worked alone with almost no distractions. Just me and 3 dogs in the country.
At least that's my strategy. It's definitely not a career-booster but the results are good.
But in reality I miss about 1-2 pomodoros every day due to unforeseen events, procrastination, latenesss and so on.
I work mostly 5 days per week, but sometimes I’ll work on Saturday too if I’m feeling good that day and nothing else better to do.
I’m a freelancer and building my own product.
A good example is gRPC. We all can use it no problem, but using it correctly and efficiently is outside the scope of some teams so I like to spend the time to understand it deeper and spread that knowledge within our groups.
Previously I worked as an Ops / Platform Team Lead for a NFP that was around 130 people - 40 to 70 hours as I was very emotionally invested.
I find that I can sustain a max of about 4 hours of focused work (programming) a day before I’m just mentally worked over. If there isn’t more project management/coordination work to do, then I’ll just call it a day.
There have been short seasons where I’ve averaged quite a bit more, but I don’t know that I was ever actually more productive. For me it feels like I hit a point at which there is no more work to be wrung out of me, no matter how long I sit in a chair.
At the same time, I find that work is often on my mind during the rest of my life, and here and there an idea pops up while I’m engaged in another activity.
I used to do contract programming and found that was the hardest part - my brain was at work a lot of the time outside of “work hours,” but how was I ever going to Bill the client for that?
This sentence made me laugh a little bit to hard. I know where you are coming from.
Don’t forget to do a small weird dance every hour or so. To move those muscles and the keep blood flowing to all corners of body.