“How many real hours of work do you put in each day?”
Am I supposed to count meetings I didn't need to be on, or that could've been an email, or that get rescheduled at the last minute for 15 minutes later than originally?
I'd say anything that prevents you from, for instance, browsing the internet for pleasure counts as work. Meeting in a boardroom? Work. Zoom call in which you have to regularly participate? Work. Zoom call you can basically ignore while you read HN? Not work.
In that zoom call I’m not walking along the beach or napping on the couch or cleaning the house or any other activity I prefer to attending a meeting. So I’d say it’s work as well.
That's an interesting definition. I'm not sure it's useful.
Eg when I am oncall out of hours, I could browse HN almost all the time, but it is still low-intensity work, even if nothing breaks and pages on that day.
Oncall is a bit special, usually counted as partial time work for time spent not responding to calls, or with overtime rates for time actually called in.
At Google SRE we had a flat ratio regardless of whether you had a page or not.
The idea was two-fold: reduces paperwork, and incentivizes the SRE team to reduce alerts that have to be dealt with.
In any case, my main point was that anything that prevents me from having a beer or going bungee jumping is 'work' in my books. Though, obviously, there are different levels of intensity.
> Zoom call you can basically ignore while you read HN? Not work.
Still work: if it’s preventing you from focusing but not personal time, it’s work. Your employer choosing to waste your time on low productivity meetings is something to try to improve but you shouldn’t feel any obligation to make up for it with your own free time.
Disagree. I may be on HN right now, but if I were not at work I wouldn't be on HN. I wouldn't be on my computer at all, in fact. Right now I am available, which provides value to my employer at my personal expense.
Not using part of my life in the way I see fit because I need to make a living? Work.
3-4 hours of deep work is fairly standard I think. The rest of the time is not necessarily something I wouldn't define as "hard work" (emails, meetings, etc...) - but it's not slacking either.
Especially when you WFH, or at least that's how it's been for me.
I get up pretty early, so I like getting a lot of work done before 9am standup. By then I've usually lost motivation/focus and may work an hour or 2 more. I really get mileage out of the "work always fills the time allotted for it" law.
Half of me can't wait to get back to an office where I'm with others which provides motivation/pressure to work, but the other half does not want to deal with the commute.
This isn't surprising, because devs have a tendency to focus on the hard bits of coding as being their work. Why not, right? It's probably the most satisfying too, so we forget the bits where we document, explain to colleagues, organize, etc. Don't forget that a lot of "not working" such as browsing a certain orange-and-beige website actually IS work as well: you wouldn't be updated on what's going on in the tech world if you didn't read some new things regularly.
However consider that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do. Typically you'll never find one of those people saying they don't do much. In fact, many of them feel compelled to sit in the office - face time - to look busy. If you were to narrowly define their work like I've done with software devs, many people would end up with maybe a couple of hours a day, mainly reading some docs to decide what their business unit should do.
Yes, people should be more like lawyers. Bill for that time you spent in the shower thinking about your clients case.
That reads sarcastic, but in today’s workplace you really need to know the legal framework you’re working within or you’ll probably be fleeced or worse. How lawyers charge actually is instructive.
I wrote a whole sqlite wrapper while in my hot tub carrel. I call that time "meditubbing." I read a story somewhere a thousand years ago about Gustave Flaubert's work habits. As I recall, at a dinner party: Woman: "Was your day fruitful?" Flaubert: "Yes, very." Woman: "How many words did you write?" Flaubert: "None."
You can find the same passage and line of thinking in every great author's memoir: small, consistent, disciplined, focused effort and writing, no matter what the result; buoyed by long bouts of thinking, living, experiencing, observing - to find the "peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet", as Flannery O'Connor put it.
> “The time we have alone, the time we have in walking, the time we have in riding a bicycle, is the most important time for a writer. Escaping from the typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give the subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs at the subconscious level.” - Ray Bradbury
> "When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon hole two years I took it out one day and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you've only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep -- also while you are at work on other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on." - Mark Twain
> ‘I didn’t stir out yesterday, but sat and thought all day; not writing a line; not so much as the cross of a t or the dot of an i. I imaged forth a good deal of Barnaby by keeping my mind steadily upon him; and am happy to say I have gone to work this morning in good twig, strong hope and cheerful spirits. Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably miserable.’ - Charles Dickens
Billing time is the absolute worst thing about types of legal practice you're talking about, and absolutely nobody should adopt anything about that system. Economic pressures eventually force granularity of a tenth of an hour. There are no circumstances under which I would ever willingly return to anxiety over whether a bathroom break might take longer than three minutes.
Try billing 2000 hours a year in .1 increments. It’s not so much the bathroom breaks that lead to anxiety, it’s things like: kids’ soccer games, doctor’s appointments, and anniversaries.
You don't need to anticipate how long those things will take, you bill after the fact. Yeah if you don't keep good records of your schedule and just try to guess what you were doing at 2:39 last tuesday it might be stressful, but that's a problem with the record keeping, not the billing.
This is a much better argument than bathroom breaks. I do think it still comes down to an ability to self manage, which is going to vary widely by individual.
I was once forced to do that by a client and the result was having to bill additional time for logging and investigating what everyone on the team was doing. It probably added an additional 10% to the billed hours for engagement management.
I had a lawyers suggest I drive him to court. This turned out to be a trick so he could "justify" billing me for the commute time. It was like Uber, except the driver pays the passenger $500.
> that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do
As someone who finds coding completely unsatisfying and who instead chose to have a career sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do, I find this pretty funny.
I can’t imagine anything being as satisfying as communicating well with another person.
I regularly catch myself thinking and telling my wife I've had a very unproductive day and didn't work much when I spent the majority of it working through internal memos, email, and otherwise just getting caught up on the company happenings.
It isn't really work. It's squarely in the bullshit side of "bullshit jobs".
I don't really miss label other things like documentation, research, testing or project spiking but those too very regularly get forgotten and don't feel significant to bullet point in my daily standup.
There are “schmoozers” who are completely satisfied and coders who dread their work lives...
There are also schmoozers who create value beyond anything many single coders could ever dream of: by raising capital, creating multimillion sales, persuading and inspiring others, etc.
And I say this as someone who switched from a management job to designing and coding because I personally find it much more fulfilling.
Not sure that I do. I think, there is subtext which may not translate across cultural boundaries. The smiley seems to indicate a joke.
In my experience, working part-time means getting paid only the proportional amount for the benefit of only having to be present for that part, while at the same time having to deliver the same output as the full-time.
I'm pretty sure I put in about 3-4 hours of real work when I was in office too. If you count meetings, answering emails, and operational work, it is hard to put in a standard 8 hours of real work.
Also, the comment that the Amazon employee made is similar to what I hear across other online forums such as Reddit and Twitter. Seems Amazon has created a really toxic environment for everyone involved.
This sounds about right for focused thinking work. Also probably an average. For me if I'm really in deep on a problem, then I work much more than that as I try and figure it out, including evenings and weekends. But... once its done, that might be followed by some "light" work days.
Good point - your job may be at risk if they discover it takes you more than 4 hours a day to get it done...
What noone has mentioned is that the reason people get away with 3 hour days is it's too hard to fire them. Bottom line is those who get more done work for those other employees (I can only wish my colleagues exploited me as much (but not more) as my employer).
Some just leave and go to a startup where there's no BS and worklplace socialism.
There is less incentive to do work when your output is the same as those who work twice (or many times more) as much. When you watch your coworkers fumble through constant framework and trendy tool bullshit instead of actually solving for the business requirements you really want to do the right thing and bypass the stupidity to deliver actual results back to the business. Doing that, however, often results in retribution, so you just sit there not doing work.
Meetings can really disrupt my day, I think most devs understand the ramp up it can take to get into a problem, and having meetings spaced out all day can really hit that.
But also, does anyone count when you're on home time and it you suddenly have an idea on how to solve a work problem that's was bugging you throughout the day and couldn't find a decent approach, and didn't really write much code.
1/3 of tech workers admit to working 3 to 4 hours, while 2/3 of tech workers admit to sucking at tech work. Leaving less than 10% who know what they're doing and working full days doing the real tech work. Just ask any company.
i work with a guy who claims like 15 hours of overtime per week... his total output is prbably like 0.1x what a normal developer does... constantly adds bugs, never squashes his commits (to show extra 'work' being done'...).
typicial commits for 1 day of work:
Including overhead I am well over 12 hours/day but pure coding... Really depends on how many times people disturb me with 'stuff'.
I have worked with many freelancers and worked (as tech consultant) in many big and small businesses; a lot of capable tech people, in my experience, vastly understate the time they actually work. When they are in meetings, all day, they feel they didn't work and report hours accordingly. I have to point out to them regularly that even though they reported 3 hours, I was in meetings with them for 6 (and yes, I find that generally quite pointless so I understand the sentiment), so I think it's closer to 8-9 hours.
yeah, thread winner here....not really surprising that so few comments here are speaking to this seemingly obvious truth...because HN is management-oriented
This is a bad survey, both for questions of selection (busy people don’t do surveys like this) and the nebulous question of what constitutes real work (my guess: this is telling you who has lots of meeting, Jira, etc. overhead).
My real question: is this just clickbait or is this fodder for the kinds of companies which market things like monitoring software to toxic managers? I have memories of working at a consulting shop which tried to entertain the idea that the reason they weren’t profitable wasn’t due to two of the partners cutting deals below estimated costs but rather something like people slacking or not tracking their time precisely enough. Tracking at 5 minute intervals didn’t change the big picture but it did dramatically increase the amount of time spent on time tracking.
It's ideological reinforcement for their target audience. Most managers and business types have no idea what their underlings actually do, but they have a suspicion that they are not the lean-mean-money-makin'-machine they (ideally) should be. So business-oriented publications like this pander to their fears and strengthen their resolve to whip slackers into shape.
It’s very appealing because it tells people that the reason they’re not making more is not due to anything they could personally improve at but rather their employees taking advantage of their trust and generosity.
A managers salary correlates with how many subordinates he has, the more lazy people the better since then he can motivate to expand the team with even more lazy people. It all works as long as the managers superiors don't notice the entire department is lazy, so as long as butts are in seats the manager will be happy since it makes him look good for his managers.
Lazy buys into a dysfunctional framing: it’s far more common to have poor or conflicting incentives. If managers are just measuring by how many seats are full, they are rather by definition getting exactly what they asked for.
This appears absolutely to be clickbait posted for entertainment value.
The actual phrasing of the single question appears to be about "real" or "focussed" work which many people seem to have interpreted as being "not meetings" or "other work I do which I feel is pointless busywork" - certainly how I would interpret it.
As many people pointed out it depends what "working" means. If this is focus mode/deep work, than it's quite a lot. If it means 3 to 4 hours of light work (e-mails, waiting on conferences, chatting with co-workers etc) and the rest is social media and things totally not related to the job then it's a different story.
A lot of comments here are to the effect that the things they do when "not working" are actually work of some fashion.
For me, I promise you that is not the case. I've always been a lazy motherfucker. I didn't get into automating things with technology because I liked to work, after all. Over the past 10 years I'd say I did honestly work a full work day when I was my most productive, but my median work day was probably around 3 hours/day. As in, I spent the rest of it reading books in a terminal so it looked like I was doing work, or something similarly useless to my employer.
My employer never complained, and in fact I earned a reputation for being the guy who can get to the bottom of hard problems, deliver the simplest and quickest solution to an immediate need, or reason out and mitigate for all the ways something could go wrong. I would say I was actually good at my job despite not actually working that much. Thus, I am constantly annoyed that my employer is so insistent on butts-in-seats, to the extent that during a global pandemic I've only been working from home during the time I was contagious with the goddamned plague (all of my department caught it thanks to this policy).
Due to my rapidly failing mental health, I'd say I put in a median 3 hours/week of work right now. Still, very few people seem to have noticed and no one has said anything.
Yeah, same. When I work at corporate I work maybe 2-3 hours a day. When I work on my personal projects I work more than 8 a day. All that time sitting around procrastinating isn't necessary to do the actual work, it is just a waste of time (not for me, I got paid the same as when I put in effort, but for the world).
Edit: And just to clarify, I always got stellar performance reviews, quick promotions and large salary bumps. Corporate just doesn't demand much from you so it is hard to motivate yourself to do the job when nobody else performs well either. This includes Google etc, at least the teams I worked at there.
It is not uncommon in the profession that someone working 3 hours can be more productive than another working 8 hours a day especially in slow pace environments.
Occasionally there is an emergency where you work the full 8 hours being the hero, then it is back to slacking off.
"My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadAm I supposed to count meetings I didn't need to be on, or that could've been an email, or that get rescheduled at the last minute for 15 minutes later than originally?
While not impossible, I find it implausible ;)
A Zoom call you can basically ignore but have to be around. Still work but not "working".
Eg when I am oncall out of hours, I could browse HN almost all the time, but it is still low-intensity work, even if nothing breaks and pages on that day.
The idea was two-fold: reduces paperwork, and incentivizes the SRE team to reduce alerts that have to be dealt with.
In any case, my main point was that anything that prevents me from having a beer or going bungee jumping is 'work' in my books. Though, obviously, there are different levels of intensity.
Still work: if it’s preventing you from focusing but not personal time, it’s work. Your employer choosing to waste your time on low productivity meetings is something to try to improve but you shouldn’t feel any obligation to make up for it with your own free time.
Not using part of my life in the way I see fit because I need to make a living? Work.
I get up pretty early, so I like getting a lot of work done before 9am standup. By then I've usually lost motivation/focus and may work an hour or 2 more. I really get mileage out of the "work always fills the time allotted for it" law.
Half of me can't wait to get back to an office where I'm with others which provides motivation/pressure to work, but the other half does not want to deal with the commute.
However consider that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do. Typically you'll never find one of those people saying they don't do much. In fact, many of them feel compelled to sit in the office - face time - to look busy. If you were to narrowly define their work like I've done with software devs, many people would end up with maybe a couple of hours a day, mainly reading some docs to decide what their business unit should do.
That reads sarcastic, but in today’s workplace you really need to know the legal framework you’re working within or you’ll probably be fleeced or worse. How lawyers charge actually is instructive.
> “The time we have alone, the time we have in walking, the time we have in riding a bicycle, is the most important time for a writer. Escaping from the typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give the subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs at the subconscious level.” - Ray Bradbury
> "When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon hole two years I took it out one day and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you've only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep -- also while you are at work on other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on." - Mark Twain
> ‘I didn’t stir out yesterday, but sat and thought all day; not writing a line; not so much as the cross of a t or the dot of an i. I imaged forth a good deal of Barnaby by keeping my mind steadily upon him; and am happy to say I have gone to work this morning in good twig, strong hope and cheerful spirits. Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably miserable.’ - Charles Dickens
As someone who finds coding completely unsatisfying and who instead chose to have a career sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do, I find this pretty funny.
I can’t imagine anything being as satisfying as communicating well with another person.
I regularly catch myself thinking and telling my wife I've had a very unproductive day and didn't work much when I spent the majority of it working through internal memos, email, and otherwise just getting caught up on the company happenings.
It isn't really work. It's squarely in the bullshit side of "bullshit jobs".
I don't really miss label other things like documentation, research, testing or project spiking but those too very regularly get forgotten and don't feel significant to bullet point in my daily standup.
What a narrow world view.
There are “schmoozers” who are completely satisfied and coders who dread their work lives...
There are also schmoozers who create value beyond anything many single coders could ever dream of: by raising capital, creating multimillion sales, persuading and inspiring others, etc.
And I say this as someone who switched from a management job to designing and coding because I personally find it much more fulfilling.
Just assume the people you're writing to aren't all idiots. If you really think OP meant what you thought, ask them.
The original quote or calling non-coders “schmoozers” (their words, not mine), are in fact, no longer there as far as I can see.
It wasn’t taken out of context, there was not that much nuance to the sentence I quoted.
Apologies.
In my experience, working part-time means getting paid only the proportional amount for the benefit of only having to be present for that part, while at the same time having to deliver the same output as the full-time.
Also, the comment that the Amazon employee made is similar to what I hear across other online forums such as Reddit and Twitter. Seems Amazon has created a really toxic environment for everyone involved.
Playing ping pong and taking 3rd lunch and faffing on HN are not working.
What noone has mentioned is that the reason people get away with 3 hour days is it's too hard to fire them. Bottom line is those who get more done work for those other employees (I can only wish my colleagues exploited me as much (but not more) as my employer). Some just leave and go to a startup where there's no BS and worklplace socialism.
- add 3 docstring for 3 setter functions (max 10 lines each). (1 day)
- fix a codesmell, ~15 character syntax change, whose 'fix' is given freely by the analysis plugins' web app. (1 day)
- change a version number in a file (1 day)
In total I'd say he does maybe .5 hours of work a day...
I'm probably around 4-5 hours, but knowing hes claiming overtime ontop just kills me lol.
I have worked with many freelancers and worked (as tech consultant) in many big and small businesses; a lot of capable tech people, in my experience, vastly understate the time they actually work. When they are in meetings, all day, they feel they didn't work and report hours accordingly. I have to point out to them regularly that even though they reported 3 hours, I was in meetings with them for 6 (and yes, I find that generally quite pointless so I understand the sentiment), so I think it's closer to 8-9 hours.
Are you trying to reduce that unsustainable amount?
Also I don't know exactly how they measure this, but I have a feeling it might be the time people spend pressing buttons..
My real question: is this just clickbait or is this fodder for the kinds of companies which market things like monitoring software to toxic managers? I have memories of working at a consulting shop which tried to entertain the idea that the reason they weren’t profitable wasn’t due to two of the partners cutting deals below estimated costs but rather something like people slacking or not tracking their time precisely enough. Tracking at 5 minute intervals didn’t change the big picture but it did dramatically increase the amount of time spent on time tracking.
It's ideological reinforcement for their target audience. Most managers and business types have no idea what their underlings actually do, but they have a suspicion that they are not the lean-mean-money-makin'-machine they (ideally) should be. So business-oriented publications like this pander to their fears and strengthen their resolve to whip slackers into shape.
The actual phrasing of the single question appears to be about "real" or "focussed" work which many people seem to have interpreted as being "not meetings" or "other work I do which I feel is pointless busywork" - certainly how I would interpret it.
For me, I promise you that is not the case. I've always been a lazy motherfucker. I didn't get into automating things with technology because I liked to work, after all. Over the past 10 years I'd say I did honestly work a full work day when I was my most productive, but my median work day was probably around 3 hours/day. As in, I spent the rest of it reading books in a terminal so it looked like I was doing work, or something similarly useless to my employer.
My employer never complained, and in fact I earned a reputation for being the guy who can get to the bottom of hard problems, deliver the simplest and quickest solution to an immediate need, or reason out and mitigate for all the ways something could go wrong. I would say I was actually good at my job despite not actually working that much. Thus, I am constantly annoyed that my employer is so insistent on butts-in-seats, to the extent that during a global pandemic I've only been working from home during the time I was contagious with the goddamned plague (all of my department caught it thanks to this policy).
Due to my rapidly failing mental health, I'd say I put in a median 3 hours/week of work right now. Still, very few people seem to have noticed and no one has said anything.
Edit: And just to clarify, I always got stellar performance reviews, quick promotions and large salary bumps. Corporate just doesn't demand much from you so it is hard to motivate yourself to do the job when nobody else performs well either. This includes Google etc, at least the teams I worked at there.
Occasionally there is an emergency where you work the full 8 hours being the hero, then it is back to slacking off.
>As in, I spent the rest of it reading books in a terminal so it looked like I was doing work, or something similarly useless to my employer
What are some of your other favourite things like this? Some:
* Using rtv to browse reddit via CLI
* Browsing RSS feeds and news sites, eg with elinks.
* Learning a totally new programming language / tool / paradigm.
* Roguelikes, eg ATOM, Nethack
* Random IRC chat rooms (meh)
* And as you said, reading books
- "working" is not defined clearly so it's possible everybody meant a different thing - "admit" implies some sort of guilt on the developer side.
"My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."
As others have said, it all depends on what you call "work".