What do you define as "real" work? In most productive days of coding I get 4/5 "real" hours of focused, concentrated work. Very, very rarely would I get more than 6 without finishing the day mentally exhausted.
Meetings? Doing more than two back-to-back, hour-long meetings is an ordeal if you want a productive meeting. You can sit there and stare into space for far longer, or just keep minimum attention. But intelligent debate with multiple individuals for longer than that is hard to pull off, especially if you also want to get the productive work as mentioned above.
Meetings of the "just being present" and responding various, random emails that need little care? Feel free to spend 10 hours a day on those, for sure.
4 to 5 hours of real, focused, concentrated work is impressive. I take a long time to recover from a meeting and they're usually in the middle of my day, almost every work day, and often there's more than one. They're also exhausting so I'll have lost some vibrancy by the time I do get back in the flow of actual work.
4 to 5 hours is achievable and easy if you are aligned with your work and team and find it energizing. With a bad team, bad money, or bad product, downright near impossible to care enough for it.
Meetings themselves are the problem and what I'm suggesting are the problem. I don't think team alignment is related to the disruptive havoc caused by meetings. We have a lot of evidence that it takes a long time for a mind to refocus on a task once disturbed.
I say it's impressive you can crank out that level of focused work because I can't get a long stretch of uninterrupted time that you can. Maybe you have fewer meetings?
It's two 2-hour work blocks a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Yes, you have to aggressively block other activities. Working in small teams with similar goals and prescheduled sync points has helped a lot.
But it's like marketing though. You're productive for 50% of the time, but you can't know which 50%. Scheduling one's self 4-day work weeks seems great in theory but you can't force the flow state to happen
I have the similar schedule like you do. I even plan a short 0.5 - 1h training between morning and lunch. And like you, I am more productive in the afternoon, at the end of the day.
Hour 0-0.5: get back to whatever I left the previous day... most productive 0.5 hour of the day with a fresh mind.
Hour 0.5-1.5: meetings, status updates, syncing with others...
Hour 1.5-3.0: more intense coding. May be bug hunting, new feature, more testing...
Hour 3.0-4.0: lunch.
Hour 4.0-5.0: typically helping other team members or discussing bugs/new features etc. Or doing "research", keeping up-to-date reading whatever (software related), including HN.
Hour 5.0-5.5: coffee break, thinking about personal stuff usually, have a little snack or something.
Hour 5.5-7.0: more coding. Much lower productivity though, typically leave things to finish in the 0.5 hour I am most productive the next day. Might read news and non-work related things to give my brain a little break every now and then.
My uncle used to work for McDonnell Douglas and regaled me with stories of people standing around or hanging out in the parking lot, basically getting payed to do jack all. At the time he told me this, almost 40 yrs ago now, they were in a slump and were laying off. Nepotism in the hiring practice was prevalent. I would have fired him, personally. Needless to say one can expect most "industries" to be very similar.
You have peer pressure to keep working longer, you get little done and you're wasting your brain power.
It makes sense if someone is junior and learning from the other.
Otherwise it's just an employers' tool to get people to squeeze in more hours of half-assed work (and then work more alone to actually get something done to have something to show for).
Async PRs reviews are way more efficient and less taxing on people.
When I did it (a long time ago) we worked for seven hours or so and went home tired but feeling like we actually accomplished a full day of work. Peer pressure was more about keeping to the normal schedule and taking breaks than putting in more hours.
But the startup died due to not paying enough attention to business issues. Programming productivity isn't everything.
Then I went to Google and my productivity got a lot worse, for many reasons but waiting on code reviews was one. To some extent I could compensate by making unrelated changes in parallel, or even working on a stack of patches and fixing up later patches when earlier ones needed to change. It felt like it was fighting a system that wanted to slow me down, though.
Somehow I count meetings as … meetings and not work. More like pauses between productive work efforts.
Same with communication.
Only when I produce something tangible I feel that I’m working.
I know this is kind of silly but I feel like sitting in a meeting and getting paid is like cheating. Or replying to an email.
In no way I’m suggesting that time and attention are not valuable - it’s just that these activities feel trivially easy compared to the cognitive load of coding.
Write down notes from meeting for yourself and try to remember what was said - the tl;Dr.
It will make you feel more like working. But also, I found that actually useful in the long term. I did that as experiment and then then some months later I found myself using all that stuff. Not everything was useful, but a good chunk of it was.
My view is as a coder if there is real hard work needed, essentially debugging something vexing or a large re-architecting, it needs to be done in an undisturbed 3 hour window, of which I can realistically fit two in a day.
Minor coding tasks like documenting and preparing a commit can be done in any amount of time, but crucially it is time that is allowed to be broken up by meals or meetings. Casual skimming over the code for ideas is also in this category, eg scanning for random TODOs that can be checked off.
I try to gather all my regular calls on the same day, that way I get it out of the way with the least amount of context switching.
I don't normally have two long things to do in a day, I just have a max capacity of 2x hard things, if that day is not broken up by something.
Long term doing 2 hard things a day for a whole week would probably not be sustainable, either you run out of motivation or you run out of hard tasks.
One of the things you do under "hard tasks" is simplify your code so that subsequent tasks fall under "easy tasks". You trade your "must not disturb" time for "can be stopped and started".
Eh, I know it's just an expression but I automatically distrust awfully presumptuous stuff like "as much as you think". The author doesn't have the slightest idea what I think, yet he proclaims to know better and tries to correct me.
Rant aside, it is my experience that the vast majority of people are useless bums. Pretty sure that's nurture as opposed to nature, though. If it weren't learned behaviour, people wouldn't be performing all these rituals in the hopes of obscuring their very uselessness.
That said, I manage 4-6 productive hours a day. Used to be half that at the start of my dev career. Sometimes I do 10, even 12 hours if I have the energy and motivation.
I think every service industry worker is laughing their ass off at this post. That is, if they can get past the tears and fury at the injustice of the world that allowed this post to exist.
I don't share your sarcasm. Working with your body and working with your mind aren't that different, it's just that the mind gets tired quicker. It's very hard to be doing concentrated thinking for 6 hours straight.
Exactly, but if it has to be an us vs. them kinda thing, I’d like to throw in: people who’re working with their body at least have the luxury of being able to remove themselfs from work when they get home. Leaving work as a developer, researcher, whatever, means that your stupid brain brings problem home and distracts you when you should spend time with your family.
PhD studies can be very different. Wet-lab students who do experiments can spend 12 hours a day in a lab cutting mice. But that’s somewhat mechanical work where you repeat the protocol. PhD students are also less experienced and spend a lot of time making mistakes and learning. When I got my fist full-time developer job I spent day and night working as well. After 5-7 years, I was something like the author because I could do non-trivial tasks quickly. It felt like the code was writing itself in the back of my mind while I was drinking coffee or browsing HN.
When I was building the physical apparatus itself and plumbing it up, I was working 70 hour weeks because it was more or less mindless physical labor.
When I was writing software to operate the experiment or analyze data, I settled into more of a few hours a day of deep work pattern. Part of that might be the nature of science; after I implemented an idea, it might be hours before the experiment fully responded to my changes or the computers finished crunching numbers. And I needed that feedback to inform what I'd do next.
Writing my dissertation was somewhere in the middle. The actual writing required focus, but a lot of it was tracking down references or making figures, which required some thought but not too deep. That's probably the closest I came to a 40 hour week.
Based on other replies, it sounds like other people have experienced similar relationships of the nature of the work to their capacity to do it.
I spend a significant part of my day working synchronously (engineering / product / etc. meetings, mandatory unplanned calls to fix some crappy system that is failing in production...) as opposed to working asynchronously (reviewing someone else's PR while they work on something else, reading some spec, etc.).
I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart culture. The fact we work 50 hour weeks to do things we could do in 35-40 is hilarious and infuriating at the same time.
Hey, at least you have a paycheck. There are tons of people out there who work 50-hour weeks (artists, musicians) who get less than a decimal of that pay, none of the benefits, and all of the stress.
Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.
No, they - in general - do not. A few get this. A few more lucky folks make a living off of it. In the case of an artist, you are probably doing commissions and spend a lot of time on social media, in the post office, and such things just to tread water. Comic artists and animators you've never heard of go about their day in invisibility while they destroy their wrists, elbows, and shoulders for your enjoyment. (a number of these are contract jobs, too, which means no benefits).
Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that.
The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.
There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.
Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real job?'
Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there, and often ugly if you do.
Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from say musclebound video game characters for adolescents. Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are dead/generic for accessibility reasons.
I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.
> Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that.
> The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.
I've been working professionally as a music creator for nearly 20 years. I think what separates the musician types you're referring to from actual professionals is an understanding of how to make money with art and when to pivot one's career, e.g. "live gigs are paying me nothing... how else can I make money with my music?" I'd be miserable if I'd stayed in live music beyond my early twenties or believed that teaching was an adequate substitution for being paid to create for a living.
Most hobbyist musicians never work beyond the genre or instrument they initially learned, like a "programmer" who learns HTML as a kid but fails to take their expertise further. It's a severe lack of business acumen, self-awareness, and desire to evolve.
Yes they do. I'm both a musician and a software developer and the difference in social prestige is night and day, depending on how I present myself.
You're trying to refute the statement that musicians and artists get a lot of social prestige, by stating that they make little money and do work that's not glamorous, and that's irrelevant, it's rather actually part of what gives it prestige.
I think it depends on how you define the word prestige. I work as a software engineer but also freelance composing music for mobile games, I wouldn't say that people are exactly "in awe" of what I do in either situation. Neither job is particularly difficult.
Posing with a guitar will help you get laid. Even if you don't play remotely well enough to make any money, or for anyone to really care about your music.
> > Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.
> I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting.
Groupies, maybe? I've encountered them hanging on even celebrity impersonators (in Los Angeles) and cover bands (in Las Vegas), not just originals. Not to mention authors and visual artists. Most artistic scenes seem to attract them.
I feel this. I am automatically suspicious of anyone who has to drop the number of hours they worked a certain day, or frequently flexes that they are still working at a late hour. Why do you need us to know?
I have an extension in VS Code that tracks time spent coding, and sends me a weekly summary. While I’m unsure how accurate the time algorithm is, on my “home office with no meetings” days it says I get around 5 hours of code time, which sounds about accurate. Interestingly it claims the the global average is 52 minutes, which I can definitely get on days with many interruptions.
How do you measure if you are coding in the extension? I wonder if it counts activity (keystroke, mouse) or uf having the window focused (while grabbing a quick coffee, for instance) counts.
I'm not the parent you're replying to, but get similar stats on the average. I use RescueTime together with Neovim, and it works by activity. So if I leave for a coffee it stops logging the time I spend, and the window needs to be in focus. I also have the browser extensions setup, as to separate the time spent in editor compared to in browsers. The git repository is also logged, so I can see how much time is spent with what repository (normally use multiple repos at the same time). Not affiliated with RescueTime in any way, just a happy user.
Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that.
Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly.
My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribute this to an unhealthy grip on life that stemmed from somewhere.
All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week. I had to keep on top of their own hours to tell them to go home and find a girlfriend.
DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it. Only do it if you can honestly say you are unhealthily obsessed with it and can’t actually have a normal life.
80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.
I would not call it trivial, but I found that, as a manager, you often have to be a psychologist and spend very large amounts of your time listening to the more personal issues of your colleagues. When I was manager over 400 people (there were managers between me and them but I was ‘the top level’), I spent 80+ hours a week doing my work; 60+ was easily absorbed by motivating people and listening to their stories about imminent divorces, dying parents, spouses or kids, and so on. Then 20 or so hours to do my actual work. It is not for me… I do not want such a position again.
I did 80+ hours as well when I was just writing code and managing servers; about 40/60 respectively. It was more than 80 hours and I missed things, but I was young and made up for it. I would not want to do that again either.
Sometimes it's easier to code all day long than how easy it feels to improve your life. Especially if one excels at work and lacks a social network in life.
> End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.
There are definitely ways to mitigate this way of thinking, one being understanding the "spot light effect" the "phenomenon where people tend to overestimate how much others notice aspects of one's appearance or behavior."
Also to do more structured based social activities.
If it’s so painful to hang out then you could do something else. Go for a run/bike/hike, woodworking, gardening, gym, learn a new skill, etc. heck so drugs and play video games. It’s good to have something other than work in your life or one day you’ll have a crisis when things go poorly with work
it doesnt matter if the work is trivial, youre still working. if im dealing with slack pings at 9pm, thats work, even if they just need a thumbs up.
> six days a week.
Anecdotally when I was doing that much work, it was 7 days a week. When I woke in the morning my phone was full of emails slack pings and build issues, and it was closer to midnight when it stopped than 10pm. There is no down time whatsoever in an environment like that, everyone is constantly stressed and overworked and it just makes it worse
Why do it though? You’re ruining your life and halving your normalized hourly rate. There are plenty of companies where 40 hours of effective work is a top performer and things aren’t breaking every week
> You’re ruining your life and halving your normalized hourly rate.
Agreed.
> Why do it though?
It was a boiling frog situation. When I joined, things were good. 35-40 hour weeks, interesting work, great coworkers. The team grew, and all of a sudden I was a knowledge holder in areas. It started with an occasional message from a co worker who had a deadline, and then the deadlines were every 2 weeks, and it wasn't just one coworker, it was multiple coworkers. Then it was other people working late nights and me replying on saturday mornings to their issues because I wasn't really working, it was just a slack message. Then it was me fixing issues on a sunday morning because it was the only time my mailbox wasn't bursting. Around that point I realised what was happening, so I scaled things back to working hours, and started getting negative feedback and comments about "not trying as hard as others" from other managers (not my manager though). My annual review came back as negative because other teams were reliant on me being available, so i went back to being always on for about a year before I got another offer and left on good terms.
It genuinely took me about a year afterwards to realise how bad things had gotten (everyone checks their work email precautionarily at 11pm on a saturday night so they can sleep without worrying, right? That's normal.) I'm much better off now.
Thanks for sharing. I am probably in the same boat. I feel miserable when not working. I managed to improve my situation though
- 100 km running minimum per month. I take this seriously.
- Writing notes about work in a notebook. Not publishing but that's the only way I can stay away from other work and not feel bored.
- Spending more time on two hobbies: hardware/circuits and cooking.
To an extent, if you function this way, its not even unhealthy. People give me strange look when I work because I love going fast (in smooth precise way). To them it's abuse, to me it's joy (granted I can stay in my own limits). To me their slow and bored ways are unhealthy. I start twitching.
Yes I am the same. Work sets me goals that I obsess about. I like playing golf, but I can’t obsess about getting my handicap down. I also can’t obsess about a hobby project. I can about a product that I know has a user base. Then the brain goes fast, dopamine kicks in and I can keep going for long hours.
> All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week.
> DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it.
Do as I say, not as I do. The culture of being always on, and working these insane hours comes from management allowing it or leading by it. It's utterly meaningless for you tell your reports to not work crazy hours only to show them that you need to do it.
Being a manager puts a power dynamic at play; it's one thing if a team member is working silly hours but if your boss is, it sets the expectation that you can too. By working you are setting the precedent for your team
I agree. And I tried it too. In the end I couldn’t find anything else to do in my downtime. So I went home at 5 and worked from there. Got up early and worked before coming in. I work from home now so the above is moot now.
I think for a very short period that it can work, such as a critical deadline. We’ve all been there, adrenaline flowing, target hit, etc. but if that is normalized then no it will kill you in the end.
I spend most of my time thinking what needs to be done, and how to do it. Then I make the simplest possible prototype/POC and re-check my ideas. Then I think about use cases (test cases, actually) and keep iterating making small modifications (usually) to the code and finding more edge cases. My point is, the actual amount of time actually doing code-writing is very small, most time is spent figuring things out (thinking on the high level design/algorithm), writing out the ideas as code is usually the least part of the work. Finally I do cleanups/refactor, which are quite simple to do, but take non trivial amounts of time, including writting more documentation (e.g. code comments and descriptions for the PR for reviewers and for later reference).
Some people do work a solid 8 hours or whatever per day. Mostly those in more manual jobs as they basically sell their bodies. But in our line of work it's not quite like that. I both work less than 8 hours a day, or more, depending on how you define "work".
The thing is, I'm not paid for my body or my labour. I'm paid for my mind. My employer pays for me to engage myself with the business. My mind never fully disengages. When I start work on Monday I don't "start again" like a rebooted machine. In addition, the mind never fully switches off, even when sleeping. I'll often crack a problem in my sleep and realise it during my morning cleaning cycle.
So no, I might not "work" as much as you think I should, but if you find that surprising then I'm probably far more engaged than you would imagine too.
There are, of course, those who don't work much and aren't as fully engaged. That will always happen. It's important to measure the value people are delivering (and help them improve) but it can't be done using any single metric and certainly not "hours worked".
I am now in 2 projects in parallel and most of the work time is consumed by meetings. Meetings eat up so much energy that I have none left to utilize the time-slots in between meetings to get things done.
Yeah mentally I estimate the dead time created around meetings as 2x the length of the actual meeting. A "quick checkin" actually kills an hour, an all-hands meeting may well write off the entire day.
> Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work.
Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my life such that I either can spend a solid zero hours in a day working on hard mental tasks ;P or make myself ready to work until dawn (at which point I simply feel bad I am still awake sometimes more than truly feel like I am ready to stop).
I'm in the same boat as you, and yet my hours look like the post author's. One scenario that leads to this is that I simply have other shit to do, and need to hard stop my focus on something that I far too often want to keep working on.
This is partly a delegation problem (I'm trying to free up time by delegating certain things), and partly just a problem of growing up: What interrupts me might sometimes be other work or menial tasks, but it's often also just social life or having to go to to the ice rink.
I'm super happy with my current work-life balance, though a bit unsatisfied at how often I have to context switch. I wish I could just schedule as well as you do, unfortunately when it comes to social engagements for example I'm often more restricted...
That's great until a PM schedules a quick meeting to make sure your progress is tracking their spreadsheet line. And there are 4 or 5 PMs. You end up with your days split into 6 or 7 segments between quick standups and triage meetings and status meetings and emergency customer calls where you're brought in "just in case" and because it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work. And you can't even explain at the PM's next quick progress meeting that you're behind because her quick status meeting has set you back a week, because to her reporting status at a meeting of 15 people is how things progress.
> [B]ecause it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work.
And when that half hour itself is semi-routinely[0] interrupted, the whole cycle becomes a form of aversion therapy conditioning you to avoid even attempting to concentrate.
Once you're stuck in that rut, you're really screwed because every failed attempt to break out of the cycle just reinforces it, and not being interrupted just means you're worrying about being interrupted instead.
[0] As with other processes, intermittent reinforcement is far more effective than consistency.
I've had a lot of luck with blocking out a couple hours a day for "dedicated work time." You have to aggressively defend that time and reject requests where someone carelessly double-books you anyway to be able to keep that time sacred. I've worked for places who wouldn't respect that and expected me to be "always available". Those places got the level of output from me that they deserved when I found myself unable to concentrate and would just be waiting for the next interruption.
I've found as well that once I get really going on a tough problem, it may consume my life for the next several days in a row, it'll be all I do or think about. I wish I knew how people turn it off after a few hours a day and think about anything else.
I don't think people who say they work 14 hours a day are lying. They just count in everything that is somehow related to their job, like reading about their business in the newspaper or thinking about work in the shower. And that's the crux of the matter, in jobs that don't have clearly assigned shifts or where attendance is measured, the boundaries between work and leisure become blurred. And then again, comparisons of who works how long are completely useless.
Exactly. I spent a decade plus in a job where emails came in routinely until 9-10 at night and often the CEO would send out something on the weekend. Even if I wasn't required to respond or the response was short, this is _absolutely_ work. Over and above that, spending a decade being literally unable to get away from work in that way is like arsenic poisoning. It was like "I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm dead." It's insidious and terrible.
But you shouldn't publicly claim 12 hour work days if you watch TV during those hours, that's ridiculous. That gives a completely wrong impression and may push some who don't know better to actually try and work 12 hours.
I never understood people who bragged about working long hours. Why on earth do they believe that working long hours is something to be admired? I care about what people achieve. Not how many hours they spend achieving it. People can be super busy, spinning their wheels, without achieving much. I see that all the time. I call it “being incompetent”. Not something to be proud of.
But if you're there, you're working. You can't spend that time out at a stadium watching a ballgame, or hiking through a forest, or catching up with old friends over coffee, or fixing that stubborn door on your house, or with your family. You're at work, in work mode and your time and energy are alloted to that.
If you work for an agency, and sales is having a tough time closing a deal so there's no work for you today, but you have to be there anyway, ready to work or finding other things to do, maybe upgrading your tools, practicing/learning, then that's still work time. It's not leisure time.
Just because you don't achieve 100% uptime cranking out widgets non-stop at full productivity doesn't mean you're not working. We're people, not industrial factory machines.
You can say 'people are pretending' or 'that's not actually work', but it is. And saying that it's not is just denying reality by casting a moral judgment on it like that.
I agree. I do maybe 6h of clocked in official work, then maybe 2-6 additional hours of reasearch, tinkering, learning, thinking, taking random notes.
But those hours are very blurry and come in random high bursts („being onto something“). They’re important and effective for me but it’s difficult to categorize them or even track them.
I alway liken folk who say they work long hours to Intel cpus in the megahertz race. Sure it runs at 6ghz but it’s useless for a laptop. Performance per watt is where the quality is. I equate that to be forty hours of work per week.
high performance per watt is pretty low value for those of us who haven't moved our laptops from our home/desk in the past 2 years. In fact the whole premise of a laptop has largely been erased under work from home restrictions. Most of the point was to have a portable machine so your employees felt the need/desire to take the device home and continue working after hours.
There's maybe a slight argument to be made for meetings, but even then you're supposed to be paying attention to the meeting, if not then why are you there? One person might need to take notes...
Look at the second histogram. The average is roughly aligned with OP’s summary, but there is huge variance. These comments have already devolved into people telling each other they are lying, or about to burn out - all I ask is humility in the face of our messy shared reality.
I think you're completely right, however I'd love to see a graph of average work time claims on HN plotted against this.
There's no denying that there are far more people claiming they work 60-80 hour weeks than would collate with the data that you and OP have provided.
I think these people are generally overworked but are also poor assessors of their own performance, taking worst cases as averages and calling a day in which you finish at 5pm but answer a slack message at 9pm, a 12 hour day.
Not to be too sardonic, but: I'm on call frequently but I don't tell people I've been working for 24 hours because I got a page at midnight, even if it can feel a bit like that by the end of the next day.
We tracked work hours using a custom desktop app in our team (made by the team over several iterations to make it not burdensome), and insisted that devs log time against the downtime category (only during work hours of course).
Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime. Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki binge etc..
We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project admin would average 20% of total team time. “Firefighting” which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%.
If you don’t believe someone who says they work X hours per week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn’t realize until we spent the time to log it.
If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made you more productive in the hours you do work.
His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day.
In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to sleep and exercise than anything else.
Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or meditation), and enough exercise every day to get the heart rate up.
If I don’t do this for a couple of days, I can be unproductive from hour 2 after waking! We managed to implement a defect metric in my previous team that worked well, my defects went through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.
There is a lot of literature on this correlation, but just thought I would share my own experience.
Nothing very automated I am afraid, but we had enough people who cared to do the admin work to make the figures reliable.
We wanted to get a handle on how often work went backwards in our life cycle, and why it went backward.
We had a JIRA lifecycle hook that asked for the reason for moving from SIT state back to Development state, or from UAT state back to Development state etc..
One of which was defect. A defect either being a confirmation that wasn't implemented as per the spec, or an edge case bug.
Test failures were different, we had automated testing so test case failures were picked up before the ticket moved on in the lifecycle.
We could also move completed tickets from Deployed to Review, if a production error was linked to a ticket. This movement could also be tagged as a defect in the same way.
We would then just query the jira database and report on it, by project, by assignee etc..
It wasn't a blame exercise, we were more interested in the % of tickets that moved backwards, and the relative percentages of causes for the move. Another category for example was 'Requirements Changed', we worked with banks, so we had a LOT of these!
It's been a minute since I read this study, and I didn't take perfect notes, but iirc, the top line result is that (among munition workers) productivity per hour peaks below 40 hours a week, but total productivity peaks above it.
I think that you are right to point out the large variance, but you could have also have said that the 90th percentile was approx 7 hrs of work per workday, and 75th was probably 5-6
I’ve logged my work time (automatically with time tracking apps) for over a decade. I’ve also done a significant amount of hourly-rate consulting where I’m very careful to only bill for actual working time.
When I was younger, one of my early challenges was that I had been misled to believe that only time spent in the editor, writing code counted as “working”. There’s a somewhat pervasive idea among devs that meetings, e-mail, communications, team discussions, and other such facts of business do not count as work when you’re a programmer. It led to some anxiety before I accepted that collaboration and communication is also work, something that seems obvious in retrospect but was difficult to swallow as a young programmer raised on Internet forums.
Some people default to the other extreme, where they seem to count every hour as “work” if they did anything remotely related to work during that hour. By now, I’ve worked with a lot of people who claim 60-80 hour work weeks simply because they check their phone and type out single-sentence replies in Slack or e-mails on evenings and weekends. Some of the laziest, least productive people I've worked with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour grinds every week.
Two better metrics I’ve found for gauging productivity are total hours spent in work mode (in the office, or sitting at my home office desk) and total time spent in time wastes (Hacker News, non-work Slacks, Twitter, and so on). If I’m accumulating more than 30 minutes commenting on HN or scrolling Twitter, it’s a sign that I’m not really engaged with work and I need to shake things up.
I’ve shared my time tracking tools and techniques with a lot of people that I’ve mentored. It’s some times shocking for someone to realize that they’ve been spending 4 hours on social media (Discords, HN and Reddit are social media) during a what’s supposed to be a workday. Many of them gauge their own level of focus as average or better than average before actually tracking it. They might even be surrounded by friends or peers who engage in the same amount of distraction during the day, reinforcing their own behavior. Usually once they see what they’re doing as a hard number they can take steps to break the habit, but for some it’s so deeply engrained that they don’t understand what they’re doing until they see it as a number.
> Some of the laziest, least productive people I've worked with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour grinds every week.
In my experience, people who claim to regularly work 60-80 hours/week are completely full of it. Yes, there’s this “thought about work for a second, that’s another hour” mentality. But there’s also just a ton of people outright lying about the amount of time they actually sit at a desk.
I worked at Yahoo for a while and nearly everyone told me they worked long hours, like 10 hour days, every day. The vast majority of them were working at most 8. People would talk about working late but they came in even late, too. Showing up at 11am and leaving at 7pm is not a long day. The people claiming to work until 7 were also not actually stating that late typically, because if I stayed until 6 the place was a ghost town. There legitimately were a few people who were working long days, but they very much seemed to be the exception. There was an unhealthy culture of pretending to work absurd hours, though.
I used to work at a company where we could clock in and out if we wanted. If we did, we could keep any extra hours at our convenience as a day off. If we didn't it would be a full workday by default.
I liked the freedom to work long days every now and then, and then take some time off later when I wanted a long weekend or so. A colleague decided that's a great idea and started doing the same, but stopped after a week or two when he realized he's just accruing negative time.
I'm not claiming that I was fully productive with my office hours, just agreeing with you that some people really do think they work more than they actually do.
I think it varies by person a lot but how little people work in general affect people expectations in the workforce. Especially in a market where firing people is hard (because hiring them is expensive) there is going to be a certain leniency towards performance.
When I work for myself I can literally code all day, if I'm working for a client I'll work as much as it's reasonable to hit deliverables, keep the managers happy and keep a good reputation in the company. My prices when working per projects were always too cheap because I found features to be simple to implement; I then switched to what's expected in the industry and charge per day and I make way more, working way less.
Similarly, I know people who can work all day and some who can't and will burn out if they do. The 10x developers exist, but you won't find them at big corp making bank (or if you find them, they'll likely slack like everyone else), they'll be building their own startups and making bank with that.
I'd add a 4th point: accept a wider definition of work when counting your hours.
A lot of us are lucky enough to have knowledge based jobs, which require mental tasks of solution design and decision making that are hard to quantify. I regularly get ideas when walking, cooking, driving, etc... and then spend time thinking through a work problem and taking notes. Several times a day I go for a short walk to clear my head of distractions and regain focus, That would be hard to quantify to a theoretical bad manager who wanted you to count hours but for many it is an essential part of knowledge work.
While this blog post and reading about his opinions may be interesting, ultimately it's an opinion piece and I strongly dislike when people write opinion pieces and make it sound like they did a study in the title!
For all we know, he may be completely wrong! Maybe he is the outlier and people generally, in fact do perform more "focused work" than two hours a day...
Maybe he isn't overly enthusiastic about his work place, maybe he is in a remote work environment where he isn't inspired to work more efficiently through his peers. Maybe there is a little of everything and he's just trying to warrant this one hour focused work days through "insights".
The reason I'm questioning this is because I have procastrination issues at work and take several short mental breaks, but even I, once I get going and in "the zone" (often later in the work day), I can often do focused work at least twice as long as him. He really gives nothing to go by as for his bold title, which I ask why it's not at least the more undeniably accurate: "I don't work as much as you think".
The OP does mention "being in the zone" as a possibility. He just says that it's rare, inherently not applicable to many kinds of work, and requires optimal conditions that generally don't apply. It's very much the exception, not the rule.
The article resonated with my experience as as software developer.
At my first place, a small outsourcing shop, employees were required to log daily activities so hours per day roughly fit to 8 and 40 per week. From the beginning and unlike most of coworkers, I measured my time precisely with https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 and soon understood that doing 8 hours per day doesn't happen much and often involves staying late, so instead I simply adjusted the reported numbers to look plausible. In four years, I only received positive feedback on my productivity. What was the management thinking, I have no idea, just like the article says, this was a farce all around.
When I changed the company, the habit to measure productivity stuck. Nowadays, I start working somewhere at 9 and finish at 18, and result is still the same - honest 8 hours of work activity per day happen at best once a month, the average week sums to 30-34 hours. Code-related activities never take more than 3-4 hours per day, that includes both coding and reviews. I get the impression that some of my colleagues might spend more time on the job, but low productivity was never a topic of my performance reviews, management seems content with what they get.
Perspective from the management side at a consulting place: We don't want or need you to log your time to the minute. It's counter-productive and a waste of time. It needs to just be representative and not dishonest (please read that sentence twice).
An hour long meeting booked, that ended up taking 45mins? It's an hour. It's the same reason we don't expect you to stop recording time when you to down the hall to make a coffee or take a bathroom break. The numbers only really makes sense at the aggregate level, and going to a higher level of detail is not reliable because of all the noise and different ways people measure their time.
My experience with timesheets is that they must add up to the hours you're paid for (full-time salaried work, not hourly consulting). That more-or-less guarantees that timesheets are made-up.
My first salaried job was as a salesman; we incurred expenses, which we could claim back. It was explained to us that the system was there to ensure that we weren't out-of-pocket; claims didn't have to actually be true, but you did have to have incurred the expense.
I fairly soon realised that this was a lie; the expenses system was really a salary-augmentation scheme, and you were expected to inflate your claims. Everyone was at it.
8 hours of sleep can undo less than 4 hours of problem-solving activity. Our large brains are already consuming too much body resources.
I have CO2 monitor, which I use to estimate is my brain working or not: when I'm working, CO2 level raises quickly above 1000ppm, so I need to ventilate my room often; when I'm idling, e.g. by playing a simple game, CO2 level is at about 740-790ppm without ventilation for whole day.
When I'm returning from work, I see at CO2 monitor that my head is still working. Yes, I'm able to «work» sustainable 4h per day only, but «work related activity» consumes my brain for whole day.
What happens if you have a peer that clocks 14 hours per day and work weekends too, for some reason? At our place they started comparing everyone to him. I work like at half his total speed. He often break things or have to redo things or are late to standup and don't really partake in conversations. We've all asked him to slow down and not burn out but he keeps going.
Speaking as a manager, I’d flag this dev as a concern. Very few people can work at this rate without one (or more) of three scenarios playing out:
1. They burn out and clock out mentally or leave altogether
2. They develop psychological issues and destroy their personal life, leading to an unbalanced and unsustainable situation
3. They expect something from the org in return, which normally the org can’t/won’t match (either in the way of product ownership or compensation or role).
Someone like that needs to be constrained. Keep them on the edge and eager to contribute but don’t let them free reign. If the situation and culture allow, try help out to fill the void in their personal life (I ordered one of our guys to leave early twice a week to spend time with his girlfriend because I knew his dedication to work is destroying his relationship. I sent couple of others to weekends in hotels with their SO after long sprints).
Often times people who work a lot are avoiding serious problems at home/family too, so even ordering someone to go home might be ordering them to go back to an abusive partner or something. I know more than one person who used “oh, my job takes so much of my time!” As a socially acceptable reason to avoid interacting with abusive people in their life.
Work is not work. That’s a single data point. I can mention few cases I experienced: student learning last week for exam. 100 hours week is nothing unusual here. Of course it’s not sustainable and does not take longer than few weeks. PhD student writing paper for most important conference of the year - 80 hours week. Working for your own startup 60 hour a week is imho absolutely normal. These are cases for personal gain. Now let’s talk about salaried jobs when one gets paid for sitting in the office or be green in Teams all day. And that’s the case where 10 hours each week of actual work is absolutely sufficient. I am pretty sure that productive hours are proportional to gain. Why should I do 50 hours a week for the Big Corp when my salary will be exactly the same as after productive 15 hours weekly!? There are individuals, that like what they do, so they enjoy daily tasks and are productive closer to 40 hours weekly. Luckily I know few such people, they are very inspiring.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadMeetings? Doing more than two back-to-back, hour-long meetings is an ordeal if you want a productive meeting. You can sit there and stare into space for far longer, or just keep minimum attention. But intelligent debate with multiple individuals for longer than that is hard to pull off, especially if you also want to get the productive work as mentioned above.
Meetings of the "just being present" and responding various, random emails that need little care? Feel free to spend 10 hours a day on those, for sure.
I say it's impressive you can crank out that level of focused work because I can't get a long stretch of uninterrupted time that you can. Maybe you have fewer meetings?
This does not include meetings, communication etc.
This is essentially the time spent towards a tangible deliverable.
My average day looks something like:
Hour 0-0.5: Get ready for the workday - messages, email, write standup report, take a shower.
Hour 0.5-1: standup meeting + offline meetings.
Hour 1-2: meetings or brain work
Hour 2-3: mealtime, active availability
Hour 3-5: active availability, light work, meetings
Hour 5-7: brain work (I do my best brain work at the end of the day typcially)
I'd be curious what others schedules look like.
Hour 0-0.5: get back to whatever I left the previous day... most productive 0.5 hour of the day with a fresh mind.
Hour 0.5-1.5: meetings, status updates, syncing with others...
Hour 1.5-3.0: more intense coding. May be bug hunting, new feature, more testing...
Hour 3.0-4.0: lunch.
Hour 4.0-5.0: typically helping other team members or discussing bugs/new features etc. Or doing "research", keeping up-to-date reading whatever (software related), including HN.
Hour 5.0-5.5: coffee break, thinking about personal stuff usually, have a little snack or something.
Hour 5.5-7.0: more coding. Much lower productivity though, typically leave things to finish in the 0.5 hour I am most productive the next day. Might read news and non-work related things to give my brain a little break every now and then.
What's striking to me is that if we break it down, it seems like for you by category it'd be:
Hard task/"brain" time: 2-3.5 hours depending on that last section
Light task time (including wakeup time): 2-3 hours
"Active availability" time: ~1 hour?
Personal time: 1.5 hours
and for me by category it'd be:
Hard task/"brain" time: ~2.5 hours depending on my after-lunch section
Light task time (including wakeup time): 3 hours
"Active availability" but not working time: 1 hour
Personal time: 1 hour
So even though it's distributed differently, the amount of time we spend on the types of tasks are pretty similar.
If I'm not feeling it (motivation) will try blasting music/getting pumped then start to slowly get into the flow. Usually works.
You have peer pressure to keep working longer, you get little done and you're wasting your brain power.
It makes sense if someone is junior and learning from the other.
Otherwise it's just an employers' tool to get people to squeeze in more hours of half-assed work (and then work more alone to actually get something done to have something to show for).
Async PRs reviews are way more efficient and less taxing on people.
But the startup died due to not paying enough attention to business issues. Programming productivity isn't everything.
Then I went to Google and my productivity got a lot worse, for many reasons but waiting on code reviews was one. To some extent I could compensate by making unrelated changes in parallel, or even working on a stack of patches and fixing up later patches when earlier ones needed to change. It felt like it was fighting a system that wanted to slow me down, though.
Same with communication.
Only when I produce something tangible I feel that I’m working.
I know this is kind of silly but I feel like sitting in a meeting and getting paid is like cheating. Or replying to an email.
In no way I’m suggesting that time and attention are not valuable - it’s just that these activities feel trivially easy compared to the cognitive load of coding.
It will make you feel more like working. But also, I found that actually useful in the long term. I did that as experiment and then then some months later I found myself using all that stuff. Not everything was useful, but a good chunk of it was.
I felt disturbance in the force. As if all the product managers in the world screamed at the same time.
Minor coding tasks like documenting and preparing a commit can be done in any amount of time, but crucially it is time that is allowed to be broken up by meals or meetings. Casual skimming over the code for ideas is also in this category, eg scanning for random TODOs that can be checked off.
I try to gather all my regular calls on the same day, that way I get it out of the way with the least amount of context switching.
Long term doing 2 hard things a day for a whole week would probably not be sustainable, either you run out of motivation or you run out of hard tasks.
One of the things you do under "hard tasks" is simplify your code so that subsequent tasks fall under "easy tasks". You trade your "must not disturb" time for "can be stopped and started".
Rant aside, it is my experience that the vast majority of people are useless bums. Pretty sure that's nurture as opposed to nature, though. If it weren't learned behaviour, people wouldn't be performing all these rituals in the hopes of obscuring their very uselessness.
That said, I manage 4-6 productive hours a day. Used to be half that at the start of my dev career. Sometimes I do 10, even 12 hours if I have the energy and motivation.
Somewhat career specific is a colossal understatement.
I may be wrong, but looking from the outside it looks to me like they are improving themselves as a person and earning a living at the same time.
I need to set aside time to improve my social and physical well being, outside of working time.
Don’t get me wrong I work with interesting people that I love, but we don’t improve our social abilities together
5 - 10 hours of deep work per week required to get a Phd from Imperial. That's impressive.
10hrs of deep work a week is also a significant amount of time. I doubt most people spend that much time doing deep work each week.
When I was building the physical apparatus itself and plumbing it up, I was working 70 hour weeks because it was more or less mindless physical labor.
When I was writing software to operate the experiment or analyze data, I settled into more of a few hours a day of deep work pattern. Part of that might be the nature of science; after I implemented an idea, it might be hours before the experiment fully responded to my changes or the computers finished crunching numbers. And I needed that feedback to inform what I'd do next.
Writing my dissertation was somewhere in the middle. The actual writing required focus, but a lot of it was tracking down references or making figures, which required some thought but not too deep. That's probably the closest I came to a 40 hour week.
Based on other replies, it sounds like other people have experienced similar relationships of the nature of the work to their capacity to do it.
I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart culture. The fact we work 50 hour weeks to do things we could do in 35-40 is hilarious and infuriating at the same time.
That's part of why many people are willing to have a go at these careers despite the well-known abysmal earning expectations.
It's just a lot of very willing supply and rather limited demand that depresses monetary earnings for labour in these sectors.
Compare also pay and conditions for programmers in the games industry vs those working on in-house corporate CRUD applications.
No, they - in general - do not. A few get this. A few more lucky folks make a living off of it. In the case of an artist, you are probably doing commissions and spend a lot of time on social media, in the post office, and such things just to tread water. Comic artists and animators you've never heard of go about their day in invisibility while they destroy their wrists, elbows, and shoulders for your enjoyment. (a number of these are contract jobs, too, which means no benefits).
Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that.
The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.
There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.
Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real job?'
Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there, and often ugly if you do.
Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from say musclebound video game characters for adolescents. Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are dead/generic for accessibility reasons.
I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.
It's hard to try and make money on something lots of people do as a hobby, it's the same situation in professional sports.
> The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.
I've been working professionally as a music creator for nearly 20 years. I think what separates the musician types you're referring to from actual professionals is an understanding of how to make money with art and when to pivot one's career, e.g. "live gigs are paying me nothing... how else can I make money with my music?" I'd be miserable if I'd stayed in live music beyond my early twenties or believed that teaching was an adequate substitution for being paid to create for a living.
Most hobbyist musicians never work beyond the genre or instrument they initially learned, like a "programmer" who learns HTML as a kid but fails to take their expertise further. It's a severe lack of business acumen, self-awareness, and desire to evolve.
Yes they do. I'm both a musician and a software developer and the difference in social prestige is night and day, depending on how I present myself.
You're trying to refute the statement that musicians and artists get a lot of social prestige, by stating that they make little money and do work that's not glamorous, and that's irrelevant, it's rather actually part of what gives it prestige.
Posing with a guitar will help you get laid. Even if you don't play remotely well enough to make any money, or for anyone to really care about your music.
> I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting.
Groupies, maybe? I've encountered them hanging on even celebrity impersonators (in Los Angeles) and cover bands (in Las Vegas), not just originals. Not to mention authors and visual artists. Most artistic scenes seem to attract them.
50?! but why?
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=software...
Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly.
My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribute this to an unhealthy grip on life that stemmed from somewhere.
All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week. I had to keep on top of their own hours to tell them to go home and find a girlfriend.
DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it. Only do it if you can honestly say you are unhealthily obsessed with it and can’t actually have a normal life.
I did 80+ hours as well when I was just writing code and managing servers; about 40/60 respectively. It was more than 80 hours and I missed things, but I was young and made up for it. I would not want to do that again either.
I am not entirely sure what is wrong with them. Only one case can be attributed to money. The rest looks like a weird psychological addiction.
If you are good at coding, then you code for a day and create something you are proud of. +1 to self worth.
You send it for code review or deploy and you get positive feedback. +2 to self worth.
A junior dev in house or browsing your open source project loves your code and asks for advice. +3 to self worth.
Compared to.
Go out to a social event for lunch, struggle through the social interactions.
Maybe drink a bit too much because you are stressed.
Get caught in a difficult spot when you tell someone they are wrong (which they were, but you were being rude).
Hang around for the whole afternoon / evening because you told yourself you have to make this work and get a life.
End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.
This is the life of a few socially awkward (and usually high iq) people I have had the pleasure of meeting. And myself.
I think it is healthy to take the second option, get a life, learn to make relationships.
But it’s the hard option. Sitting at the IDE and being good at what you are good at, is much easier.
There are definitely ways to mitigate this way of thinking, one being understanding the "spot light effect" the "phenomenon where people tend to overestimate how much others notice aspects of one's appearance or behavior."
Also to do more structured based social activities.
> six days a week.
Anecdotally when I was doing that much work, it was 7 days a week. When I woke in the morning my phone was full of emails slack pings and build issues, and it was closer to midnight when it stopped than 10pm. There is no down time whatsoever in an environment like that, everyone is constantly stressed and overworked and it just makes it worse
Agreed.
> Why do it though?
It was a boiling frog situation. When I joined, things were good. 35-40 hour weeks, interesting work, great coworkers. The team grew, and all of a sudden I was a knowledge holder in areas. It started with an occasional message from a co worker who had a deadline, and then the deadlines were every 2 weeks, and it wasn't just one coworker, it was multiple coworkers. Then it was other people working late nights and me replying on saturday mornings to their issues because I wasn't really working, it was just a slack message. Then it was me fixing issues on a sunday morning because it was the only time my mailbox wasn't bursting. Around that point I realised what was happening, so I scaled things back to working hours, and started getting negative feedback and comments about "not trying as hard as others" from other managers (not my manager though). My annual review came back as negative because other teams were reliant on me being available, so i went back to being always on for about a year before I got another offer and left on good terms.
It genuinely took me about a year afterwards to realise how bad things had gotten (everyone checks their work email precautionarily at 11pm on a saturday night so they can sleep without worrying, right? That's normal.) I'm much better off now.
- 100 km running minimum per month. I take this seriously. - Writing notes about work in a notebook. Not publishing but that's the only way I can stay away from other work and not feel bored. - Spending more time on two hobbies: hardware/circuits and cooking.
Things are improving!
I used to take 15min jog cuts, it made me have just a few more thoughts ready when I was back at my desk.
> All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week.
> DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it.
Do as I say, not as I do. The culture of being always on, and working these insane hours comes from management allowing it or leading by it. It's utterly meaningless for you tell your reports to not work crazy hours only to show them that you need to do it.
Being a manager puts a power dynamic at play; it's one thing if a team member is working silly hours but if your boss is, it sets the expectation that you can too. By working you are setting the precedent for your team
The thing is, I'm not paid for my body or my labour. I'm paid for my mind. My employer pays for me to engage myself with the business. My mind never fully disengages. When I start work on Monday I don't "start again" like a rebooted machine. In addition, the mind never fully switches off, even when sleeping. I'll often crack a problem in my sleep and realise it during my morning cleaning cycle.
So no, I might not "work" as much as you think I should, but if you find that surprising then I'm probably far more engaged than you would imagine too.
There are, of course, those who don't work much and aren't as fully engaged. That will always happen. It's important to measure the value people are delivering (and help them improve) but it can't be done using any single metric and certainly not "hours worked".
Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my life such that I either can spend a solid zero hours in a day working on hard mental tasks ;P or make myself ready to work until dawn (at which point I simply feel bad I am still awake sometimes more than truly feel like I am ready to stop).
This is partly a delegation problem (I'm trying to free up time by delegating certain things), and partly just a problem of growing up: What interrupts me might sometimes be other work or menial tasks, but it's often also just social life or having to go to to the ice rink.
I'm super happy with my current work-life balance, though a bit unsatisfied at how often I have to context switch. I wish I could just schedule as well as you do, unfortunately when it comes to social engagements for example I'm often more restricted...
And when that half hour itself is semi-routinely[0] interrupted, the whole cycle becomes a form of aversion therapy conditioning you to avoid even attempting to concentrate.
Once you're stuck in that rut, you're really screwed because every failed attempt to break out of the cycle just reinforces it, and not being interrupted just means you're worrying about being interrupted instead.
[0] As with other processes, intermittent reinforcement is far more effective than consistency.
I have more important things to do, like doing actual work.
The difference is that in the office people pretend to be working.
If you work for an agency, and sales is having a tough time closing a deal so there's no work for you today, but you have to be there anyway, ready to work or finding other things to do, maybe upgrading your tools, practicing/learning, then that's still work time. It's not leisure time.
Just because you don't achieve 100% uptime cranking out widgets non-stop at full productivity doesn't mean you're not working. We're people, not industrial factory machines.
You can say 'people are pretending' or 'that's not actually work', but it is. And saying that it's not is just denying reality by casting a moral judgment on it like that.
I agree with you that sitting at my desk or being in the office is work time regardless of what I am doing and therefore should also be paid.
But those hours are very blurry and come in random high bursts („being onto something“). They’re important and effective for me but it’s difficult to categorize them or even track them.
There's maybe a slight argument to be made for meetings, but even then you're supposed to be paying attention to the meeting, if not then why are you there? One person might need to take notes...
RescueTime wrote a similar post, but +100 data:
https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/work-life-balance-study-2019...
Look at the second histogram. The average is roughly aligned with OP’s summary, but there is huge variance. These comments have already devolved into people telling each other they are lying, or about to burn out - all I ask is humility in the face of our messy shared reality.
Thank you for listening to my TED Talk, I guess
There's no denying that there are far more people claiming they work 60-80 hour weeks than would collate with the data that you and OP have provided.
I think these people are generally overworked but are also poor assessors of their own performance, taking worst cases as averages and calling a day in which you finish at 5pm but answer a slack message at 9pm, a 12 hour day.
Not to be too sardonic, but: I'm on call frequently but I don't tell people I've been working for 24 hours because I got a page at midnight, even if it can feel a bit like that by the end of the next day.
Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime. Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki binge etc..
We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project admin would average 20% of total team time. “Firefighting” which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%.
If you don’t believe someone who says they work X hours per week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn’t realize until we spent the time to log it.
If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made you more productive in the hours you do work.
https://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day.
In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to sleep and exercise than anything else.
Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or meditation), and enough exercise every day to get the heart rate up.
If I don’t do this for a couple of days, I can be unproductive from hour 2 after waking! We managed to implement a defect metric in my previous team that worked well, my defects went through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.
There is a lot of literature on this correlation, but just thought I would share my own experience.
We wanted to get a handle on how often work went backwards in our life cycle, and why it went backward.
We had a JIRA lifecycle hook that asked for the reason for moving from SIT state back to Development state, or from UAT state back to Development state etc..
One of which was defect. A defect either being a confirmation that wasn't implemented as per the spec, or an edge case bug.
Test failures were different, we had automated testing so test case failures were picked up before the ticket moved on in the lifecycle.
We could also move completed tickets from Deployed to Review, if a production error was linked to a ticket. This movement could also be tagged as a defect in the same way.
We would then just query the jira database and report on it, by project, by assignee etc..
It wasn't a blame exercise, we were more interested in the % of tickets that moved backwards, and the relative percentages of causes for the move. Another category for example was 'Requirements Changed', we worked with banks, so we had a LOT of these!
I went through the loop three times before I recognized the pattern, and decided it was a good time to pass out.
2hours sleep or 2hours less sleep? Because 2hrs is approximately none, that would not be at all surprising.
When I was younger, one of my early challenges was that I had been misled to believe that only time spent in the editor, writing code counted as “working”. There’s a somewhat pervasive idea among devs that meetings, e-mail, communications, team discussions, and other such facts of business do not count as work when you’re a programmer. It led to some anxiety before I accepted that collaboration and communication is also work, something that seems obvious in retrospect but was difficult to swallow as a young programmer raised on Internet forums.
Some people default to the other extreme, where they seem to count every hour as “work” if they did anything remotely related to work during that hour. By now, I’ve worked with a lot of people who claim 60-80 hour work weeks simply because they check their phone and type out single-sentence replies in Slack or e-mails on evenings and weekends. Some of the laziest, least productive people I've worked with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour grinds every week.
Two better metrics I’ve found for gauging productivity are total hours spent in work mode (in the office, or sitting at my home office desk) and total time spent in time wastes (Hacker News, non-work Slacks, Twitter, and so on). If I’m accumulating more than 30 minutes commenting on HN or scrolling Twitter, it’s a sign that I’m not really engaged with work and I need to shake things up.
I’ve shared my time tracking tools and techniques with a lot of people that I’ve mentored. It’s some times shocking for someone to realize that they’ve been spending 4 hours on social media (Discords, HN and Reddit are social media) during a what’s supposed to be a workday. Many of them gauge their own level of focus as average or better than average before actually tracking it. They might even be surrounded by friends or peers who engage in the same amount of distraction during the day, reinforcing their own behavior. Usually once they see what they’re doing as a hard number they can take steps to break the habit, but for some it’s so deeply engrained that they don’t understand what they’re doing until they see it as a number.
In my experience, people who claim to regularly work 60-80 hours/week are completely full of it. Yes, there’s this “thought about work for a second, that’s another hour” mentality. But there’s also just a ton of people outright lying about the amount of time they actually sit at a desk.
I worked at Yahoo for a while and nearly everyone told me they worked long hours, like 10 hour days, every day. The vast majority of them were working at most 8. People would talk about working late but they came in even late, too. Showing up at 11am and leaving at 7pm is not a long day. The people claiming to work until 7 were also not actually stating that late typically, because if I stayed until 6 the place was a ghost town. There legitimately were a few people who were working long days, but they very much seemed to be the exception. There was an unhealthy culture of pretending to work absurd hours, though.
I liked the freedom to work long days every now and then, and then take some time off later when I wanted a long weekend or so. A colleague decided that's a great idea and started doing the same, but stopped after a week or two when he realized he's just accruing negative time.
I'm not claiming that I was fully productive with my office hours, just agreeing with you that some people really do think they work more than they actually do.
I use Qbserve on MacOS and I like it, but I haven’t reviewed options in maybe 5 years. It “just works” so I haven’t felt the need to explore.
When I work for myself I can literally code all day, if I'm working for a client I'll work as much as it's reasonable to hit deliverables, keep the managers happy and keep a good reputation in the company. My prices when working per projects were always too cheap because I found features to be simple to implement; I then switched to what's expected in the industry and charge per day and I make way more, working way less.
Similarly, I know people who can work all day and some who can't and will burn out if they do. The 10x developers exist, but you won't find them at big corp making bank (or if you find them, they'll likely slack like everyone else), they'll be building their own startups and making bank with that.
We're all wired differently.
A lot of us are lucky enough to have knowledge based jobs, which require mental tasks of solution design and decision making that are hard to quantify. I regularly get ideas when walking, cooking, driving, etc... and then spend time thinking through a work problem and taking notes. Several times a day I go for a short walk to clear my head of distractions and regain focus, That would be hard to quantify to a theoretical bad manager who wanted you to count hours but for many it is an essential part of knowledge work.
For all we know, he may be completely wrong! Maybe he is the outlier and people generally, in fact do perform more "focused work" than two hours a day...
Maybe he isn't overly enthusiastic about his work place, maybe he is in a remote work environment where he isn't inspired to work more efficiently through his peers. Maybe there is a little of everything and he's just trying to warrant this one hour focused work days through "insights".
The reason I'm questioning this is because I have procastrination issues at work and take several short mental breaks, but even I, once I get going and in "the zone" (often later in the work day), I can often do focused work at least twice as long as him. He really gives nothing to go by as for his bold title, which I ask why it's not at least the more undeniably accurate: "I don't work as much as you think".
At my first place, a small outsourcing shop, employees were required to log daily activities so hours per day roughly fit to 8 and 40 per week. From the beginning and unlike most of coworkers, I measured my time precisely with https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 and soon understood that doing 8 hours per day doesn't happen much and often involves staying late, so instead I simply adjusted the reported numbers to look plausible. In four years, I only received positive feedback on my productivity. What was the management thinking, I have no idea, just like the article says, this was a farce all around.
When I changed the company, the habit to measure productivity stuck. Nowadays, I start working somewhere at 9 and finish at 18, and result is still the same - honest 8 hours of work activity per day happen at best once a month, the average week sums to 30-34 hours. Code-related activities never take more than 3-4 hours per day, that includes both coding and reviews. I get the impression that some of my colleagues might spend more time on the job, but low productivity was never a topic of my performance reviews, management seems content with what they get.
An hour long meeting booked, that ended up taking 45mins? It's an hour. It's the same reason we don't expect you to stop recording time when you to down the hall to make a coffee or take a bathroom break. The numbers only really makes sense at the aggregate level, and going to a higher level of detail is not reliable because of all the noise and different ways people measure their time.
My first salaried job was as a salesman; we incurred expenses, which we could claim back. It was explained to us that the system was there to ensure that we weren't out-of-pocket; claims didn't have to actually be true, but you did have to have incurred the expense.
I fairly soon realised that this was a lie; the expenses system was really a salary-augmentation scheme, and you were expected to inflate your claims. Everyone was at it.
I have CO2 monitor, which I use to estimate is my brain working or not: when I'm working, CO2 level raises quickly above 1000ppm, so I need to ventilate my room often; when I'm idling, e.g. by playing a simple game, CO2 level is at about 740-790ppm without ventilation for whole day.
When I'm returning from work, I see at CO2 monitor that my head is still working. Yes, I'm able to «work» sustainable 4h per day only, but «work related activity» consumes my brain for whole day.
Does this track w/ respiration rate or heart rate?
I've never thought about this - it seems like it would be hard to measure w/o a more intense face mask vo2 max testing type setup.
1. They burn out and clock out mentally or leave altogether
2. They develop psychological issues and destroy their personal life, leading to an unbalanced and unsustainable situation
3. They expect something from the org in return, which normally the org can’t/won’t match (either in the way of product ownership or compensation or role).
Someone like that needs to be constrained. Keep them on the edge and eager to contribute but don’t let them free reign. If the situation and culture allow, try help out to fill the void in their personal life (I ordered one of our guys to leave early twice a week to spend time with his girlfriend because I knew his dedication to work is destroying his relationship. I sent couple of others to weekends in hotels with their SO after long sprints).
It’s a bit odd you’re setting your employees up to maintain their sex lives but I’m sure they appreciate the forced time off after stressful times