This article reads like so much clickbait. Only someone who isn't actually a SWE would think that it's "common" for tech workers to juggle multiple FT jobs, based of one or two confirmed cases.
> In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less, while 12 percent said they did between one and two hours a day.
I seem to recall many people on HackerNews being of the opinion that it’s almost impossible to do more than four hours of focused engineering work in a day so this seems relatively high.
I can easily imagine many developers actually doing 1-2 hours of work per day because the rest of the day is taken up with "work" like unnecessary meetings, e-learning, fending off BS, etc.
Not a programmer, but as a QA "analyst", the productivity involved was probably less than 15% of my time spent on "projects". To the point where I quit (several years ago) because it seemed pointless. Another colleague quit within 2 months for the same reason. I felt I was riding the clock simply to make a paycheck. It paid well, yet I'd rather work in retail or something else and feel useful than simply be a body following "the process" as was asserted by my immediate manager. Screw "the process". It felt like a waste of time.
I don't think I'm an outlier in my thought process regarding my peers, but there was little upward mobility and couldn't stand the multiple meetings where I was supposed to provide value by making up CMMI metrics to please the other managers in addition to my 3 current ones in a team of 2 devs and myself. That's 4 managers in a team of 3 people. Too many chiefs... as the saying goes.
It's not all bullshit, but most of it is.
I have no problem saying it was at Dell Services, later acquired by NTTData while I still worked there. The rest is irrelevant.
I understand the writer's complaints after working at a hedge fund like this. The firm made so much money that no individual could move the needle on revenue. So everyone was judged by how many people report to them.
Thus, everyone was stepping over everyone else to assign work to people that didn't report to them. It was the only time in my career that I've had to deal with office politics.
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6 hours of focus work per is enormous for software engineers, not a bad sign.
They say Google has spent hundreds of millions trying to develop new businesses. It's easily hundreds of billions.
I seem to recall many people on HackerNews being of the opinion that it’s almost impossible to do more than four hours of focused engineering work in a day so this seems relatively high.
I don't think I'm an outlier in my thought process regarding my peers, but there was little upward mobility and couldn't stand the multiple meetings where I was supposed to provide value by making up CMMI metrics to please the other managers in addition to my 3 current ones in a team of 2 devs and myself. That's 4 managers in a team of 3 people. Too many chiefs... as the saying goes.
It's not all bullshit, but most of it is.
I have no problem saying it was at Dell Services, later acquired by NTTData while I still worked there. The rest is irrelevant.
Thus, everyone was stepping over everyone else to assign work to people that didn't report to them. It was the only time in my career that I've had to deal with office politics.