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Over the first 15+ years of my career as an engineer and engineering manager, I've repeatedly surveyed colleagues and friends in engineering roles about this qu
by hardworkerthrow 9y ago
Over the first 15+ years of my career as an engineer and engineering manager, I've repeatedly surveyed colleagues and friends in engineering roles about this question. I've asked it of people I consider low-performing, all the way to folks I'd consider 10x developers.
I have never met a single software developer who, when pressed to give an honest assessment and when "working" is defined along the lines of "actively defining, coding, or debugging a feature", self-identifies as working more than 50% of the time. There are occasional stretches of 12+ hour working sessions, but they are very rare.
I'd say I've asked this of over a hundred people.
This isn't to say these people only do 4 hours of work a day. Often, peers have described how they hit a wall at work, go home, and then work on personal projects in the evening.
I've come to the conclusion that is generally impossible to do mentally intensive tasks for more than 4 continuous hours over the long term.
- nubbins 9y agoThats interesting because 4 hours is exactly the limit I've seen cited by researchers as the max for highly focused work but even that much is a kind of skill that has to be developed, so a beginner might have much less concentration.
- veddox 9y agoCan you give a reference for that number? Sounds intriguing...
- antognini 9y agoThis article also references about four hours as the limit that a creative professional can work every day: http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-you-should-be-too http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-y...
- veddox 9y agoA fascinating article, thank you for sharing!
- lazythrowawayd 9y agoYou should also ask if they feel their manager facilitates their productivity.
- leadguit 9y agoCould you link a research article for that? I'm interested in reading what they found
- MichaelMoser123 9y agoThe question is hard to answer: work can be 'waiting for something to break' or 'bugfixing and problemsolving' or 'active development' or 'designing things' these are very different modes of work with different requirements for attention and involvement...