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One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
- ceejayoz 6y ago“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?
- Causality1 6y agoI'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.
- Bootvis 6y agoIn 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.
- intev 6y agoBy that logic, you could get away with doing <anything that is not my most favorite thing> and calling it work. You must be "working" a lot ;)
- necovek 6y agoAre you suggesting that cleaning their house is their "most favorite thing"? While not impossible, I find it implausible ;)
- toyg 6y agoif that time is paid-for by someone else and you cannot decide what it is used for, then it's work. Period.
- bhaak 6y agoAs long as you get paid for it, it's work. A Zoom call you can basically ignore but have to be around. Still work but not "working".
- eru 6y agoThat'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.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoOncall 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.
- eru 6y agoAt 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.
- acdha 6y ago> 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.
- grep_name 6y agoDisagree. 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.
- Causality1 6y agoIt's not a binary solution set. People locked in a jail cell are not working either.
- levosmetalo 6y agoWork time is office time. If I can't do anything that I want during that time, it's work.
- throwaway3699 6y ago3-4 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.
- m463 6y agoI also find my work is sort of a monday through friday bell curve. sort of a coordinate - do - deliver flow.
- thefz 6y agoThe Brits have a splendid term for it: "faffing".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- brigandish 6y agoSome people pfaff, some people skive.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoThat's still work. The surveys are talking about goofing off like we are now.
- sharadov 6y agoWhich companies? I'll start applying :-)
- majewsky 6y agoIf anything, this demonstrates how ludicrous the idea of "working/not working" as a binary concept is.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoEspecially 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.
- lordnacho 6y agoThis 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.
- ianai 6y agoYes, 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.
- me_me_me 6y agoI am running out of fingers to count how many times i concluded/fixed a design or a problem while showering.
- jjk166 6y agoBut can I write off my shower as a home office tax deduction?
- jksmith 6y agoI 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."
- jansan 6y agoI am officially working half time. You know what that means :)
- yokaze 6y agoNot 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.
- jansan 6y agoIt means that I am only doing 1-2 hours actual work per day. That's all, no deeper meaning behind it.
- itg 6y agoI'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.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoMeetings, email, and ops are working. Playing ping pong and taking 3rd lunch and faffing on HN are not working.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 6y agoThis 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.
- nxpnsv 6y agoI work more than that, but I don't admit it...
- Proven 6y agoGood 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.
- austincheney 6y agoThere 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.
- secretsatan 6y agoMeetings 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.
- SMAAART 6y agoMost knowledge workers have about the same amount of productive/active work; the rest is fluff/goofing off/socializing.
- xwdv 6y agoSo the other two thirds are just lying.
- bengale 6y agoI've worked at a few large orgs, 100s sometimes 1000+ developers. If the majority of them did more than an hour or two of work a day I'd be shocked.
- daebersold 6y ago1/3 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.
- abledon 6y agoi 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: - 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.
- daebersold 6y agoLOL That's awesome! I know these people too! And watch, he's IT Manager next year...
- abledon 6y agoactually, yes he is applying to be a Software Team Manager LOL
- tluyben2 6y agoIncluding 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.
- PedroBatista 6y agoIs it me or the article reads as "Not everyone works what they should, look at these slackers.."? Also I don't know exactly how they measure this, but I have a feeling it might be the time people spend pressing buttons..
- yread 6y agoEspecially compared to all the "look at these founders working 100h/week" articles
- necovek 6y ago"Self-reported"
- toyg 6y agoIt's a publication oriented towards business types. Of course any salaried employee is by definition a slacker to be whipped.
- anti-shill 6y agoyeah, thread winner here....not really surprising that so few comments here are speaking to this seemingly obvious truth...because HN is management-oriented
- Dirlewanger 6y agoIt's Blind, so this is to be taken with a massive grain of salt. Even though they have a strict registration policy, there's plenty of trolls there.
- acdha 6y agoThis 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.
- toyg 6y ago> is this just clickbait 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.
- acdha 6y agoIt’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.
- username90 6y agoA 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.
- 6y ago
- zascrash 6y agoAs 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.
- KaiserPro 6y agoWhy else do you think I'm commenting here?
- cblconfederate 6y agoAnd isn't that wonderful? "admit" implies they should feel ashamed?
- 0x008 6y agoCan we change this clickbait title? - "working" is not defined clearly so it's possible everybody meant a different thing - "admit" implies some sort of guilt on the developer side.
- scaramanga 6y agoThis reminds me very much of an EWD quote: "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."
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoA 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.
- username90 6y agoYeah, 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.
- mobjack 6y agoIt 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.
- 6y ago
- tremon 6y agoTo contrast that with my anecdata, I regularly work over 12 hours a day. Of course, not all of that is paid. As others have said, it all depends on what you call "work".
- pietroppeter 6y agothe other 6-7 hours is meetings
- berrynice 6y agoI physically cannot make myself work more than I already am, my brain is utterly destroyed from lockdown; My memory is shot, my motivation is shot, fundamentally my ability to think has declined to the point where I'm seriously worried, and the fact this seems to be the case for everyone else isn't helping at all. Before you ask yes I tried taking a holiday and it actually made things worse.
- thenoblesunfish 6y agoI would be proud to get 3-4 hours of "real" work done a day, and I'd be very happy with any employee that did the same. I think most people in jobs that require some degree of problem-solving would agree.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI used to say I coded for only 1 month a year. The other 11 I was debugging, documenting, testing, releasing and supporting.
- throw1234651234 6y agoI am pretty envious. I have worked 10 for the past 6 years. I am probably an idiot for doing so.
- jjk166 6y agoLarge number of posts here about how people do work when they're not really working that were posted on this social media site during standard working hours.
- danielrpa 6y agoWhy do we care about how many hours people are working? Good looking people make tens of thousands of dollars for showing up at a party for 1-2 hours. Influencers make thousands for recommending a product in a few minutes. Tech workers have a valuable and, in the grand scheme of things, rare ability that is immensely useful to Humankind. Perhaps some very talented people can do top quality work for a couple of hours a day, but deliver immense value in these two hours. Is this a reason for concern?