8 ms·

The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (

The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is). However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else - your brain is still whirring on the problem whilst you are out walking, exercising, cooking etc. If you add on the time spent working through problems, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have that I spend 24 hours a day thinking about the problems i'm tackling. I often come up with great solutions whilst i'm asleep, and bad nights sleep is often correlated with a gnarly problem i've still not worked out. I personally don't get hung up on how much time I spend actually coding. Some days it's full on, other days I seem to achieve next to nothing, or if anything go backwards. I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.

tkiolp4 3y ago
> I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right. And how many unproductive hours of work do you spend per day? I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  I'm communicating ideas to people most of the time.
- naavis 3y ago
  > When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours. Honest question, do you unilaterally ignore any other parts of the contract?
  - bigDinosaur 3y ago
    Nobody works exactly to the contract. Except perhaps in the most monitored and hellish workplaces (e.g. Amazon warehouses).
    - distances 3y ago
      What do you mean? As far as I know, I've always worked according to the contract. Some of my employers had flexible timekeeping, and then I would often work a bit over 40h/week so that I could take extra days off for extended weekend trips when I felt like it.
      - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
        Are you working right now?
        distances 3y ago
        Why would I be working now? It's Sunday.
        tonyedgecombe 3y ago
        That's the problem with retirement, I have no idea what a weekend is anymore.
      - bigDinosaur 3y ago
        You've always done things like observed the precise lunch hours (and not taken a single minute more)? This stuff is usually defined in contracts but at least for a professional job in a good workplace is subservient simply to getting the work done rather than literally doing your 7.3 hours of work and 0.7 hours of lunch to the letter. Even doing duties for your job that aren't listed as part of your contract is common. How common is working more than the contract specifies by just a few minutes? And so on. There's a reason Work to Rule strikes [1] are a thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
- cj 3y ago
  > I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on. One day, there are threads here saying $120k is considered underpaid for an entry level dev out of a bootcamp. The next day, we talk about how all the RTO companies are only doing it because managers want to feel productive. The day after that, there are threads of remote devs boasting they don't even consistently work 4 hours a day. And the day after a thread about how we're all going to unionize to protect our rights. This is truly an interesting phenomenon. Either these anecdotes are just that, anecdotes and not representative of most people, or there's a huge misalignment between employer and employee expectations. Edit: to be clear, I fully support the author of this blog post because he works 3 hours per day working for himself. More power to him. If you truly think you’re underpaid and overworked, do what the guy in this article is doing! Stop making excuses and become an entrepreneur. Work for yourself, set your own hours, no managers, and you’ll leverage the full earning potential of your skillset. No employment contracts to comply with!
  - youerbt 3y ago
    > And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on. Yes, because one can't work 4h tops while being in office... Truth is, they can't tell how much working hours this individual is putting. And maybe it's not that important.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    The devs "boasting" (that is your perspective, not the reality) are probably the ones generating more revenue for those companies wanting "us" back in the office (are you a SWE?). There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best (and others who might not be considered the best) for significant sums - they are worth it. Yes, we are underpaid. Just look at the bank balances of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Software engineers aren't illiterate construction workers. We have the means to build and destroy tech companies that think they can do whatever they want.
    - Sai_ 3y ago
      A software engineer can create but can they sell? Can something you create be worth a billion dollars without selling it? Even the highest selling piece of art tops out at a few dozen million dollars... I fear you may have a very skewed sense of a software engineer's place in the world.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  > I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours. But you don't tell your management and trust your fellow engineers not to rat you out (or they are not your colleagues, just people on HN?)? Because this sounds more like quiet quitting. Or you over-perform even though you work 50%?
- cesaref 3y ago
  When i've employed people, I tend to be focussed on their ability to get stuff done, and being responsive to requests, especially external users of the system. Hours spent at the desk is just a proxy for the above, and there are better ways of measuring it these days, so i'd think that your bosses will be cool with this unless that have a rather different mentality. I've worked with people with very strict working hours who will never respond to an email outside of those hours, and other people who would be late into the office most days, but would respond to a support problem at 11pm at the weekend. We're not all the same, and there is strength in depth.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Exactly this. When I've had employees, the only thing I've cared about is: are they producing acceptable work within the needed time frame? If so, it doesn't matter if they're working one hour a day or eight. It also doesn't matter if they are in the office or not (in practice, about half preferred to be in the office, about half not).
- val314159 3y ago
  sounds like it's 3 hours of coding / day + 5-10 hours a day preparing for and thinking about the problem. that's 7-12 hours / day if you add in an hour's worth of breaks. sounds billable to me!
brigadier132 3y ago
I find I need at least 2 hours of continuous focus to get any real work done and 3 hours to be really productive. If I start at 9:00 am and have no meetings in the morning that means I can get a meaningful piece of work done by the time I eat lunch. Then if I have no meetings in the afternoon I can get another meaningful chunk of work done. Oftentimes though, days are wasted because of meetings thrown in haphazardly.
- cesaref 3y ago
  Sounds like you are working on deep complex systems - i totally get the experience of needing a couple of hours to stare at how the system behaves before the lightbulb moment when you realise how a simple change will achieve what you want (ideally!). There are other times when it's a bit more greenfield and just fiddling around gets your ideas straight and you can be productive even with interruptions. We tend to work with a backlog of simpler and harder problems, and part of the skill of prioritisation is deciding what mood you are in, and being realistic about how much time you have to focus on a problem, and hence what sort of problem or feature is worth tackling that day.
JohnFen 3y ago
> creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else yes indeed. The finest dev work I've done in my life was accomplished entirely in my head while cleaning hotel rooms.

tkiolp4 3y ago

> I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right. And how many unproductive hours of work do you spend per day? I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.

kuchenbecker 3y ago
I'm communicating ideas to people most of the time.
naavis 3y ago
> When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours. Honest question, do you unilaterally ignore any other parts of the contract?
- bigDinosaur 3y ago
  Nobody works exactly to the contract. Except perhaps in the most monitored and hellish workplaces (e.g. Amazon warehouses).
  - distances 3y ago
    What do you mean? As far as I know, I've always worked according to the contract. Some of my employers had flexible timekeeping, and then I would often work a bit over 40h/week so that I could take extra days off for extended weekend trips when I felt like it.
    - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
      Are you working right now?
      - distances 3y ago
        Why would I be working now? It's Sunday.
        tonyedgecombe 3y ago
        That's the problem with retirement, I have no idea what a weekend is anymore.
    - bigDinosaur 3y ago
      You've always done things like observed the precise lunch hours (and not taken a single minute more)? This stuff is usually defined in contracts but at least for a professional job in a good workplace is subservient simply to getting the work done rather than literally doing your 7.3 hours of work and 0.7 hours of lunch to the letter. Even doing duties for your job that aren't listed as part of your contract is common. How common is working more than the contract specifies by just a few minutes? And so on. There's a reason Work to Rule strikes [1] are a thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
cj 3y ago
> I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on. One day, there are threads here saying $120k is considered underpaid for an entry level dev out of a bootcamp. The next day, we talk about how all the RTO companies are only doing it because managers want to feel productive. The day after that, there are threads of remote devs boasting they don't even consistently work 4 hours a day. And the day after a thread about how we're all going to unionize to protect our rights. This is truly an interesting phenomenon. Either these anecdotes are just that, anecdotes and not representative of most people, or there's a huge misalignment between employer and employee expectations. Edit: to be clear, I fully support the author of this blog post because he works 3 hours per day working for himself. More power to him. If you truly think you’re underpaid and overworked, do what the guy in this article is doing! Stop making excuses and become an entrepreneur. Work for yourself, set your own hours, no managers, and you’ll leverage the full earning potential of your skillset. No employment contracts to comply with!
- youerbt 3y ago
  > And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on. Yes, because one can't work 4h tops while being in office... Truth is, they can't tell how much working hours this individual is putting. And maybe it's not that important.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  The devs "boasting" (that is your perspective, not the reality) are probably the ones generating more revenue for those companies wanting "us" back in the office (are you a SWE?). There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best (and others who might not be considered the best) for significant sums - they are worth it. Yes, we are underpaid. Just look at the bank balances of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Software engineers aren't illiterate construction workers. We have the means to build and destroy tech companies that think they can do whatever they want.
  - Sai_ 3y ago
    A software engineer can create but can they sell? Can something you create be worth a billion dollars without selling it? Even the highest selling piece of art tops out at a few dozen million dollars... I fear you may have a very skewed sense of a software engineer's place in the world.
anonzzzies 3y ago
> I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours. But you don't tell your management and trust your fellow engineers not to rat you out (or they are not your colleagues, just people on HN?)? Because this sounds more like quiet quitting. Or you over-perform even though you work 50%?
cesaref 3y ago
When i've employed people, I tend to be focussed on their ability to get stuff done, and being responsive to requests, especially external users of the system. Hours spent at the desk is just a proxy for the above, and there are better ways of measuring it these days, so i'd think that your bosses will be cool with this unless that have a rather different mentality. I've worked with people with very strict working hours who will never respond to an email outside of those hours, and other people who would be late into the office most days, but would respond to a support problem at 11pm at the weekend. We're not all the same, and there is strength in depth.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Exactly this. When I've had employees, the only thing I've cared about is: are they producing acceptable work within the needed time frame? If so, it doesn't matter if they're working one hour a day or eight. It also doesn't matter if they are in the office or not (in practice, about half preferred to be in the office, about half not).
val314159 3y ago
sounds like it's 3 hours of coding / day + 5-10 hours a day preparing for and thinking about the problem. that's 7-12 hours / day if you add in an hour's worth of breaks. sounds billable to me!

brigadier132 3y ago

I find I need at least 2 hours of continuous focus to get any real work done and 3 hours to be really productive. If I start at 9:00 am and have no meetings in the morning that means I can get a meaningful piece of work done by the time I eat lunch. Then if I have no meetings in the afternoon I can get another meaningful chunk of work done. Oftentimes though, days are wasted because of meetings thrown in haphazardly.

cesaref 3y ago
Sounds like you are working on deep complex systems - i totally get the experience of needing a couple of hours to stare at how the system behaves before the lightbulb moment when you realise how a simple change will achieve what you want (ideally!). There are other times when it's a bit more greenfield and just fiddling around gets your ideas straight and you can be productive even with interruptions. We tend to work with a backlog of simpler and harder problems, and part of the skill of prioritisation is deciding what mood you are in, and being realistic about how much time you have to focus on a problem, and hence what sort of problem or feature is worth tackling that day.

JohnFen 3y ago

> creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else yes indeed. The finest dev work I've done in my life was accomplished entirely in my head while cleaning hotel rooms.