5 ms·

> 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 spen

> 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
  - naavis 3y ago
    Not exactly, no. But how far can you stretch that? Working 4 hours a day is half of what is agreed in the contract. Would you be fine with the employer ignoring the agreed salary with the excuse of no one following contracts exactly?
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  Arguably these contracts are a legacy of factory shifts in industrial revolution times. What (most) managers want is your output, irrespective of how long it will take, may be 12h or 3h. One could argue, that while working 3h or 4h one should still be available to support, help, communicate, meet with, your team and stakeholders for the remaining hours of that contract. I would not have an issue with less hours provided you don't ghost for the remaining hours, if one of your colleagues hits a block, or your manager gets hit with a shitstorm, then you need to have a communication line open (which should also not be 24 hours but for the hours in your contract).
  - naavis 3y ago
    This I agree with. But I would say being available to help and support and whatever is part of the job. If you say you work for 4 hours, but still have to be available for all of the above for 8 hours, you are working for 8 hours, not 4.
    - andirk 3y ago
      In "agile" or "scrum" or whatever story pointing is, the "level of effort" is often touted and rightfully so. The mind can quickly become exhausted after grueling mental labor. Personally, I often get some 5 hours of solid work in one day and consider that enough. Other times, I'll work 10+ hours in a day on less mentally grueling work but I rarely bill over 8 hours in one day even if it's more. I always want my employer to see the cost of me as well worth it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
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!

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
- naavis 3y ago
  Not exactly, no. But how far can you stretch that? Working 4 hours a day is half of what is agreed in the contract. Would you be fine with the employer ignoring the agreed salary with the excuse of no one following contracts exactly?
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
Arguably these contracts are a legacy of factory shifts in industrial revolution times. What (most) managers want is your output, irrespective of how long it will take, may be 12h or 3h. One could argue, that while working 3h or 4h one should still be available to support, help, communicate, meet with, your team and stakeholders for the remaining hours of that contract. I would not have an issue with less hours provided you don't ghost for the remaining hours, if one of your colleagues hits a block, or your manager gets hit with a shitstorm, then you need to have a communication line open (which should also not be 24 hours but for the hours in your contract).
- naavis 3y ago
  This I agree with. But I would say being available to help and support and whatever is part of the job. If you say you work for 4 hours, but still have to be available for all of the above for 8 hours, you are working for 8 hours, not 4.
  - andirk 3y ago
    In "agile" or "scrum" or whatever story pointing is, the "level of effort" is often touted and rightfully so. The mind can quickly become exhausted after grueling mental labor. Personally, I often get some 5 hours of solid work in one day and consider that enough. Other times, I'll work 10+ hours in a day on less mentally grueling work but I rarely bill over 8 hours in one day even if it's more. I always want my employer to see the cost of me as well worth it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

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!