
How many hours do you work a day (developers)? - vemv
After 3 in-place jobs, I&#x27;ve been working at home for three months now. One thing I have noticed is that I can deliver a comparable (&quot;samey&quot;) amount of progress in less hours of pure work.<p>At my office-located jobs, I waited to complete 7-8 hours of work (excluding chit-chat, etc) in order to feel satisfied. Now I can do with 4:30 on average. For me being interruption-free is a huge boost.<p>Personally I do believe in measuring effort in work-hours. Assuming you feel optimal (which I constantly make sure of), the more time you spend the more you get done. Also, 90% of webdev does not require that much creative hard-thinking imo.<p>My question simply is - do you find 4:30 of work a day acceptable (for you)? And marketable (for employers to accept it)?<p>Anyway, feel free to post how many hours you work, and what you think about it.
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grobmeier
I think 4:30 will be hard to market, as most people are stuck in the stone
age. As you said, productivity is not a matter of hours, it's a mix of many
things. But that's not what the majority believes. Many people still believe
we work like ice-cream sellers, who need to be around, not matter what. My
guess is most people want to pay only for the hours you work so it will be
hard to explain why you want to be paid for 8 hours when you just work 4 hours
(even with same productivity).

Personally I work every day. When I am tired and not productive, I work less.
When I feel good, I work much. The minimum is usually 6 hours. Maximum is
usually 12 -14 hours. At weekends, it happens it's just 2 hours a day.

I don't count in work time. I count in "fun". If I have fun, I automatically
work more. If I am not having fun, I need to double-check if I am the right
thing. If it's not, I go away. If it is temporary or something that needs to
be done, I make sure I have some good relaxing part afterwards.

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level09
3 - 5 hours at my day job, 5 - 9 hours running my startup(s)/consultancy.

I leave some videos running before I sleep so I could hear/learn something new
before I sleep.

I also work through weekends.

I think it is too much, but as a Syrian, I don't have the birth advantage of
having a first-world country passport, I have to keep both the job (allows me
to have the visa), and I make a lot of money which I can spend on family and
building my own dreams.

~~~
grobmeier
This can happen even with first-world birth advantage like me in Germany.
However, I don't have that many bullets around me. I wish you only the best
for you, your family, and dreams.

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travelton
Over the past two months, I've had the opportunity to work from home. I've
spent the last six years working in an office environment, with the standard
"open" workspace.

Within the few months of working from home, I've noticed a radical change in
my day. No longer am I interrupted randomly, while in deep thought. I don't
veer off to the break room for coffee, and get caught up in conversations. I
don't take excessive lunch breaks to stand in lines at a restaurant. Speaking
of, it helps the waistline! I have easy access to my full kitchen at home. I
digress.....

Anyway, my team is located in central time, so I reap the benefit of
distraction free coding between 2PM and 7PM pacific time.

I typically wake up, sit down at my desk at 9AM, and begin my daily routine of
checking email, checking out what's new via HN, catching any meetings with
folks in the central timezone, etc. Once lunch comes, I take a break, and
begin planning what I want to accomplish in my 2-7 distraction free time
block.

So, while I do work a full 8 hours, only about 4-5 hours of that time is spent
head down in code.

Point is, I certainly agree working 4:30 is probably sufficient, however, for
me, I do utilize the other hours of the day to "socialize" and plan "big
picture" with my colleagues via video conference. I feel that if I lost the
extra time in the mornings, these meetings would overflow in to my distraction
free time.

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spotman
It depends how you frame the time in question. Is this 4 hours and 30 minutes
of heads down, in the zone, productive work? Or is it a mixture of emails,
conference calls, and coding?

In my experience managing and being part of various teams and projects for
over a decade, I have found that a senior level developer that gets 4 hours of
productive work done each day (over a week average, often not in one spurt,
depending on the individual) is worth his/her weight in gold.

I always try to encourage 40 hours a week of being online, available, dealing
with meetings and whiteboard sessions, but 1/2 of that devoted to heads down
work like coding or designing. Often many people that are extremely valuable
end up getting less than 20 hours a week of real focused work done in my
experience.

~~~
vemv
Great input, I feel relieved to read that my 4:30 (of pure coding work) is
good, according a profile like yours.

Personally I'm kinda afraid that some developers out there might be pulling
actual 8 hours of overhead-free progress, unlike me. Doing that daily would
certainly drain me.

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hashberry
Yes, 4:30 is plenty. I am a remote salary employee at a consultancy firm and
work less than that.

I've worked at three other web firms and always had to pad my "billable
hours." A boss gives me a project with "x" amount of hours and I'm not going
to say "well, I can do this in half the time," because they'll just give me
more work with no additional pay.

If I were truly motivated I would start my own firm. But I don't like dealing
with clients or writing functional specs; I only like to code.

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jsegura
In our office we work around 8 hours per day. We use Agile (Scrum) but we
count only 6 hours per day. We recognize that we spend around 2 hours in
overhead tasks (informal meetings, tasks not listed in the sprint and some
not-job related work.

~~~
Scea91
You still get paid for 8 right? You count only 6 for estimates. Just
clarifying that I understood correctly. :)

~~~
jsegura
Exactly. You understood it correctly :)

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lordnacho
There's no such thing as an acceptable amount of hours. Is the goal reached or
not?

Often in programming, you have this weird situation where spending more time
makes the work harder. It is actually possible to dig a hole that makes you
further away from the goal, while for the whole time you think you're getting
closer. So I try not to get too tired, and I manage deadline expectations.
Often you find the right solution to a whole day's problem in a few minutes of
clarity the next morning.

Working from home, there are certain productivity benefits. There's no
commute. The environment is familiar. I can take a break whenever I like, to
do whatever I want, like take the kid out on a 2 hour lunch break. I can make
more kids during work hours. Run errands. Often I find I can spread out the
normal working hours over a longer period and feel better.

There's no meetings, other than online chats on Skype or Slack. There is a bit
of a danger of chatting too much, but it's not as bad as when you're sitting
in the office.

The thing that makes the most difference is whether I like what I'm doing. If
I'm enjoying a project, time just flies by. It's like snapping your fingers,
and breakfast turns to lunch, which turns to dinner, which turns to bedtime.

~~~
Gibbon1
There is actually an acceptable number of hours, it's somewhere near the
number of hours you can work without burning out. For me that is about 5-7
hours a day. Two things I remember, one was an old guy talking about working
in a windshield factory, where they made windshields for cars. They had a
line. While he was working their they sped it up by 25% and management was
happy happy joy joy. The workers were getting run ragged though and after a
few weeks the defect rate started creeping up. After a few months the defect
rate was so high that they were producing less finished product than when the
line speed was slower. Took another year for the plant manager to get fired
and bring in a guy who turned the line speed back down.

The other is the first place I worked their were two younger coders and they
were being flogged to work 9-10 hours days, basically being given unreasonable
deadlines. After a few years they burned out and the company fired them.
Twenty years later both of them are still damaged. I did some of the same,
hurt my wrist, which is still a little messed up. After that I decided I
didn't care I was going to work as much as I though possible and that's that.
You only have so many hours a day. Instead of using yourself up, concentrate
really hard on not wasting your time.

Me, I've never been fired for not working enough hours.

~~~
lordnacho
What I was thinking was acceptable on the low side. If you get things done,
but it seems fast, that should be okay.

Of course working too much is bad for everyone, I sympathise with your
examples.

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astockwell
I think that watching your "working" time decrease and being concerned about
it is one sign that you're crossing into a new threshold of experience in your
career. Most people in this position conflate "working" with "producing", but
as many learn, these two are very different.

"Working", "producing", code grunt-ing, whatever you call it, seems to be what
most young folks spend all their time doing in their first few professional
years (it's what I did too). This is a good thing, it builds a lot of exposure
and raw experience. You may be immersed in (or cranking out) code, fixing
bugs, or working _directly on_ your project/product for almost your entire
work day, every day.

But at some point, many re-remember that they must learn and grow to advance
in their field, and with that comes reading, exploring, trying/failing, as
well as non-technical work, like planning/architecting, etc.

Once you start finding that you are pulled out of the code more and more, it's
just a sign that "working" and "producing" are getting further from each other
for you. And that's not a bad thing.

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ereckers
I run a little consultancy, and I'm about where you're at. I need to target
around 4 billable hours per day for actual client work. This means I turn the
clock on, start working, and when I'm finished or ready to call it quits on
that particular project or task the clock is stopped.

I then spend about 2 to 3 hours on administrative, misc project management,
emails, research, self-improvement/learning, and personal and business
projects. Somewhere in there is some fruitful and non-fruitful time wasting.

On good days, I can crank out 6 hours billable, when really pushing it on
deadline that can go to 8 or 10, but that wipes me out for a while afterwards.

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rejschaap
I work 5 days per week, 8 hours per day. I have given working time reduction
some thought and I have worked 4 days per week, 8 hours per day in the past. I
would like to try working 5 days, 6 hours. That's two hours less per week than
4x8, but without the 20% productivity drop. With a good lunch break I think a
6 hour work day will cost no productivity loss. That's my theory anyway,
haven't had the chance to try it out yet.

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sebringj
I think you can easily get the same amount of work done definitely with 4:30
compared to 8 going to a job, but having remote lets you do more with 8 and
you should because you are putting up with less crap. The worst thing you can
do is be lazy in that situation giving Marissa Mayer more fuel to her bs
mantra. You should fly above your coworkers who are coming in every day. Lead
by example and this will be the norm.

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cvs268
about 8hours a day.

2hrs independent technical reading.

2hrs independent design/development.

4hrs code-review/training others/discussions.

~~~
pratikch
I believe this should be the typical day of every developer.

~~~
cvs268
Hmmm... no wonder i feel immensely satisfied at work nowadays. ;-)

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jastanton
To answer your question, If I can get 4-6 hours of solid dev time in I'm a
happy camper.

"Also, 90% of webdev does not require that much creative hard-thinking imo."

Really? Is this true for people? I'm a web developer, and right now i'm
sorting through 30K lines of obfuscated javascript code looking for a bug. A
few hours of that and my brain gets pretty tired!

~~~
vemv
As a backend (Rails, in particular) dev, most tasks are really streamlined -
I've done them 1000 times before pretty much the same way I would do now.
There is room for unpredictability, debugging hours, etc but those are rare.

I can see how frontend or higher-profile backend dev can be more
unwieldy/demanding, though.

I made the 90% remark because it is a somewhat common opinion that programmers
are completely above the hours thing. Were programming a totally creative
activity, I would agree, but it is not.

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colinbartlett
I work from home about 8 hours of billable work per day.

Whenever I step back into any office, I am astounded at the lack of
productivity in comparison to my own. I feel I can easily accomplish 2x to 3x
the work in the same 8-hour day at home compared to an engineer of equal
skills and experience.

~~~
StavrosK
Same here, 8 billable hours (four days a week), 6-8 productive hours,
depending on how stressful the day is.

~~~
JshWright
"Oh hey... someone else working 4 day weeks, just like Stavro... oh..."

~~~
StavrosK
That's pretty conclusive proof that I'm the only person here working four days
a week!

~~~
thibaut_barrere
To back you up, I bill less that 4 days a week, and also know more than a
couple of people doing the same.

~~~
StavrosK
Thanks, but that was a bit of an inside joke between coworkers :)

As a data point, I am currently full-time employed, it just happens that I
prefer full-time being four days a week. I recently made the switch from five
to four, and I'm enjoying it immensely.

~~~
suhailpatel
I really want to do this just so I can get some time to work on my own
projects. How did you sell this to your employers (or are they one of a very
few shops which do the 4 day week thing like Treehouse)

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cromulent
I've seen people do this.

"I want to work 4 days per week".

"OK, no problem, we will reduce your salary / bonus etc by 20%".

Time passes.

"Ok, I am doing the same job for 80% of the salary and I never make my bonus".

":)".

~~~
StavrosK
I bill daily, in 8-hour blocks. All those hours belong to my employer, and I
do as much work as needed. Any more work than that needs to allocate more
8-hour blocks.

I know that being a salaried employee is different, but if you're letting
people work you into 10-hour days, don't.

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jkoudys
I used to work at one of the big corporations, and most people there probably
worked ~10h a day, but was only paid for their 8h/day contract and given no
overtime. I'm building my own company now, and honestly it consumes most of
each day each week. The difference is, at my old job I'd spend ~8 of those 10
hours doing work that was mind-numbing and/or stressful, and only ~2 working
on something I really enjoy. Even though I've probably done ~12-14h each day
so far this month, I usually spend <1h of each day doing work I don't really
want to do (invoicing, reducing the backlog of important-but-interesting
issues on the queue, etc.), so I actually enjoy most of my day.

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bjr-
Based on git logs and some extended time tracking experiments, I tend to get
~4 hours of real work done on an average day.

I feel most relaxed when that's split between 2 hours in the morning and 2
hours in the afternoon. Great days are 6 hours (i'll be in "the zone" from
~4:30 to ~6:30).

Another 3-6 hours can be spent reading (code or books) and exploring (fiddling
around in a repl).

I am at the office for 8-10 hours per day, but the office is really only a
center where most work hours occur. Often a good Saturday spent across
libraries, cafes and parks can yield 6 hours of getting shit done.

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patcon
I tend to like to allow myself lots of time for "information consumption"
balanced with productive output time. So I am in "work" mode maybe 8-9 hours
per day. But during that, I allow myself to go off on sustained tangents and
don't beat myself up over that -- I trust the tangential learning to be
valuable later. (This has proved true for me.)

If I didn't value that tangential learning time, I would probably be happy
with 4.5 hours of solid "productive" work :)

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chrisbennet
I work around 8 hours a day of which around 5 is billable. I work on my own
projects and my clients'.

I don't bill for the time I spend researching in bed in the middle of the
night to prepare for the next day. I'll wake up at say 3:00am with an
idea/solution and I _have_ to research it right then. I email the links to
myself. I don't recommend this approach - it's probably not healthy.

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q845712
i think part of the challenge is how to count hours spent in the office but
not coding. Some amount of discussion is necessary to get a group on the same
page, and some time socializing about things that aren't work lubricates those
discussions by letting people feel comfortable and familiar with their
coworkers.

That being said I worked remote (from home) for ~5 months and felt like a got
a ton of work done, most days coding for 5-6 hours, 1/2 - 1 for communication,
and 1 hr for technical reading / self-training.

Currently i'm working at a shop that thinks i should arrive at the office at 9
and leave at 6. to me, that adds up to 45 hours a week (per above, imo lunch
with coworkers is an important part of teamwork and counts as working): that's
too many hours each week at a place that also strictly counts PTO days! and
those two factors combined certainly discourage me from ever putting in more
than the odd hour or two of self-study on the weekends & evenings.

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StavrosK
I think 4:30 is a bit too low. I think five to six hours of actual work are
about average, but after eight hours of productive work I felt completely
drained, and couldn't wait to just veg out in front of the TV (which I
otherwise almost never do).

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mcantelon
It depends on what kind of work I'm doing. If it's painful, nitpicky stuff
then it's hard to get 6 hours of focus in. If it's interesting stuff then time
flies and more than 6 hours.

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minimalism
It depends on the tickets I'm assigned, and that can be feast or famine. I
don't possess any decision making power in the tasks I am assigned, and to be
honest I'd rather not have it.

Sometimes the tasks I'm assigned are merely to reconnoiter the feasibility of
taking action, and not to actually develop or commit code changes.

In other cases I'll be asked to change something that required 30 seconds of
effort. Maybe flipping the value of a configuration flag from true to false,
et c.

On average, I'll deal with tickets that involve several hours of stepping
through nested loops in a debugger and inspecting log output, or wading
through long-running SQL queries, and then committing changes that improve
upon an existing body of work.

More rare are the intermediate tickets, that might take days and weeks of
effort, and roll up into a larger project spanning many weeks or months across
multiple developers. Tickets that keep me continuously tasked for multiple
days at a time experience differing degrees of productivity, depending on
hundreds of variables, and some of those variables are the work environment.

If something's _really_ important and difficult, and the colleagues I'm
delivering it to possess an understanding that it requires my undivided
attention, then I'm provided with exactly that. I'll ask for a quiet office to
camp out in, with a door I can lock, if I need it.

No matter what, I'm in the office, regardless of whether I'm idle, during a
dead zone of activity while we wait for other people to provide requests or
complete planning through interminable daily hours-long meetings, or whether
I'm swamped in a firestorm of emergencies that divide my attention across
several immediate worries.

At the end of the day, I'm paid for my time, and sometimes that pay is what
will retain me through period of waiting for my turn at the trigger. If you
don't pay me for that time, then I'm a temp, and not a regular, full-time
employee. That's how it works.

I'm not a founder, or a partner, so I don't receive bonuses or a share of
profits based on the success of calculated risks. In exchange for that, I
accept the status of a regular persistent relationship. Eight hours a day, 50%
of my waking time on this plain of existence, on call as a resident expert.

I stopped worrying about a perfect, even flow of continuous, normalized
engagement a long time ago. Almost every field out there has varying degrees
of hurry-up-and-wait temperament, and that comes with the nature of human
interaction.

It's not productive to mince parsimonious hours and minutes, in my opinion,
when it doesn't reflect the realities of human interaction.

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Vadoff
Get paid a salary, but feels like I put in around 6 hours working (minus
eating, bathroom, talking, etc).

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cturhan
I work 9am-6pm with a 1h launch break. Apart from that, I code some side
projects mostly between 9pm-12pm

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thirdreplicator
Before taking a 3 week vacation: 6 hours per day After taking a 3 week
vacation: 1 hour per day

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twelvenmonkeys
per day;

8 hours working full-time

4 hours on dev/devops for kihi.io

2 hours learning something new (go, rust, etc.)

rest walking the dog or sleeping

seems normal

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allsystemsgo
full time job: 9 hrs a day

side project: 20 hrs a week

