
Who's in the Office? The American Workday in One Graph - nikhilpandit
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/08/27/343415569/whos-in-the-office-the-american-workday-in-one-graph
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howeyc
Do 9-5 jobs with paid lunch exist?

Everything I've seen is either 8-5 or 9-6 or some variation of that. Heck,
where I am now is 9 hour days plus they encourage you to take lunch, 7-5.
Half-day Friday though.

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nawitus
They (kinda) exist in Finland, as lunch is unpaid, but the workday is 7.5
hours and the workweek is 37.50 hours. Lunch is often optional, but a typical
workday can be from 9 to 5 with a 30 minute lunch break. There can also be two
~10min "coffee" breaks in addition to the lunch break but they typically
matter only in non-software development work environments..

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sebkomianos
Is 7.5 the standard workday in Finland or are you talking only about your
case? If it's typical, it's very encouraging to read about it and it explains
a lot about why it's mostly Scandinavian places that are willing to experiment
with 6 hours also.

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nawitus
By law the maximum is 40 hours per week (8 hours a day). The length of the
workday is determined by a "generally binding" collective labor agreement[1].
It depends on the sector you're working in, but is often 37.50 hours per week.
In the IT industry it's almost everywhere 37.50 hour per week. Some sectors
have a 40 hour work weeks, but have extra days off here and there to bring the
average down to 37.50 hours.

1\. [http://www.tietoala.fi/english/](http://www.tietoala.fi/english/)

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osandov
I expected to see more night owls in the "Computer and mathematical" category,
but it looks like we're more conventional than the average.

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Iftheshoefits
The vast majority of computer programming is done in "stodgy", "boring"
settings, like offices and for government projects, so this really shouldn't
be a surprise for that field. The "work anywhere when you like, just get your
8 in" concept is relatively niche, even in the Valley "glamor" bubble.

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kyllo
Exactly. According to Oracle there are approximately 9 million Java developers
in the world, and since Java is _the_ enterprise programming language, an
awful lot of them are working 8-5 in a cubicle.

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lordbusiness
I'd be interested in seeing a weekday version of this data.

Realtors, car sales, etc, all work weekends. In tech, what about weekend
maintenance windows?

Admittedly, that's probably less of a thing now we have redundancy and
continuous deployment practises; the concept of a late night / weekend change
window is diminishing in my personal experience. I'm intrigued if that's true
across the tech industry.

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Someone1234
> Admittedly, that's probably less of a thing now we have redundancy and
> continuous deployment practises; the concept of a late night / weekend
> change window is diminishing in my personal experience. I'm intrigued if
> that's true across the tech industry.

Odd, my experience is exactly the opposite. Increase complexity breads
increasing numbers of potential problems, which causes partial outages at
unpredictable times and for unpredictable reasons (or reasons so complex they
are perceived as unpredictable).

Now are these "user impacting?" Often times, no. But they will become user
impacting if left for too long (e.g. new instances aren't able to connect to a
database, but existing ones are connected: classic DNS problems). So people
are still waking up in the middle of the night to fix stuff when the alerts
start streaming in.

The only thing that has REALLY changed is that now you can often fix these
issues from your bedroom in your PJs. Since the AWS, Azure, Rackspace, etc
console doesn't care where you are or what you're wearing.

But companies are getting no better at actually having around the clock staff.
When they used to out-source a dedicated server the data centre would employ
24/7 staff on real shifts, Amazon/Rackspace/Google/etc do the same, but for
the software side of things you rarely see it (never?). Most companies just
expect employees to be on-call 24/7 as part of their salary (unpaid overtime
essentially).

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aianus
Weird, I came to work once at Twitter at 9am and I was the only one in sight
on the whole floor.

~~~
johnward
I used to come in at 7am to beat traffic at my startup. There would only be a
handful of people until everyone else started rolling in around 10. After
acquisition by IBM basically everyone is there at 9 for a stand up and now I
come in later when I do go in.

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apostate
A couple of things that one would guess, but are neat none the less: Food prep
is the only one without a dip during the lunch hour (they are preparing what
everyone else is eating). Also, protective services has the fattest tails
(most late shift workers).

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spindritf
Doctors match average the best? Am I reading that right?

Legal skips lunches the most. Engineers are most likely to be in office at
peak hours along with legal and finance.

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bshimmin
Great graph, though I was a bit confused by the categories - I ended up
picking "Computer and mathematical", which seemed to be a strange way to
describe what I do (but hey, I'm not American either).

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blueskin_
Interesting data, reminds me of that thread a few months ago about work start
times by city; I expected a bit more variation on some of the industries here,
but I guess most of them are large categories.

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josu
Why is there a peak at 3 am for legal? It looks like an statistical error to
me, unless it has something to do with conference calls and people starting
their workday in Europe.

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lilsunnybee
Legal doesn't even start climbing from 0 until after 6 am. Are you looking at
"protective services" perhaps, which has a slightly-pre-3 am trough?

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josu
This bump [http://i.imgur.com/dt0iVfG.png](http://i.imgur.com/dt0iVfG.png)

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lilsunnybee
Oops I'm sorry. I missed it.

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cagenut
if you take one of this graph for the east coast and overlay it with another
one 3 hours shifted for the west coast, you get the traffic graph for pretty
much every US news site. thats why the founder of buzzfeed calls it the "bored
at work network".

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ascotan
hmm. "computer" is grouped with "mathematical" jobs. And these people are less
likely to come in early and less likely to stay late. Seems reasonable...

