
40% of geeks surveyed really work fewer than ... say what? - kqr2
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/38854
======
patio11
If they're falling behind on their goals because of that, sounds like a case
for RescueTime. If not... oh well?

In a typical day at the day job, I'm physically at my desk for twelve hours,
and am physically typing for two of them. Count another two for talking to
coworkers. The other eight are downtime between tasks.

Aside from the Japanese corporate need to keep up appearances and not have
engineers go home at 5:00 on the typical day (which, but for appearances, I'd
be able to do four days a week), my bosses are very enlightened about the
subject: they set reasonable deadlines, and when the reasonable deadlines are
being met they do not micromanage professionals' use of time.

We have a few people who do OSS for kicks. The guy behind me is some sort of
volunteer for BSD, if I recall correctly.

I read. A lot. My bosses know it and explicitly encourage it, on the condition
that I bring the stuff I learn back to the company. That's the same attitude
they have about my off-the-clock economic activities -- "training we don't
have to pay for, please, do as much as you want!" Although even knowing that
was the arrangement I was pretty darn shocked when the boss strolled up one
day, dropped a printed copy of my site on the desk, and said "Teach [coworker
X] how to reproduce the effect you're using on this page. He needs to
implement it for [Y] University's course registration."

~~~
indiejade
One thing that Japanese companies have down is how they plan for their
employees' retirements. I remember learning about their system in grad school
and thinking _I need to move to Japan!_ But it's been awhile, and I'd
forgotten some of the details about how they do it.

[http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/archives/2005/06/later_ret...](http://www.becker-posner-
blog.com/archives/2005/06/later_retiremen.html)

Specifically: _The Japanese system where employees past age 60 sometimes work
for lower pay at the same company that had employed them would not be possible
in the United States and some other countries because of legislation that
prohibits alleged discrimination against older workers. The combination of
legislation that prevents companies from lowering the earnings of older
employees, and of legislation that prevents mandatory retirement in some
occupations, creates a major rigidity in the market for older workers._

Brilliant. Build a system that rewards workers with retirement, yet subtly
place incentives to encourage them to keep working (less). Albeit, they are
also working for less $, but at this point, the holistic benefits of having
employment probably outweigh the dollar amount.

------
dangrover
I quit my job about a week ago to work on my business. I've found that I'm on
HN a _lot_ less now.

For me, the idea that I had to be physically there and making a big show out
of getting stuff done made me do less. Knowing that I can get up and leave and
take a walk any time at home to think about a tough technical problem makes it
a lot easier to get stuff done.

~~~
gruseom
What's your business?

~~~
steveplace
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dangrover>

------
marvin
This happens in all areas of work, it's just that the geeks are honest about
it..at least when asked in an anonymous poll on the Internet. I happen to not
be a slacker, and a casual observation of the room around me makes it pretty
obvious that most people waste huge amounts of time and effort. There is no
reason to believe that it would be different in a profession not related to
computers.

The reason there are consulting companies where the annual wages are more than
twice as high than in the economy at large is that these companies have
focused employees that put work first and life second, squeezing results out
of every hour. In a regular company, you'd be insane to put in the kind of
effort that these guys do, because you wouldn't be rewarded in any halfway
reasonable way. The system breeds mediocrity, but there is thankfully a world
of smaller companies (and in the extreme, startups) that allow overachievers
to get compensation for their effort.

There is a corollary to this observation: it isn't really necessary to work
more than 4 hours a day to have a good standard of living. Unfortunately,
_this_ particular niche isn't yet filled by any kind of company. Solo
consulting may (marginally) work, but you won't get the best clients. There's
an opportunity here..not to earn big bucks, but to create a different kind of
company. How few (although focused) hours can each employee work and still
earn more than the median wage?

------
far33d
News Flash - people who read slashdot frequently and respond to its online
polls work less than people who don't.

~~~
ja2ke
Coming from the glass house of the HN comments section, a documented bastion
of productivity...

~~~
kragen
It's not an attack on the people who participated in the poll; it's a limit to
the applicability of the poll results.

------
swombat
I think that figure is outrageous. Back when I worked in the corporate
environment, I worked considerably less than 4 hours a day.

------
lionhearted
I kept a journal of what I called "long term productive work" for a while. So
I didn't count email, waste of time catch-up calls, cleaning my desk, clearing
my desktop, etc. Then I clocked focusing on just one task that I termed long-
term productive with no multitasking. If I had to take a call, I'd stop the
clock.

I realized I didn't do all that much really productive stuff - lots of BS
admin. So I set a goal of 30 minutes per day, and gradually expanded it to one
hour, then eventually two hours. An amazing day I'd get six hours of LT
productive work done. Like, it was a rare, epic event. By just getting two
hours per day done, I was one of the most productive people I knew. (I also
didn't let my admin totally melt down, but with a new focus that it's not
really creating anything of value, I moved through it much faster and just got
it done, instead of toiling in it to feel productive).

Most people are "working" a lot, but are not "getting shit done" at a very
good pace.

------
icey
Just because I'm not typing doesn't mean I'm not working.

~~~
wallflower
We used to joke that you could tell when someone in the cube farm was sending
email or IMing - it's when they were pounding on the keys/typing like madmen -
no one can write code that fast without sacrificing quality and/or non-broken-
ness!

------
10ren
_If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane._

~~~
ggruschow
Especially since they ran basically the same poll a couple weeks apart with
significantly different results:

[http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1713&aid=-1](http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1713&aid=-1)

[http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1719&aid=-1](http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1719&aid=-1)

Good old slashdot.

------
jasonkester
Averaged out over a week, I probably come in under 2 hours a day of good
productive work.

I tend to work in bursts of up to 6 hours at a time, maybe twice a week if I'm
lucky. Those bursts account for pretty much everything good that I've put out
over the last few years, and I've learned not to try to tackle anything
important when I'm not in that mode.

Other, normal days, I start out by checking the surf report. If there's no
swell (and I don't feel like climbing that day), I'll just wade through low
priority bug reports and other mindless things like text changes and layout
tweaks.

This approach works surprisingly well, since it means that I get maybe 4 days
of "Weekend" scattered throughout the week, and am thus usually pretty fresh
in the morning. It doesn't quite fly at an office job though (I usually limit
myself to one day off for surfing when working an on-site contract), but
frankly I find that to be a competitive advantage.

------
glomek
It's partly a matter of definition. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work
done during meetings, but sometimes I still need to be at them. I usually
don't feel like I'm getting work done when I'm talking with coworkers about
workplace politics, but I find that it's necessary in order to avoid being
blindsided by politics that I wasn't aware of. I usually don't feel like I'm
getting work done when I'm waiting for or pestering someone else to do
something so that I can proceed, or when I'm waiting for a long installer, but
I can't leave it because it asks me questions every now and again. I usually
don't feel like I'm getting work done when I'm doing paperwork, but it still
needs to be done.

All together, four hours of work a day that feels productive (like I'm "really
working") isn't that far from the norm for me, and some weeks I don't even get
that far. But it's not because I don't want to do more, it's usually because I
can't because of other things that are very much "work" and that I am very
much expected to do by my employer, but that just don't feel like work to me.

While four hours a day of "real work" may not sound like much, my employer is
actually much happier with me than it would be if I spent 8 hours a day doing
"real work" and ignoring all of the "fake work" that I'm also expected to do.

------
biohacker42
The easiest trap to fall into with software development is negative
productivity.

While you can fix bugs and add features, it doesn't mean you're not in reality
making things worse.

So don't force yourself to code beyond a certain point. For me that's 6 hours
a day.

------
Dobbs
At my last job we worked until the work was done. The problem was that we
couldn't start our work until the developers gave us the build to test.
Because of this there were days where I might work 2 hours in 8-10 hour day.
There were others where I worked 18 hours in a 24 hour work day.

I think using productive 'hours' of work as a unit of measure is little more
fair than using lines of code as a unit of measure.

What of the epic hacker of hackerness who finishes in an hour what takes most
coworkers a week to finish. If he is only spending 10 hours of the week doing
real productive work is he a benefit to team or is he hurting the team?

------
DenisM
The proverbial undertime. Imagine what would happen if geeks could realize
their potential? We would had all kinds of cool software right now, and even
enterprise software would suck a lot less.

~~~
ars
I disagree. It think it's not humanly possible to work at full output for an
entire day without taking breaks. Your brain just gets tired. It's not as
obvious as when a muscle gets tired but it still happens.

So do the breaks necessary to recharge the brain count as work? It's not like
they are time that could be spent working, so why count them as down time and
make you think you could work more? But on the other hand you are not working
then, so it doesn't count as work.

------
xenophanes
> That said, a careful study of my past shows that 40% of my "sick" days have
> been taken on either Monday or Friday.

Monday and Friday are 40% of the work week! This shows _no bias_ for being
"sick" on those days more often.

~~~
brlewis
It was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a Dilbert cartoon where the boss gets
mad about that particular statistic.

~~~
xenophanes
Haha :)

------
lurkinggrue
Wow! That figure is much higher than I expected.

Excuse me while I go back to refreshing slashdot every minute.

------
eli
Slashdot poll != "survey" in any meaningful sense of the word

