
Ask HN: Do you get more done working longer hours? - shifte
I&#x27;ve been wrestling with this idea for a while that pulling long hours at the office doesn&#x27;t increase the chances of us meeting a deadline. For whatever reason there&#x27;s rarely more than 4 hours in the day that I write solid working code. The other hours are either meetings or replying to emails. The latter I mostly skip and read HN or Reddit.<p>What&#x27;s your experience? Can an engineering team be successful only working 4-5 hour days?
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twh270
Brain-intensive work is fatiguing just like physically demanding work, and if
you regularly push past your limits mentally or physically there will be
consequences. Yes, over the _short_ term you can get away with it. But it's
gonna cost you, and the longer you do it the more it's gonna cost.

With that in mind, not all coding is equally brain-intensive. If I put in a
serious intense hardcore 3 hour session of gnarling code wrangling, I'm pretty
much done for several hours. Conversely I can do minor refactoring and code
cleanup all day.

It's well known that pushing developers to work more hours isn't effective. It
might (might!!) get a product to deadline faster, but it will be at the cost
of burned-out developers who will have greatly reduced productively, and a
decreased quality in the codebase and more defects at the time of launch. And
the better developers tend to leave for a healthier environment.

Regarding skipping meetings and emails, figure out (if you haven't) why you're
doing that and take appropriate steps. Maybe it's having a discussion about
why a particular meeting is unproductive, or alternate forms of communication.
Maybe it's finding a reason to go to a meeting other than its stated purpose.

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mattbgates
My company operates during business hours and then some (6 AM - 2 AM). I
think, for the most part, they have decent hours, but I'd say we could be just
as productive with working 10 hour days, 4 days a week, instead of 5 days a
week at 8-9 hours. But generally, I work 9 hour days 5 days a week. About 4
hours of my day is somewhat busy, but not always. Once in awhile, my entire
shift is busy.

Luckily, my company doesn't have a policy that anything I work on during my
shift is theirs. They don't mind me doing me during downtime, and in fact,
they encourage it. I believe its right in the handbook that they encourage us
to go on social media if we have nothing else to do and have gotten all of our
work done. I work for a media company, so it kind of makes sense that they
would want us to be up to date with social media trends and news.

I've built several successful websites during downtime and off-hours (after I
leave work and continuing on it). I think much of my success outside of work
has to do with the hours I've had downtime at work. We can definitely get
busy... but we pretty much sit around, waiting for an inbox to have work in
it, and we just get it done when it comes in. After it's done, I return back
to what I was doing before.

While I definitely procrastinate, it's rare for me to not do anything. Always
working on something. In my early days, I had started up a side gig
freelancing, building, maintaining, and editing websites for clients, and then
I started up a side business while working for my main job and currently in
the process of starting up a second side business.

None of my side businesses steal away any business from my company, and if
anything, only compliment their work and mine. In fact, I try to reel in
business for my company so that I can keep doing what I do. Everyone wins.

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Powerofmene
When I was working full time and working on my doctorate I had very long days
for 27 months. Several months I was only averaging 2 hours of sleep. I can say
for me, working longer hours was not ideal. I had trouble concentrating. At
times I could not complete simple tasks. I had leg cramps that were
excruciating. We had a very short timeline to complete a ridiculous amount of
work.

I firmly believe that obtaining a doctorate is as much about jumping through
hoops that they have set on fire as it is mastery of your academic field of
study. I just wonder the quality that was surrendered because sleep was in
critically short supply.

In business, I believe it is better to work smart than to work hard. I
acknowledge that when I was working on my doctorate had I taken a step back
even for a solid day, I would have recharged and likely saved myself 5x that
in lost productivity. Unfortunately, it is hard to see that when you are under
intense pressure to produce huge volumes of work on a very brief timeline.

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bradknowles
Each person is somewhat unique in this regard, but generally speaking there is
a peak number of hours you can work and be effective. Beyond that, you're
working longer and less effectively, and more likely to make mistakes. And
that can be very counter productive.

On average, I think that number is about 6-8 hours per day for most people.
But even that length isn't functioning at your peak, just high enough to be
generally worthwhile. Peak effectiveness would be more like half that.

You need to do your research and find out what works best for you and your
team, but the larger the group, the more likely you are to fall into the
typical pattern.

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db48x
Certainly. I get a lot more done on days when I work 6 hours than I do on days
when I only work for 2. In fact, I probably get more than 3× the work done,
which is nice. On the other hand, if I worked for 18 hours a day I would
certainly not get another 3×; I would soon hit the point of diminishing
returns. Where that point is must certainly vary from person to person, for I
have noticed that it also varies from project to project and day to day.

Sounds to me like you need to reduce distractions rather than working more
hours.

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twobyfour
The first few days of working longer hours, I get a ton done. By day 10 of
working 55-hour weeks I'm about as productive as I was doing 40 hours. By day
15, I'm getting less done in 55 hours than I do in 30 hours when not burnt
out.

Nowadays, working long days is something I do a few days a month when stuff
happens to pile up that will slow other people down if I don't complete it.

I recommend thinking more about why you're not productive in the hours you're
working. My solution to excessive distractions was to switch my schedule two
hours earlier. I now get a solid 2-plus hours of uninterrupted concentration
every morning before the office begins to fill up. Then I spend a few hours
doing things that require interfacing with other people. And if I'm lucky I
get a few more concentration hours later in the day too. I also work from home
whenever possible to minimize distractions - those days are blissfully
productive.

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muzani
I have seen a few individuals work longer hours and succeed. But more often
it's the kind of project they would sneak away to do, instead of sneak from.
Software is one of those industries that runs so efficiently on passion,
although passion is a limited resource.

I do think progress is proportional to time spent on it. The only question is
how much time you can get in and at what cost. You can always push harder, but
it can lead to burnout and deplete passion.

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itamarst
Given overhead of chatting with coworkers, meetings, planning, hiring
interviews, etc., I would indeed expect most programmers just write code
productively for 4 to 5 hours and that longer hours don't produce any more
value.

My personal experience: for past few years I have been at least as productive
as most programmers, while only working 28-35 hours a week. And not all those
work hours were spent coding, obviously.

I'd take it a step further: I believe enforcing a shorter workweek makes you
_more_ productive. It forces you to prioritize, instead of going off on yak
shaving expeditions, it forces you to spend more time thinking upfront, since
you can't (badly) compensate by working longer hours. More here:
[https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/10/work-life-balance-
so...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/10/work-life-balance-software-
engineer/)

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drakonka
I do, but it seems to be less about the hours being longer and more about my
being in the office when it's quiet and distraction-free. Therefore I am
hoping that noise cancelling headphones will help me be more efficient during
the normal workday. It won't be the same as having the whole office quiet and
the room to myself, but it might be an improvement.

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danieka
There was a time that I could put in more hours and keep my productivity up.
But it wears you down, and after two years of many hours I'm quite worn out.
So, yes, short time you could probably get more done if you push yourself. But
it will run you, and any developers, into the ground leading to lowered
productivity over the long term.

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psyc
I think the connection is loose at best. Personally, yes, I'm wired so I can
mostly turn more hours into more progress. That's great when I'm working
alone. But I don't think I've ever been on a paid project at a company where
the bottleneck was straight-ahead serial work. It feels like teams have a way
of divining when's the absolute latest they can deliver something, and will
pad any length workday with slacking, as needed.

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patatino
Working is like running, consistency and staying healthy are key. You can
train/work your ass off and get better results short time, but you will pay
for it later and geat injured/sick.

Plan your day so you can use those 4 hours of focus the most! For me that
means no meetings, phone calls and email in the morning if possible.

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tmaly
I get less done with longer hours. I try to eliminate meetings, phone calls,
emails.

We have Jira at work as well as some legacy Bugzilla systems. I have been
trying to get everyone sending requests to my group to put them in Jira.

I prefer a structured process so I can minimize interruptions of developers.

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cuchoi
The problem with 4-5 hours days is that you will not be efficient 100% of the
time. You need those extra hours (for breaks, communication, coordination,
mentoring, etc) to be able to code 4 hours in a day.

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stevekemp
Very much so. I work 9AM-5PM, with an hour for lunch, and sporadic 5minute
breaks as I pace, or make coffee.

Some days I'm on fire and I'm working at 95% from start to finish. Other days
I'm maybe 60% productive, things just "don't go well". On average I assume I'm
a productive and useful employee, as I've never had any performance warnings,
or criticisms.

It's just the nature of the industry. You can't perform at your peak 100% of
your working life. Some days you need to mull problems over, try different
approaches, cancel them debug random failures, and so on.

I love my job, I love my colleagues, but I can't be 100% efficient and if I
were I suspect I'd get annoyed about it. I need to wander, to pace, and to
scribble on note-pads.

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NetStrikeForce
No, since I've reduced my day to ~6 work hours I am much more productive.

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nidhi549
Definitely

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oldandtired
To answer your question - Yes.

In point of fact, the observation of no interruption for the team (by anyone
including management) means more work is done in less hours. This observation,
which I have found to be true, was made in the late 80's.

Any interruption in thought processes when doing engineering/technical work
requires the person to spend a significant amount of time returning to the
place where the interruption occurred.

Management practise since the late 80's has ensured that all technical staff
(engineering, programmers, etc) must be interruptible at all times (especially
by management itself). The team/team members have no ability to redirect phone
calls, email messages or management meetings to management PA's to deal with.

The experience that I and my technical colleagues had was that if we could
have a non-interrupted period of 2-3 hours to work on any project, we would
achieve more than we could in any normal interrupted 8 hour day. Often we
found that an extended uninterrupted period of 4-6 hours would allow us to
complete technical work/projects that would normally take us a week to
complete. This was based on a total effective 1 hour due to the continual
interruptions we normally received during our normal days. This lead us to
start work early and finish late when we could work uninterrupted. Of course,
this worked against as this was in effect unpaid time.

The common management practise of the last 30 years has ensured that every
technical/engineering team works at its lowest efficiency. There are some
managers who will protect their engineering teams from such interference and
as a consequence get a much higher efficiency out them in a normal work day of
7-8 hours. Unfortunately, these kinds of managers are few and far between.

I would say that any team that works beyond this number of hours will still
not achieve anywhere near the same results as a corresponding team that has
the unfettered ability to block out all interruptions.

In addition, it also requires group offices for this to work. Open plan
layouts are an instant cause of inefficiency, especially with
technical/engineering groups. Two to three team members per office would be
ideal.

As an office is considered a status symbol within management circles, we
should not expect any sensible outcome in this area. All of this was
documented and published in the late 80's.

In relation to your comment that in any day there is only 4 hours that you
write solid code, I would suggest that if you had an uninterrupted 4 hours
that the amount of code produced would very likely double or even triple and
be even better.

Just don't expect any management or management guru's of today to see it this
way.

The comment regarding brain-intensive work being fatiguing is certainly true
when you have to deal with multiple interruptions. From my experience, mostly
the fatigue is from having to get yourself back to the place you were at
before the interruption. A uninterrupted period of time devoted to a brain-
intensive activity is less stressful than the same period that has had
interruptions.

I am also saying that such periods of time need to be regulated by oneself so
that burnout doesn't occur. Good physical activity, good food, rest,
relaxation and good non-work related socialising make one able to keep at peak
efficiency.

Have made some edits about to fill in more explanation and correct spelling
and sentence structure.

