
Ask HN: How many (actual) hours do you work a week? - sam36
I&#x27;ve been mostly freelance&#x2F;1099 for the last 2 years doing full stack dev work. I&#x27;m happy with everything but I am struggling to get more than 30 hours a week of billable coding time. My employers are starting to complain about needing more work from me (ie, put in more hours).<p>Problem is I simply don&#x27;t have any more time to give. I typically get up around 9-10am, take care of a few morning rituals and might get an hour of billable time in before lunch. Typically I&#x27;m back after lunch around 2pm, and there I remain in my office until between 11pm-1am (break for dinner of course). So for being in my office for 10+ hours, at the end of the day I&#x27;m lucky if I got 6 hours of billable time in.<p>I can only reference my old actual office jobs for comparison. I know at the last place I worked, after all the meetings and facebook browsing time, I really don&#x27;t think anyone put in more than 20 hours of actual coding time. But there everyone was salary and as long as you were in your seat, you were considered &quot;working&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t think I slack off. I don&#x27;t browse social media. I do get caught up sometimes in watching youtube videos on programming topics and conferences or maybe taking care of my many personal development machines. But sometimes the programming tasks I have are not simply trivial, requiring many hours or days of thought, in these times, the youtubing does go up as well as other side tasks. Not really sure how to bill for that, if it took two days of thinking and screwing around the house before I had my &quot;ah ha&quot; moment for a complex issue.. yea I don&#x27;t know. I&#x27;m just really not sure how I can possibly type for 8 hours straight without ever stopping and at the same time write code that works.<p>I do pay for access to a co-working space, but I normally don&#x27;t go as I assume the 30+ min.  trip could be better used. Either way, going there hasn&#x27;t magically gotten me 8+ billable hours a day.<p>Not really sure how to improve at this point. Thoughts?<p>Edit: Thank you so much for the quick responses. For a little bit more back story, I actually work for a small dev shop that has several contracts. They send me work that is usually already bid on as far as hours and price. Sometimes I have a say in that, and sometimes not. They briefly tried to make me salary, not sure why, I wanted to stay hourly. But then started complaining that they were paying me for more hours than I was working. Meaning taking the number of hours allocated for each ticket&#x2F;feature that I had completed added up to less hours than what they were paying me for, so then they stuck me back to hourly. Basically since the tickets are hourly, it is very hard to complete 8 one hour tickets in one day (that is an extreme case but you get the point.) There are bigger tasks that are allocated 80+ hours, but still not easy to get those 8 hours of coding.
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kylecordes
Thinking back to years ago when I did individual freelance work, I would say
you are actually doing quite well to get in 30 billable hours. Realistically
you probably need to spend 10 to 20 hours a week on all the ancillary tasks
(especially doing work that will get you more, better, future clients). So if
you want to have a long-term sustainable result, it's probably best to plan on
at most 30 billable hours per week.

(Of course, people who can disregard or don't have families and other
obligations, could plausibly work an enormous amount of hours. But that
doesn't seem like a great strategy, there are so many good opportunities to
produce a lot of value and receive reasonable pay for reasonable total work.)

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itamarst
Bad news: it's unlikely you can work longer hours productively.

Good news: working more hours is the least effective way to be more
productive.

The key to productivity is reducing unnecessary work. That means:

* Things you think the customer wants, but actually they don't.

* Things that are nice to have, not on critical path to success. Sometimes the customers thinks they want them, but often they won't care if they're not actually there.

* Things that are "best practices" generically but not applicable in particular situations. E.g. unit tests if this is code that will never be reused and you have an end-to-end test.

* Digressions where you go off on a tangent and realize too late. This can be solved with timeboxing.

I could go on. In general it's possible to be _far_ more productive while
still working same number of hours.

More suggestions here:
[https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/)

More conceptual overview here:
[https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills-
pro...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills-productive/)

~~~
itamarst
Interestingly, being more productive as hourly contractor is a bad thing
mostly, since you get paid less. Working fixed contracts is better that way.

In this particular weird setup your company has, though, sounds like that's
not the case. But as others have said the system they use doesn't make sense.

~~~
literallycancer
Bill by larger time blocks (days, weeks?). Done with your work for the day in
a couple hours? Take a walk in the forest, do some fishing, work on your car,
meditate or whatever.

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smt88
I don't know. I've never tracked my hours, despite working contract for most
of my career.

Based on managing contractors for years now, I think you might be the most
honest contractor I've ever heard of. Most of them bill for more hours than
they're actually coding. I don't think this is malicious -- it's simply
replicating the salaried structure, where goofing off and Facebooking are
still part of a work day.

If you feel like you're pretty efficient, I think fixed-fee projects are good
for both parties. Hourly tracking is pretty miserable. My clients are usually
excited that I offer only fixed-fee engagements.

If you do continue time-based billing, you should try to switch to weekly or
monthly instead of hourly. This allows you to build in a little variability.

Somewhat unrelated: someone posted on HN that s/he only codes 4 hours a day at
the most, because most people's brains only have a certain amount of cycles to
devote to something truly thought-intensive. Many, _many_ people chimed in
with their agreement.

That's an anecdote, sure, but there's lots of research to suggest that much
more than 30 hours of productivity per week is a fantasy.

~~~
sam36
> Most of them bill for more hours than they're actually coding.

I pretty much figured that. Problem is how we manage our internal work flow is
based on tickets with an amount of hours allocated to each one. Some have 4 or
8, others have 40+. Many times I am given 3 or 4 four hour tickets to tide me
over for a couple of days (while some bigger tickets are negotiated), but
trying to get those 4 four hour tickets done takes all week (or sometimes
more). I've stopped really caring if I overrun the times, but the main issue
is these smaller tickets branch out across many different apps, all with their
own quirks and there is a 3+ hour ramp up time just to get familiar with what
the ticket even wants me to do. Then you end up with the dreaded "Why did it
take 8 hours just to add a button to a page?" scenario.

~~~
smt88
It sounds like the problem is that your org's internal workflow depends on
accurately estimating the time things will take.

As any experienced coder will tell you (and you've just told me), time
estimates for tasks are nonsense. You should _never_ run a team by relying on
time estimates because they will always be wrong and people will be unhappy
(both clients and employees).

~~~
jklein11
Yeah at the very least you should have gotten a rate hike when they changed
the way your hours are calculated. You are now taking on the risk of the extra
complexity of the project, which was previously on them. They should have to
pay for that.

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shoo
> My employers are starting to complain about needing more work from me (ie,
> put in more hours).

> Problem is I simply don't have any more time to give.

This sounds like a classic employer move. Of course they want you to give them
more of your time.

What do YOU want? Why do you want more than 30 hours a week billable time?
Could you raise your own hourly rate that you charge your employer and work
the same or fewer hours?

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lastofus
Considering they equate _estimations_ of hours on tickets w/ hours you work
and bill, all hope is lost. A dev shop should know better. The fact that they
don't is disheartening, and makes me think management level is not run anyone
w/ software dev experience.

The cynic in me says that you should just pad hours on ticket estimations to
encompass ancillary tasks and bill for 40 hours while working the same as you
do. It's a bit dishonest, but you may end up with happier management, and a
happier you.

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chuck4932
Wow, what a backwards company. This reminds of how IBM used to measure
productivity of programmers by the number of lines of code they've written.

Everybody knows that there is much more work involved in programming than just
typing characters into an IDE. I've never heard of any programming contract
jobs that were as strict on hours as this. Whats stopping you from leaving and
explaining exactly what you just wrote to the client? You are getting a very
bad deal.

~~~
dabockster
> Whats stopping you from leaving and explaining exactly what you just wrote
> to the client?

OP was probably broke before the job and is worried about having income.

~~~
chuck4932
True, if you are not in a position to risk leaving this job then I suggest you
save up at least 3 months worth of living expenses and then quit. Bottom line
is this company is screwing you over.

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bartvk
Personally, I really like my coworking space. But I got one that's 10 minutes
away. Isn't there something closer to you?

Also, I have the feeling that you're overthinking this. Sit down at 08:30.
Grab a brownbagged sandwich from 12:30 to 13:00. Then work until 17:00. Done,
go home and enjoy your spare time. This business of sitting in your office
until 12:00 PM sounds ridiculous to me, why would any wife out up with that?

~~~
sam36
>Personally, I really like my coworking space. But I got one that's 10 minutes
away. Isn't there something closer to you?

No, I'm out in the sticks. Hence why I fancy remote dev work :)

>Also, I have the feeling that you're overthinking this. Sit down at 08:30.
Grab a brownbagged sandwich from 12:30 to 13:00. Then work until 17:00. Done,
go home and enjoy your spare time.

I'm really trying to do that. Problem is a few hours time zone difference
between me and my workplace. They are ahead of me. So what usually happens is
I constantly end up staying up late in order to get them something they can
test out in the morning (before I sign back on) that a way when I came back
the next day for work, I will know whether what I did the day before is
working or not. But I guess that is not working...

>This business of sitting in your office until 12:00 PM sounds ridiculous to
me, why would any wife out up with that?

She manages, but doesn't like it...

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michaelthiessen
I think you may be making incorrect assumptions.

Are you sure that you need to be working more hours? Based on the setup you
have, it simply sounds like you need to be accomplishing more. The actual
number of hours it takes to complete a ticket is irrelevant (if I understand
correctly).

itamarst had some good things to say about increasing productivity.

