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How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

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Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#161

Post by Qwertious »

barry-cotter wrote: post #110
mkagenius wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In India, most of the students get a bachelors degree without any loan. No one in India becomes homeless in a week if he loses his job. This loan and debt thing is really messed up in the US.

In India slightly over a quarter of the population are illiterate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India The World Bank, in 2011 based on 2005's PPPs International Comparison Program, estimated 23.6% of Indian population, or about 276 million people, lived below $1.25 per day on purchasing power parity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India

How many Indians with bachelors degrees are illiterate?

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#162

Post by toomuchtodo »

Buge wrote: post #28
toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you sacrifice five years of your life if the odds of a financially independent exit was less than 10%? Less than 10% of startups succeed, and that's before breaking that cohort into startups that barely succeed and ones that'll leave you independently wealthy.

If you're being paid $200/hr it doesn't depend on the exit.

Don't know many startup employees making $200/hr

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#163

Post by smdz »

If an employer is expecting this, they are setting themselves up for failure.

> No programmers really work 60-80 hours a week, especially in a 5 day span

There are cases when we are required to deliver athletic/marathon-like performance and it can be achieved for a shorter timespan

I have worked on multiple occasions, 14-16 hours per day to achieve 98-100 "productive" hrs per week, working 120 hrs a week for 3-4 weeks. I know it was productive, because I installed time-tracker and used a personal notepad too to track my time. I was invisible to my family, sleeping just 4-5 hours a day and sometimes I could not sleep after the first week. Also note, doing this as a freelancer I was getting paid for all that extra time - and I have a premium price attached for quicker results. I would not recommend doing this if you are being paid peanuts or being paid regular rates because that opens up a world of abusive managers/biz-owners.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#164

Post by psyc »

j7ake wrote: post #159
psyc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do your worst, skeptical HN, but I swear on my life I've been maintaining more than 80 hours of ridiculously productive, focused coding time per week, for about a year. It so different when you love and believe in what you're working on. I literally can't wait to get out of bed and start working, and the entire day goes by before I notice. The thing I'm working on is a sheer joy to work on, and the conditions are ide…

You need to be thinking of a career of 30+ years rather than a 3 year sprint. It's cool you're spending your time producing, but don't forget you need to take care of yourself and hone your fundamentals (linear algebra, data structures, algorithms, your field).

I've already had a career of 30 years :) (really, 25)

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#165

Post by psyc »

regularfry wrote: post #152
psyc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do your worst, skeptical HN, but I swear on my life I've been maintaining more than 80 hours of ridiculously productive, focused coding time per week, for about a year. It so different when you love and believe in what you're working on. I literally can't wait to get out of bed and start working, and the entire day goes by before I notice. The thing I'm working on is a sheer joy to work on, and the conditions are ide…

Do you have a family?

Noop!

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#166

Post by oskarth »

psyc wrote: post #138
drblast wrote: post #11

I seem to be alone in this, but I actually do about 25-30 hours of actual programming work each week. And that's sit-down-and-concentrate-and-build-shit work. I'm pretty ruthless about declining extraneous meetings and I keep my door closed most of the time. I think it's reasonable to have 25% of a 40-hour week be for meetings, helping other people, eating lunch, sitting in on interviews, and learning/trying out new…

Do your worst, skeptical HN, but I swear on my life I've been maintaining more than 80 hours of ridiculously productive, focused coding time per week, for about a year. It so different when you love and believe in what you're working on. I literally can't wait to get out of bed and start working, and the entire day goes by before I notice. The thing I'm working on is a sheer joy to work on, and the conditions are ide…

An interesting exercise is to run RescueTime for a few weeks and see what your daily average is. I'm reminded by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208818

I certainly believe people can be extremely productive for, say, 100h/w. For example, see Elon Musk for a straightforward counterexample to the "40h/w is peak absolute productivity on a sustained basis"-crowd. But it is useful to separate effective coding time from other productive, and not so productive, time. Empirically speaking, as evidenced by the thread and its sampling of highly motivated YC founders, few people average more than something like 4 hours of effective coding a day.

EDIT: I mean what I say in the first paragraph quite literally. Run Rescuetime for two weeks. See what it reports for Software Dev. That is close enough for effective coding time. It isn't rocket science. Self-reported numbers are almost without fail vastly overestimated, even for expert practitioners.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#167

Post by adpoe »

Early in my career, I worked at a few different businesses where management expected us to work 12+ hour days. Mostly web development & design.

We did it, but the secret was that we didn't spend all of that time actually heads-down, working. (Surprise.)

We were in the office for 12+ hours (sometimes until 3am, having client calls and presentations at midnight), but how much of that time were we actually getting creative, productive work done? Maybe half.

And here's the problem: The hard part was, I was managing projects, and I had developers putting in 12+ hour days against my budgets, when I knew that maybe 6 of those hours were actually productive work time. Everything went over budget, across the board, for everyone's projects. At least on paper.

'Moral' of the story: you can require people to work whatever time frames you want. And if you pay well enough, people will do it. (At least until they burn out, or find a more prestigious/higher-paying job.) But it's a waste of everyone's time and money, and it creates more problems than its solves.

Worst of all, you're creating an environment where the culture of working 12+ hours is nothing but theatre. You spend half your time creating and carefully cultivating an artifice, just to meet management's expectations... which they know are unrealistic. Talk about being unproductive.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#168

Post by tudorconstantin »

codr4life wrote: post #19
tudorconstantin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you know that you go full throttle for 3-5 years and then you have the possibility to retire. I would sacrifice 5 years of my life in order to get financial freedom for the rest of it.

And then you get run over by a bus.

Statistically speaking the odds are that in 5 years I'll be 5 years older, not hit by a bus, nor killed by some disease.

I'd love to be 5 years wiser and richer also :)

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#169

Post by psyc »

oskarth wrote: post #166
psyc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do your worst, skeptical HN, but I swear on my life I've been maintaining more than 80 hours of ridiculously productive, focused coding time per week, for about a year. It so different when you love and believe in what you're working on. I literally can't wait to get out of bed and start working, and the entire day goes by before I notice. The thing I'm working on is a sheer joy to work on, and the conditions are ide…

An interesting exercise is to run RescueTime for a few weeks and see what your daily average is. I'm reminded by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208818 I certainly believe people can be extremely productive for, say, 100h/w. For example, see Elon Musk for a straightforward counterexample to the "40h/w is peak absolute productivity on a sustained basis"-crowd. But it is useful to separate effective c…

Well, everyone's different. I don't know what kind of gotcha is hiding in the word 'effective'. It's routine for me to spend 14 hours in a day actually writing and refactoring code, and it seems pretty wildly effective to me.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#170

Post by aerovistae »

rorykoehler wrote: post #133
aerovistae wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true. I love the US, but our student loans and healthcare systems just flat out suck. As a country we've slowly-but-surely gotten so many things right, but we have a god damned long way to go, and it just feels like we're crawling. I guess with a population of 320 million it's kind of like trying to turn the Titanic.

Exceptionalism is a strange beast. Thinking this way only hurts society at large.

Thing what way? How is this exceptionalism? How have I implied in any way that the United States is different or better than other countries?
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