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One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

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Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

#6
post #2

“How many real hours of work do you put in each day?” Am I supposed to count meetings I didn't need to be on, or that could've been an email, or that get rescheduled at the last minute for 15 minutes later than originally?

I'd say anything that prevents you from, for instance, browsing the internet for pleasure counts as work. Meeting in a boardroom? Work. Zoom call in which you have to regularly participate? Work. Zoom call you can basically ignore while you read HN? Not work.

Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

#7
This isn't surprising, because devs have a tendency to focus on the hard bits of coding as being their work. Why not, right? It's probably the most satisfying too, so we forget the bits where we document, explain to colleagues, organize, etc. Don't forget that a lot of "not working" such as browsing a certain orange-and-beige website actually IS work as well: you wouldn't be updated on what's going on in the tech world if you didn't read some new things regularly.

However consider that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do. Typically you'll never find one of those people saying they don't do much. In fact, many of them feel compelled to sit in the office - face time - to look busy. If you were to narrowly define their work like I've done with software devs, many people would end up with maybe a couple of hours a day, mainly reading some docs to decide what their business unit should do.

Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

#9

3-4 hours of deep work is fairly standard I think. The rest of the time is not necessarily something I wouldn't define as "hard work" (emails, meetings, etc...) - but it's not slacking either.

I also find my work is sort of a monday through friday bell curve. sort of a coordinate - do - deliver flow.

Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

#10
I'm pretty sure I put in about 3-4 hours of real work when I was in office too. If you count meetings, answering emails, and operational work, it is hard to put in a standard 8 hours of real work.

Also, the comment that the Amazon employee made is similar to what I hear across other online forums such as Reddit and Twitter. Seems Amazon has created a really toxic environment for everyone involved.

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