I've worked at a few large orgs, 100s sometimes 1000+ developers. If the majority of them did more than an hour or two of work a day I'd be shocked.
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
#22“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.
That's an interesting definition. I'm not sure it's useful.
Eg when I am oncall out of hours, I could browse HN almost all the time, but it is still low-intensity work, even if nothing breaks and pages on that day.
Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
#23I work more than that, but I don't admit it...
Good point - your job may be at risk if they discover it takes you more than 4 hours a day to get it done...
What noone has mentioned is that the reason people get away with 3 hour days is it's too hard to fire them. Bottom line is those who get more done work for those other employees (I can only wish my colleagues exploited me as much (but not more) as my employer). Some just leave and go to a startup where there's no BS and worklplace socialism.
Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
#241/3 of tech workers admit to working 3 to 4 hours, while 2/3 of tech workers admit to sucking at tech work. Leaving less than 10% who know what they're doing and working full days doing the real tech work. Just ask any company.
Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
#253-4 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.
The Brits have a splendid term for it: "faffing".
Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
#26Including overhead I am well over 12 hours/day but pure coding... Really depends on how many times people disturb me with 'stuff'.
I have worked with many freelancers and worked (as tech consultant) in many big and small businesses; a lot of capable tech people, in my experience, vastly understate the time they actually work. When they are in meetings, all day, they feel they didn't work and report hours accordingly. I have to point out to them regularly that even though they reported 3 hours, I was in meetings with them for 6 (and yes, I find that generally quite pointless so I understand the sentiment), so I think it's closer to 8-9 hours.
Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
#27Is it me or the article reads as "Not everyone works what they should, look at these slackers.."?
Also I don't know exactly how they measure this, but I have a feeling it might be the time people spend pressing buttons..
Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
#28Including overhead I am well over 12 hours/day but pure coding... Really depends on how many times people disturb me with 'stuff'. I have worked with many freelancers and worked (as tech consultant) in many big and small businesses; a lot of capable tech people, in my experience, vastly understate the time they actually work. When they are in meetings, all day, they feel they didn't work and report hours accordingly.…
> Including overhead I am well over 12 hours/day
Are you trying to reduce that unsustainable amount?
Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
#29This is a bad survey, both for questions of selection (busy people don’t do surveys like this) and the nebulous question of what constitutes real work (my guess: this is telling you who has lots of meeting, Jira, etc. overhead).
My real question: is this just clickbait or is this fodder for the kinds of companies which market things like monitoring software to toxic managers? I have memories of working at a consulting shop which tried to entertain the idea that the reason they weren’t profitable wasn’t due to two of the partners cutting deals below estimated costs but rather something like people slacking or not tracking their time precisely enough. Tracking at 5 minute intervals didn’t change the big picture but it did dramatically increase the amount of time spent on time tracking.
Re: One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day
#30As many people pointed out it depends what "working" means. If this is focus mode/deep work, than it's quite a lot. If it means 3 to 4 hours of light work (e-mails, waiting on conferences, chatting with co-workers etc) and the rest is social media and things totally not related to the job then it's a different story.