Sometimes it feels like I work really hard. Other times not hard enough. The Hacker News population seems a relatively hard working group, so I thought it would be informative and interesting to see what the average hours worked is on HN.
Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#2I work 40 at my day job, then I easily put another 40+ into my startup.
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#3I work 4 days a week so that makes 32 hours and try to fill my friday with small jobs on the side so between 32 and 40, never over that. I cherish my personal life way too much to work more than 40 hours per week. I don't even receive work e-mails on my phone neither do I check them when I'm not at work. I like to keep this separation as clean as possible so that when I'm off work, I don't think about work and / or stress about stuff going on at work.
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#4I reliably put in four or five 50+ hour weeks per year (especially if I'm at a new startup), but I've learned through hard experience that it's unbelievably counterproductive to do that for longer than a week or two at a time. My personal life and ability to stay awake, much less think/code clearly, suffer otherwise.
Of course, if work is sufficiently interesting then I end up spending what free time I have thinking about it, which can make my work time incredibly productive, obviating the need to be "working" too much to begin with.
But most importantly: YMMV.
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#540 at day job, 40+ on consulting projects. Finding it harder to keep up the pace and want to reshuffle to find time for my own projects. Hard to get off that consulting gravy train though.
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#6I reliably put in four or five 50+ hour weeks per year (especially if I'm at a new startup), but I've learned through hard experience that it's unbelievably counterproductive to do that for longer than a week or two at a time. My personal life and ability to stay awake, much less think/code clearly, suffer otherwise. Of course, if work is sufficiently interesting then I end up spending what free time I have thinking…
yeah. what I find interesting is that while most people seem to claim 40-50 hours, they don't appear to be working as much as people I know who track their hours (and don't count breaks) who have a difficult time reaching 40 hours a week.
I suspect most people inflate the number of hours spent working (or count things like hacker news as work.)
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#7I reliably put in four or five 50+ hour weeks per year (especially if I'm at a new startup), but I've learned through hard experience that it's unbelievably counterproductive to do that for longer than a week or two at a time. My personal life and ability to stay awake, much less think/code clearly, suffer otherwise. Of course, if work is sufficiently interesting then I end up spending what free time I have thinking…
yeah. what I find interesting is that while most people seem to claim 40-50 hours, they don't appear to be working as much as people I know who track their hours (and don't count breaks) who have a difficult time reaching 40 hours a week. I suspect most people inflate the number of hours spent working (or count things like hacker news as work.)
I think most people that have a 9-5 and do a small amount of after-hours contracting, or regularly stay a little bit late to finish something up will be voting 40-50. That's how I voted, even though if you subtract slacking time and lunch, I probably clock in under 40 hours most weeks.
This would seem likely to encompass the majority of HN's readership, startup crowd aside.
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#8You probably should have been a little more granular around the 40 hour mark. Perhaps 35-45?
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#9When you are working on your own startup, you don't see it as work. It's easy to "work" many hours, but it's enjoyable to a great extent.
Re: Poll: How many hours do you work a week?
#10I work 8am to sunset on weekends as a skydiving instructor. During the week I do remote stuff for a few companies for about 4-5 hours a day. I try take off 1 day a week.