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People don't work as much as they say

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Re: People don't work as much as they say

#101

Post by tardigr8 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #58
underwater wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.

TBH I know people who really only code and have no other life. Seven, rather than six days a week. I am not entirely sure what is wrong with them. Only one case can be attributed to money. The rest looks like a weird psychological addiction.

“Weird psychological addiction” that’s where I would place it too.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#102

Post by bikingbismuth »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #87

I’ve been reading some variant of this, for many years. One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen. I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time), and it would have been irresponsible, in the extreme, to put myself into the critical path (because it was no guarantee that I would be able to reliably work). I…

I am currently a manager and the few times where I have said “I am going to write part of this solution my team is working on.” Were the times that I got a big pile of management work and blocked the team. I have since learned my lesson.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#103

Post by tardigr8 »

agumonkey wrote: post #64
tardigr8 wrote: post #27

Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that. Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly. My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribu…

To an extent, if you function this way, its not even unhealthy. People give me strange look when I work because I love going fast (in smooth precise way). To them it's abuse, to me it's joy (granted I can stay in my own limits). To me their slow and bored ways are unhealthy. I start twitching.

Yes I am the same. Work sets me goals that I obsess about. I like playing golf, but I can’t obsess about getting my handicap down. I also can’t obsess about a hobby project. I can about a product that I know has a user base. Then the brain goes fast, dopamine kicks in and I can keep going for long hours.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#104

Post by m_fayer »

learc83 wrote: post #94
yodsanklai wrote: post #76

There are definitely people who can work and focus for 8+ hours a day. I can think of my dentist and family doctor. Waiting room is full from morning to evening. Some of my colleagues work hard. I can see their screen in the open space. They are machines. Never a distraction on the screen. The article should be "some people don't work so much, I'm one of them".

My wife is an ER physician. It’s a demanding job that requires a ton of focus, so most of her colleagues only work about 30 hours a week. She’s also worked as a general pediatrician seeing lower acuity patients/well visits. From talking to her, good deal of that job is essentially running on autopilot. That’s why you can do it 8 hours a day.

Yeah, I think we really need to look at the qualitative aspect of the work being done when having these discussions.

A pediatrician may really be working 8 or more hours a day, where 90% of patients are utterly cut-and-dry AND often having pleasant encounters with cute snotty kids and their parents. It doesn't stretch the imagination why this is possible for 8 hours straight.

The "machine-like" programmers that GP mentioned are likely working from cut-and-dry requirements and executing the same code patterns over and over with a stack they know like the inside of their eyelids. Doing this can be pleasurable in a similar way to playing puzzle games. I can see why it would be possible for 8 hours straight.

Pleasant, meditative physical work - what's called "artisanal" anything these days (cooking, carpentry, etc.) - sure.

Then there's programming in a challenging heterogenous environment. Perhaps the requirements are unclear, the stack is new or undependable, you're often interrupted, or have to switch between different kinds of work throughout the day, or your technical abilities are so stretched that absolute and sustained focus is required. Then, good luck getting to those 8 hours in a sustainable fashion.

There are many jobs that are acknowledged to be so difficult when in "go" mode that no one expects 40 weekly hours. This just hasn't penetrated into tech and adjacent industries, that's why we have to engage in these charades.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#105

Post by treszkai »

inglor_cz wrote: post #58
underwater wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.

TBH I know people who really only code and have no other life. Seven, rather than six days a week. I am not entirely sure what is wrong with them. Only one case can be attributed to money. The rest looks like a weird psychological addiction.

Sometimes it's easier to code all day long than how easy it feels to improve your life. Especially if one excels at work and lacks a social network in life.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#106

Post by XorNot »

neuroma wrote: post #97
yodsanklai wrote: post #76

There are definitely people who can work and focus for 8+ hours a day. I can think of my dentist and family doctor. Waiting room is full from morning to evening. Some of my colleagues work hard. I can see their screen in the open space. They are machines. Never a distraction on the screen. The article should be "some people don't work so much, I'm one of them".

Can confirm many doctors work insane hours, which are hard to even imagine for people who do office jobs. The notion that you can only do 4 hours of productive work a day is frankly a luxury. If you have 10 hours of work to do, all of which is essential for people's immediate wellbeing, you find ways of being productive.

Doctors are highly specialized mechanics for the human body. The reason they can work the hours they do is because most of what they do is not creative and can be done on basically autopilot.

MDs also work in a profession with a fairly unique quality: you always get paid more for doing more work, and the work is more or less completely prepackaged into self-contained units for you - i.e. a GP seeing patients more or less breaks their day into a pattern of independently compensated, 15-30 minute slots.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#107

Post by lordnacho »

alex952 wrote: post #72
lordnacho wrote: post #10

My view is as a coder if there is real hard work needed, essentially debugging something vexing or a large re-architecting, it needs to be done in an undisturbed 3 hour window, of which I can realistically fit two in a day. Minor coding tasks like documenting and preparing a commit can be done in any amount of time, but crucially it is time that is allowed to be broken up by meals or meetings. Casual skimming over th…

2 3 hour long windows in a day? That’s impressive. Most weeks I can fit one of those in. Workings consultancy is not the best for focus work.

I don't normally have two long things to do in a day, I just have a max capacity of 2x hard things, if that day is not broken up by something.

Long term doing 2 hard things a day for a whole week would probably not be sustainable, either you run out of motivation or you run out of hard tasks.

One of the things you do under "hard tasks" is simplify your code so that subsequent tasks fall under "easy tasks". You trade your "must not disturb" time for "can be stopped and started".

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#108

Post by tardigr8 »

orzig wrote: post #43

Valuable prospective, but (as is the gist of half my comments here): People are even more different than you think. RescueTime wrote a similar post, but +100 data: https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/work-life-balance-study-2019... Look at the second histogram. The average is roughly aligned with OP’s summary, but there is huge variance. These comments have already devolved into people telling each other they are lying,…

Another study here that uses an estimate for productivity.

https://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day.

In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to sleep and exercise than anything else.

Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or meditation), and enough exercise every day to get the heart rate up.

If I don’t do this for a couple of days, I can be unproductive from hour 2 after waking! We managed to implement a defect metric in my previous team that worked well, my defects went through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.

There is a lot of literature on this correlation, but just thought I would share my own experience.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#109

Post by NicoJuicy »

I do believe you can work 18 hours a day, since that's what I'm doing lately.

But i don't think you can repeat it successfully every day. Since the biggest problem is being able to focus.

I normally start with something very trivial that takes like 3 minutes and low effort and then I hope to be "launched".

If it was a difficult/stressing day at work, it won't work.

Re: People don't work as much as they say

#110

Post by ZeroGravitas »

neuroma wrote: post #97
yodsanklai wrote: post #76

There are definitely people who can work and focus for 8+ hours a day. I can think of my dentist and family doctor. Waiting room is full from morning to evening. Some of my colleagues work hard. I can see their screen in the open space. They are machines. Never a distraction on the screen. The article should be "some people don't work so much, I'm one of them".

Can confirm many doctors work insane hours, which are hard to even imagine for people who do office jobs. The notion that you can only do 4 hours of productive work a day is frankly a luxury. If you have 10 hours of work to do, all of which is essential for people's immediate wellbeing, you find ways of being productive.

I've never seen a convincing explanation for why doctors work these long hours that didn't boil down to 'the doctors union restricts the supply of new doctors and limits the tasks that can be delegated to non-doctors'.

As a result, the regular mention of their long hours generally just makes me angry at them rather than grateful to them, but I guess I'm in the minority.

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