111–120 of 313 posts
Eh, I know it's just an expression but I automatically distrust awfully presumptuous stuff like "as much as you think". The author doesn't have the slightest idea what I think, yet he proclaims to know better and tries to correct me. Rant aside, it is my experience that the vast majority of people are useless bums. Pretty sure that's nurture as opposed to nature, though. If it weren't learned behaviour, people wouldn…
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,…
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,…
I think you're completely right, however I'd love to see a graph of average work time claims on HN plotted against this. There's no denying that there are far more people claiming they work 60-80 hour weeks than would collate with the data that you and OP have provided. I think these people are generally overworked but are also poor assessors of their own performance, taking worst cases as averages and calling a day…
Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime. Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki binge etc..
We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project admin would average 20% of total team time. “Firefighting” which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%.
If you don’t believe someone who says they work X hours per week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn’t realize until we spent the time to log it.
If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made you more productive in the hours you do work.
> Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work. Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my…
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 don't think people who say they work 14 hours a day are lying. They just count in everything that is somehow related to their job, like reading about their business in the newspaper or thinking about work in the shower. And that's the crux of the matter, in jobs that don't have clearly assigned shifts or where attendance is measured, the boundaries between work and leisure become blurred. And then again, comparison…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you are good at coding, then you code for a day and create something you are proud of. +1 to self worth.
You send it for code review or deploy and you get positive feedback. +2 to self worth.
A junior dev in house or browsing your open source project loves your code and asks for advice. +3 to self worth.
Compared to.
Go out to a social event for lunch, struggle through the social interactions.
Maybe drink a bit too much because you are stressed.
Get caught in a difficult spot when you tell someone they are wrong (which they were, but you were being rude).
Hang around for the whole afternoon / evening because you told yourself you have to make this work and get a life.
End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.
This is the life of a few socially awkward (and usually high iq) people I have had the pleasure of meeting. And myself.
I think it is healthy to take the second option, get a life, learn to make relationships.
But it’s the hard option. Sitting at the IDE and being good at what you are good at, is much easier.
The pandemic enabled me to work 3 full time jobs as a software dev 12h a day and I'm making tons of cash and I love it. Burned down a little but I have ways to keep that under control.
Three full-time jobs is 120 hours a week or more than 17 hours every single day, which would leave you with less than 7 hours for food, hygiene, sleep and spending all that cash you're making.