Ai research, first year of my Doctorate I think I work about 40-48 hrs a week including work related reading etc
Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?
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Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?
#62[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?
#63I don't use AI in my day to day (yet, probably) but I am bullish on it in general. I currently work ~8 hour days M-F, typical stuff. > Did the layoff wave push you to work more hours than expected? No. I am a top performer (not a self assessment, officially documented) so I figure I'll be the last to go.
> I figure I'll be the last to go False sense of security. Quite a few other things can take priority over being a top performer, when it comes to cost cutting.
Good point, I've seen top performers laid off because of (what I assume) comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. Top performers may get paid significantly more, and may present more of a challenge to management (or challenge management more).
My layoff survival strategy comes down to costing too much to get rid of. I do that by mastering and turning into the go-to for some critical part of the infrastructure the other developers shun. Most often that means the database, but it could mean the cloud setup or even details of the business domain. If no one else in the organization can take over my work without significant time and cost I will get scratched off the layoff spreadsheet. I survived a few layoffs that way, watching more senior people get walked out.
Of course when your employer starts laying off you should start planning your own exit, but avoiding the first wave or two will give you some breathing room.
Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slightly off topic, but how may I get into your field?
doomscrolling is a competitive environment; HN is a decent start so you are already at a good starting point, although you might want to level-up to FB, or even TikTok for more advanced skills.
I use reddit w/ apollo. It's so good that I am thinking about uninstalling.
Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?
#652 times 8 hours a week, software made my life at work worse (at first it looked like a really good deal then the Government managed to convert my database software to database service with some extra responsibilities on me about uptime). The layoff wave have not touched me yet but since I'm a male Ukrainian, the danger of mobilization is hanging over me which will make my working hours 24 times 7 times 365 times life…
Ugh, I'm sorry. Hopefully they won't ever need to mobilize you. I don't know what I'd do if that happened to me.
Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?
#66Throwaway for obvious reasons. So I probably only work around 1-2 days a week right now, if that. It's not healthy. I have a full time job paying 100k as well as an "on the side" freelance gig paying between 4 and 5k a month. I don't feel guilty as I feel I am still delivering "enough". Will it last forever? Probably not. Will I get more into it? Hopefully. Been in the industry for 20 years, I should be able to retir…
Dream job
Re: Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?
#67Hard to tell, but here's my typical day... I work from home. Wake up at 8am, row for a bit on a machine, shower, make a coffee, and get to work around 8:45. At 9am we have a short daily standup call, which is a bit of a nuisance but okay. Some non-coding research or help the team till lunch. I'll take my wife and we'll walk somewhere far for lunch, around 11:45, sometimes sit down for a coffee, come back around 2pm. By this time I will already have some coding ideas crystallized in my head, so I'll code till 5pm. Go to gym, go have dinner. At this point we're usually at 12-14k steps. Come back around 8pm and work a bit more, maybe till 9:30. If I was good at splitting the task, by this time I'll usually have a PR ready. Then we go have some cocktails or just chill and watch TV. Bedtime at midnight.
So... altogether around 7-8 hours of work, of which at least 5 are coding. I enjoy that since I'm a generalist, sometimes I'll tinker with hardware, sometimes with firmware, sometimes DevOps, sometimes investigate some gnarly SQL, sometimes just write some APIs. So it rarely gets boring for me, even after more than 20 years coding professionally.
RE: AI, I tinkered with it a bit, and maybe something is wrong with my prompts, but it always gives me bullshit code that looks beautiful but is either absolutely wrong, or just fundamentally broken. I do have ChatGPT plus, Copilot and whatnot, and so far neither of them has been any help.