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Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

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Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#51

Post by Sai_ »

meiraleal wrote: post #49
cj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on. One day, there are threads here saying $120k is considered underpaid for an entry level dev out of a bootcamp. The next day, we talk about how all the RTO companies are only doing it because managers want to feel productive. The day after that, there are threads of remote d…

The devs "boasting" (that is your perspective, not the reality) are probably the ones generating more revenue for those companies wanting "us" back in the office (are you a SWE?). There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best (and others who might not be considered the best) for significant sums - they are worth it. Yes, we are underpaid. Just look at the bank balances of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Sof…

A software engineer can create but can they sell? Can something you create be worth a billion dollars without selling it? Even the highest selling piece of art tops out at a few dozen million dollars...

I fear you may have a very skewed sense of a software engineer's place in the world.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#52

Post by cesaref »

brigadier132 wrote: post #39
cesaref wrote: post #14

The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is). However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problem…

I find I need at least 2 hours of continuous focus to get any real work done and 3 hours to be really productive. If I start at 9:00 am and have no meetings in the morning that means I can get a meaningful piece of work done by the time I eat lunch. Then if I have no meetings in the afternoon I can get another meaningful chunk of work done. Oftentimes though, days are wasted because of meetings thrown in haphazardly.

Sounds like you are working on deep complex systems - i totally get the experience of needing a couple of hours to stare at how the system behaves before the lightbulb moment when you realise how a simple change will achieve what you want (ideally!).

There are other times when it's a bit more greenfield and just fiddling around gets your ideas straight and you can be productive even with interruptions.

We tend to work with a backlog of simpler and harder problems, and part of the skill of prioritisation is deciding what mood you are in, and being realistic about how much time you have to focus on a problem, and hence what sort of problem or feature is worth tackling that day.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#53

Post by ekianjo »

wesselbindt wrote: post #18
ekianjo wrote: post #11

We'd have much less pieces from Mozart if he had followed such advice

Saying that OP's point doesn't/wouldn't/shouldn't apply to an extremely exceptional case is a tautology (and this is even assuming that Mozart didn't already follow OP's advice in the first place, which you haven't exactly established). Here's a more interesting example, which at least shows that it doesn't apply to a much larger category of jobs than genius composer: If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice,…

> If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice, much fewer packages would get shipped.

How so? Amazon is known for tracking performance very strictly. They will find the sweet spot for performance in case they see an opportunity.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#54

Post by bfung »

ilyt wrote: post #16
kleiba wrote: post #9

Not convincing to me. I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend. Especially th…

Pretty much. Near-everything aside from "one man project hacking" will have some amount of "office hours" just used to coordinate with co-workers, plan, code review, or frankly just doing stuff like reading the docs or specs. Even assuming "you can only do 3 productive hours a day" (which is a lie with appeal to authority mixed in. "Look that guy that made shitty web framework did it, it must be good!"), that does ap…

Being in the zone def is a thing.

The longest lasting and easiest to extend software I’ve cobbled together (and some still running in production after 20yrs) were me designing for 18+hrs straight, share general idea w/team, then furiously writing for 36hrs. Those spurts were always the most productive and setup future work to be easy to add on.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#55

Post by cesaref »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #20
cesaref wrote: post #14

The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is). However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problem…

> I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right. And how many unproductive hours of work do you spend per day? I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about worki…

When i've employed people, I tend to be focussed on their ability to get stuff done, and being responsive to requests, especially external users of the system. Hours spent at the desk is just a proxy for the above, and there are better ways of measuring it these days, so i'd think that your bosses will be cool with this unless that have a rather different mentality.

I've worked with people with very strict working hours who will never respond to an email outside of those hours, and other people who would be late into the office most days, but would respond to a support problem at 11pm at the weekend. We're not all the same, and there is strength in depth.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#56

Post by mark_l_watson »

Whatever works for the author, he is self employed. For most companies I have worked for I would get to the office very early in order to have at least 90 minutes of total concentration before other people came to work. I would usually leave work around 3PM, a few hours before other people left work. That always worked really well for me. During the day, I would routinely shut my door for a while and relax.

re: author of article: I wonder if he does technology learning activities outside his 3 hour work window?

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#57

Post by meiraleal »

Sai_ wrote: post #51
meiraleal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devs "boasting" (that is your perspective, not the reality) are probably the ones generating more revenue for those companies wanting "us" back in the office (are you a SWE?). There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best (and others who might not be considered the best) for significant sums - they are worth it. Yes, we are underpaid. Just look at the bank balances of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Sof…

A software engineer can create but can they sell? Can something you create be worth a billion dollars without selling it? Even the highest selling piece of art tops out at a few dozen million dollars... I fear you may have a very skewed sense of a software engineer's place in the world.

Why do you believe that software engineers can't sell? Many programmers have created billion-dollar companies, more than any other profession.

The world's largest companies today were founded by software engineers. There's no inherent need for a designated "business" person within a tech company.

And we didn't even talk about FOSS and indie development which are both as big as big tech and driven exclusively by programmers.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#58

Post by cj »

meiraleal wrote: post #49
cj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on. One day, there are threads here saying $120k is considered underpaid for an entry level dev out of a bootcamp. The next day, we talk about how all the RTO companies are only doing it because managers want to feel productive. The day after that, there are threads of remote d…

The devs "boasting" (that is your perspective, not the reality) are probably the ones generating more revenue for those companies wanting "us" back in the office (are you a SWE?). There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best (and others who might not be considered the best) for significant sums - they are worth it. Yes, we are underpaid. Just look at the bank balances of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Sof…

> There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best [..] for significant sums - they are worth it.

No. The amount they pay is a function of supply and demand of workers and the necessity of filling the position within the company.

> Software engineers aren't illiterate construction workers.

Construction workers have the ability to build and destroy buildings probably more easily than SWEs can build or destroy companies.

Just like a skyscraper is more than just concrete and steel, a software company is way more than just code.

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#59

Post by Paul-Craft »

hereonout2 wrote: post #25
BlueTemplar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am an indie iPhone developer

Indeed! As a more senior programmer at a large corporate, I'm lucky if I only have three hours of meetings per day.

But are those meetings "work" in the sense he's talking about? I would guess that for most people, most meetings are not "work."

Re: Work only 3 hours a day, but everyday (2016)

#60

Post by Paul-Craft »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #24
wesselbindt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that OP's point doesn't/wouldn't/shouldn't apply to an extremely exceptional case is a tautology (and this is even assuming that Mozart didn't already follow OP's advice in the first place, which you haven't exactly established). Here's a more interesting example, which at least shows that it doesn't apply to a much larger category of jobs than genius composer: If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice,…

Amazon would just hire more workers... (They are paying them by the hour, aren't they?)

I doubt you could get enough people to want to show up to a 3 hour a day, 7 day a week job, and still be able to run a warehouse at the same cost.
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