Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

plumshell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 81 posts

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

#71

Post by jwestbury »

cj wrote: post #43
tkiolp4 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on.

I worked less than anyone else on my team at my last job. I was probably doing "active" work for 3-4 hours a day -- plus meetings. I was also a senior engineer with good performance reviews, and contributed more to the codebases of my team's major projects than anyone else on the team.

It's important to note that I was also often thinking about work when taking my dog for 45-minute middway walks, cooking lunch for myself and my wife, etc.

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

#72

Post by JohnFen »

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…

> creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else

yes indeed. The finest dev work I've done in my life was accomplished entirely in my head while cleaning hotel rooms.

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

#73

Post by bigDinosaur »

distances wrote: post #32
bigDinosaur wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody works exactly to the contract. Except perhaps in the most monitored and hellish workplaces (e.g. Amazon warehouses).

What do you mean? As far as I know, I've always worked according to the contract. Some of my employers had flexible timekeeping, and then I would often work a bit over 40h/week so that I could take extra days off for extended weekend trips when I felt like it.

You've always done things like observed the precise lunch hours (and not taken a single minute more)? This stuff is usually defined in contracts but at least for a professional job in a good workplace is subservient simply to getting the work done rather than literally doing your 7.3 hours of work and 0.7 hours of lunch to the letter. Even doing duties for your job that aren't listed as part of your contract is common. How common is working more than the contract specifies by just a few minutes? And so on. There's a reason Work to Rule strikes [1] are a thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

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

#75

Post by JohnFen »

cesaref wrote: post #55
tkiolp4 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ho…

Exactly this. When I've had employees, the only thing I've cared about is: are they producing acceptable work within the needed time frame? If so, it doesn't matter if they're working one hour a day or eight. It also doesn't matter if they are in the office or not (in practice, about half preferred to be in the office, about half not).

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

#77

Post by averageRoyalty »

cj wrote: post #62
meiraleal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. The amount they pay is a function of supply and demand of workers and the necessity of filling the position within the company. And juniors are getting paid above 100k usd. Deal with it. > Construction workers have the ability to build and destroy buildings probably more easily than SWEs can build or destroy companies. Sure but they would go to jail. The programmers that destroyed companies by creating better o…

> The programmers that destroyed companies by creating better open source alternatives not only didn't go to jail but managed to build multi-million dollar businesses. Which then becomes too big at some point and ready to be disrupted again. I’m not sure what your point is. Isn’t this a good thing? Lots of opportunity for you to leverage the full value of your skillset to maximize your earning potential by starting a…

$120k USD is triple the median and double the average wage of the highest paying countries in the world. It's not "fine", it's absolutely absurd and puts a junior into the top 20% of earners _globally_. It's grossly overpaid, and people need to appreciate that more.

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

#78

Post by holden_nelson »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #77
cj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The programmers that destroyed companies by creating better open source alternatives not only didn't go to jail but managed to build multi-million dollar businesses. Which then becomes too big at some point and ready to be disrupted again. I’m not sure what your point is. Isn’t this a good thing? Lots of opportunity for you to leverage the full value of your skillset to maximize your earning potential by starting a…

$120k USD is triple the median and double the average wage of the highest paying countries in the world. It's not "fine", it's absolutely absurd and puts a junior into the top 20% of earners _globally_. It's grossly overpaid, and people need to appreciate that more.

That, to me, says more about how other professions are underpaid, or perhaps just that software creates a lot of value. The work my team is directly responsible for generates tens of millions of dollars for my company - 120k feels appropriate.

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

#80

Post by val314159 »

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…

sounds like it's 3 hours of coding / day + 5-10 hours a day preparing for and thinking about the problem. that's 7-12 hours / day if you add in an hour's worth of breaks. sounds billable to me!
Post reply on HN