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How many hours do you work a day (developers)?

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Re: How many hours do you work a day (developers)?

#11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, 8 billable hours (four days a week), 6-8 productive hours, depending on how stressful the day is.

"Oh hey... someone else working 4 day weeks, just like Stavro... oh..."

That's pretty conclusive proof that I'm the only person here working four days a week!

Re: How many hours do you work a day (developers)?

#12
It depends on the tickets I'm assigned, and that can be feast or famine. I don't possess any decision making power in the tasks I am assigned, and to be honest I'd rather not have it.

Sometimes the tasks I'm assigned are merely to reconnoiter the feasibility of taking action, and not to actually develop or commit code changes.

In other cases I'll be asked to change something that required 30 seconds of effort. Maybe flipping the value of a configuration flag from true to false, et c.

On average, I'll deal with tickets that involve several hours of stepping through nested loops in a debugger and inspecting log output, or wading through long-running SQL queries, and then committing changes that improve upon an existing body of work.

More rare are the intermediate tickets, that might take days and weeks of effort, and roll up into a larger project spanning many weeks or months across multiple developers. Tickets that keep me continuously tasked for multiple days at a time experience differing degrees of productivity, depending on hundreds of variables, and some of those variables are the work environment.

If something's really important and difficult, and the colleagues I'm delivering it to possess an understanding that it requires my undivided attention, then I'm provided with exactly that. I'll ask for a quiet office to camp out in, with a door I can lock, if I need it.

No matter what, I'm in the office, regardless of whether I'm idle, during a dead zone of activity while we wait for other people to provide requests or complete planning through interminable daily hours-long meetings, or whether I'm swamped in a firestorm of emergencies that divide my attention across several immediate worries.

At the end of the day, I'm paid for my time, and sometimes that pay is what will retain me through period of waiting for my turn at the trigger. If you don't pay me for that time, then I'm a temp, and not a regular, full-time employee. That's how it works.

I'm not a founder, or a partner, so I don't receive bonuses or a share of profits based on the success of calculated risks. In exchange for that, I accept the status of a regular persistent relationship. Eight hours a day, 50% of my waking time on this plain of existence, on call as a resident expert.

I stopped worrying about a perfect, even flow of continuous, normalized engagement a long time ago. Almost every field out there has varying degrees of hurry-up-and-wait temperament, and that comes with the nature of human interaction.

It's not productive to mince parsimonious hours and minutes, in my opinion, when it doesn't reflect the realities of human interaction.

Re: How many hours do you work a day (developers)?

#14
post #13

In our office we work around 8 hours per day. We use Agile (Scrum) but we count only 6 hours per day. We recognize that we spend around 2 hours in overhead tasks (informal meetings, tasks not listed in the sprint and some not-job related work.

This is one of the most realistic approaches to project management that I've ever heard of.

Re: How many hours do you work a day (developers)?

#16
3 - 5 hours at my day job, 5 - 9 hours running my startup(s)/consultancy.

I leave some videos running before I sleep so I could hear/learn something new before I sleep.

I also work through weekends.

I think it is too much, but as a Syrian, I don't have the birth advantage of having a first-world country passport, I have to keep both the job (allows me to have the visa), and I make a lot of money which I can spend on family and building my own dreams.

Re: How many hours do you work a day (developers)?

#17
post #13

In our office we work around 8 hours per day. We use Agile (Scrum) but we count only 6 hours per day. We recognize that we spend around 2 hours in overhead tasks (informal meetings, tasks not listed in the sprint and some not-job related work.

You still get paid for 8 right? You count only 6 for estimates. Just clarifying that I understood correctly. :)

Re: How many hours do you work a day (developers)?

#19
I used to work at one of the big corporations, and most people there probably worked ~10h a day, but was only paid for their 8h/day contract and given no overtime. I'm building my own company now, and honestly it consumes most of each day each week. The difference is, at my old job I'd spend ~8 of those 10 hours doing work that was mind-numbing and/or stressful, and only ~2 working on something I really enjoy. Even though I've probably done ~12-14h each day so far this month, I usually spend <1h of each day doing work I don't really want to do (invoicing, reducing the backlog of important-but-interesting issues on the queue, etc.), so I actually enjoy most of my day.
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