31–40 of 57 posts
"Also, 90% of webdev does not require that much creative hard-thinking imo."
Really? Is this true for people? I'm a web developer, and right now i'm sorting through 30K lines of obfuscated javascript code looking for a bug. A few hours of that and my brain gets pretty tired!
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. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, but that was a bit of an inside joke between coworkers :) As a data point, I am currently full-time employed, it just happens that I prefer full-time being four days a week. I recently made the switch from five to four, and I'm enjoying it immensely.
I really want to do this just so I can get some time to work on my own projects. How did you sell this to your employers (or are they one of a very few shops which do the 4 day week thing like Treehouse)
"I want to work 4 days per week".
"OK, no problem, we will reduce your salary / bonus etc by 20%".
Time passes.
"Ok, I am doing the same job for 80% of the salary and I never make my bonus".
":)".
In my experience managing and being part of various teams and projects for over a decade, I have found that a senior level developer that gets 4 hours of productive work done each day (over a week average, often not in one spurt, depending on the individual) is worth his/her weight in gold.
I always try to encourage 40 hours a week of being online, available, dealing with meetings and whiteboard sessions, but 1/2 of that devoted to heads down work like coding or designing. Often many people that are extremely valuable end up getting less than 20 hours a week of real focused work done in my experience.
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…
If I didn't value that tangential learning time, I would probably be happy with 4.5 hours of solid "productive" work :)
I've worked at three other web firms and always had to pad my "billable hours." A boss gives me a project with "x" amount of hours and I'm not going to say "well, I can do this in half the time," because they'll just give me more work with no additional pay.
If I were truly motivated I would start my own firm. But I don't like dealing with clients or writing functional specs; I only like to code.
"Working", "producing", code grunt-ing, whatever you call it, seems to be what most young folks spend all their time doing in their first few professional years (it's what I did too). This is a good thing, it builds a lot of exposure and raw experience. You may be immersed in (or cranking out) code, fixing bugs, or working directly on your project/product for almost your entire work day, every day.
But at some point, many re-remember that they must learn and grow to advance in their field, and with that comes reading, exploring, trying/failing, as well as non-technical work, like planning/architecting, etc.
Once you start finding that you are pulled out of the code more and more, it's just a sign that "working" and "producing" are getting further from each other for you. And that's not a bad thing.