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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 57 posts

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

#41

Post by ereckers »

I run a little consultancy, and I'm about where you're at. I need to target around 4 billable hours per day for actual client work. This means I turn the clock on, start working, and when I'm finished or ready to call it quits on that particular project or task the clock is stopped.

I then spend about 2 to 3 hours on administrative, misc project management, emails, research, self-improvement/learning, and personal and business projects. Somewhere in there is some fruitful and non-fruitful time wasting.

On good days, I can crank out 6 hours billable, when really pushing it on deadline that can go to 8 or 10, but that wipes me out for a while afterwards.

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

#42

Post by vemv »

spotman wrote: post #36

It depends how you frame the time in question. Is this 4 hours and 30 minutes of heads down, in the zone, productive work? Or is it a mixture of emails, conference calls, and coding? 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, dependi…

Great input, I feel relieved to read that my 4:30 (of pure coding work) is good, according a profile like yours.

Personally I'm kinda afraid that some developers out there might be pulling actual 8 hours of overhead-free progress, unlike me. Doing that daily would certainly drain me.

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

#43

Post by Gibbon1 »

lordnacho wrote: post #22

There's no such thing as an acceptable amount of hours. Is the goal reached or not? Often in programming, you have this weird situation where spending more time makes the work harder. It is actually possible to dig a hole that makes you further away from the goal, while for the whole time you think you're getting closer. So I try not to get too tired, and I manage deadline expectations. Often you find the right solut…

There is actually an acceptable number of hours, it's somewhere near the number of hours you can work without burning out. For me that is about 5-7 hours a day. Two things I remember, one was an old guy talking about working in a windshield factory, where they made windshields for cars. They had a line. While he was working their they sped it up by 25% and management was happy happy joy joy. The workers were getting run ragged though and after a few weeks the defect rate started creeping up. After a few months the defect rate was so high that they were producing less finished product than when the line speed was slower. Took another year for the plant manager to get fired and bring in a guy who turned the line speed back down.

The other is the first place I worked their were two younger coders and they were being flogged to work 9-10 hours days, basically being given unreasonable deadlines. After a few years they burned out and the company fired them. Twenty years later both of them are still damaged. I did some of the same, hurt my wrist, which is still a little messed up. After that I decided I didn't care I was going to work as much as I though possible and that's that. You only have so many hours a day. Instead of using yourself up, concentrate really hard on not wasting your time.

Me, I've never been fired for not working enough hours.

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

#44

Post by travelton »

Over the past two months, I've had the opportunity to work from home. I've spent the last six years working in an office environment, with the standard "open" workspace.

Within the few months of working from home, I've noticed a radical change in my day. No longer am I interrupted randomly, while in deep thought. I don't veer off to the break room for coffee, and get caught up in conversations. I don't take excessive lunch breaks to stand in lines at a restaurant. Speaking of, it helps the waistline! I have easy access to my full kitchen at home. I digress.....

Anyway, my team is located in central time, so I reap the benefit of distraction free coding between 2PM and 7PM pacific time.

I typically wake up, sit down at my desk at 9AM, and begin my daily routine of checking email, checking out what's new via HN, catching any meetings with folks in the central timezone, etc. Once lunch comes, I take a break, and begin planning what I want to accomplish in my 2-7 distraction free time block.

So, while I do work a full 8 hours, only about 4-5 hours of that time is spent head down in code.

Point is, I certainly agree working 4:30 is probably sufficient, however, for me, I do utilize the other hours of the day to "socialize" and plan "big picture" with my colleagues via video conference. I feel that if I lost the extra time in the mornings, these meetings would overflow in to my distraction free time.

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

#45

Post by Estragon »

jastanton wrote: post #31

To answer your question, If I can get 4-6 hours of solid dev time in I'm a happy camper. "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!

That sounds horrible. Why don't you have the source code?

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

#46

Post by jsegura »

Scea91 wrote: post #17
jsegura wrote: 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. :)

Exactly. You understood it correctly :)

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

#47

Post by jsegura »

joshavant wrote: post #14
jsegura wrote: 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.

We use Jira with Tempo plugin as hour tracking tool. With my approach, I usually log around 6.7 hours per day. This logs goes to a specific story/task.

The only problem that we found is with people coming from consultancy. They are not confident with only having 6 hours per day as they are used to log 8 hours and bill them to a customer.

In general, the team is pretty comfortable with the approach of using 6h/day for estimations in our tasks.

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

#48

Post by vemv »

jastanton wrote: post #31

To answer your question, If I can get 4-6 hours of solid dev time in I'm a happy camper. "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!

As a backend (Rails, in particular) dev, most tasks are really streamlined - I've done them 1000 times before pretty much the same way I would do now. There is room for unpredictability, debugging hours, etc but those are rare.

I can see how frontend or higher-profile backend dev can be more unwieldy/demanding, though.

I made the 90% remark because it is a somewhat common opinion that programmers are completely above the hours thing. Were programming a totally creative activity, I would agree, but it is not.

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

#49

Post by chrisbennet »

I work around 8 hours a day of which around 5 is billable. I work on my own projects and my clients'.

I don't bill for the time I spend researching in bed in the middle of the night to prepare for the next day. I'll wake up at say 3:00am with an idea/solution and I have to research it right then. I email the links to myself. I don't recommend this approach - it's probably not healthy.

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

#50

Post by StavrosK »

cromulent wrote: post #35
suhailpatel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've seen people do this. "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". ":)".

I bill daily, in 8-hour blocks. All those hours belong to my employer, and I do as much work as needed. Any more work than that needs to allocate more 8-hour blocks.

I know that being a salaried employee is different, but if you're letting people work you into 10-hour days, don't.

Post reply on HN