People don't work as much as they say
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People don't work as much as they say
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Re: People don't work as much as they say
#24 hours a day of real work seems low, but certainly not 40 hours a week.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#34 hours a day of real work seems low, but certainly not 40 hours a week.
What do you define as "real" work? In most productive days of coding I get 4/5 "real" hours of focused, concentrated work. Very, very rarely would I get more than 6 without finishing the day mentally exhausted.
Meetings? Doing more than two back-to-back, hour-long meetings is an ordeal if you want a productive meeting. You can sit there and stare into space for far longer, or just keep minimum attention. But intelligent debate with multiple individuals for longer than that is hard to pull off, especially if you also want to get the productive work as mentioned above.
Meetings of the "just being present" and responding various, random emails that need little care? Feel free to spend 10 hours a day on those, for sure.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#4I can quibble with the specific hours, but this resonates a lot with me.
My average day looks something like:
Hour 0-0.5: Get ready for the workday - messages, email, write standup report, take a shower.
Hour 0.5-1: standup meeting + offline meetings.
Hour 1-2: meetings or brain work
Hour 2-3: mealtime, active availability
Hour 3-5: active availability, light work, meetings
Hour 5-7: brain work (I do my best brain work at the end of the day typcially)
I'd be curious what others schedules look like.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#5My uncle used to work for McDonnell Douglas and regaled me with stories of people standing around or hanging out in the parking lot, basically getting payed to do jack all. At the time he told me this, almost 40 yrs ago now, they were in a slump and were laying off. Nepotism in the hiring practice was prevalent. I would have fired him, personally. Needless to say one can expect most "industries" to be very similar.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#64 hours a day of real work seems low, but certainly not 40 hours a week.
As a programmer, I've always felt that, on an average, 4 hours of actual work gets done by me on a daily basis.
This does not include meetings, communication etc.
This is essentially the time spent towards a tangible deliverable.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#7Maybe pair programming doesn't look so bad after all?
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#8I worked really too much today. I had 10 meetings!!
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#94 hours a day of real work seems low, but certainly not 40 hours a week.
What do you define as "real" work? In most productive days of coding I get 4/5 "real" hours of focused, concentrated work. Very, very rarely would I get more than 6 without finishing the day mentally exhausted. Meetings? Doing more than two back-to-back, hour-long meetings is an ordeal if you want a productive meeting. You can sit there and stare into space for far longer, or just keep minimum attention. But intellig…
4 to 5 hours of real, focused, concentrated work is impressive. I take a long time to recover from a meeting and they're usually in the middle of my day, almost every work day, and often there's more than one. They're also exhausting so I'll have lost some vibrancy by the time I do get back in the flow of actual work.
Re: People don't work as much as they say
#10My view is as a coder if there is real hard work needed, essentially debugging something vexing or a large re-architecting, it needs to be done in an undisturbed 3 hour window, of which I can realistically fit two in a day.
Minor coding tasks like documenting and preparing a commit can be done in any amount of time, but crucially it is time that is allowed to be broken up by meals or meetings. Casual skimming over the code for ideas is also in this category, eg scanning for random TODOs that can be checked off.
I try to gather all my regular calls on the same day, that way I get it out of the way with the least amount of context switching.