What do people consider an average work week?
I do 37.5hrs religiously and have never had a problem. A good fraction of developers at head office do 30-32hrs (4 days/wk).
The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
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Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#12Finally, you'll need to have the self-confidence or stubbornness to choose and stick to a path that most people don't take. You don't need self-confidence or stubbornness, just commitment to your principles... I have never worked more than 40 hours per week for anyone else. Ever. I arrive at 8. I leave at 5. I don't work from home. Except for emergencies. My definition of emergency: If someone is dying or their produ…
most people just don't have the balls to draw a line and not cross it, mainly because of fear. simple as that.
Most people also don't set an alarm on their phone for 4:59 at which point they leave no matter what is happening. Not saying the GP is that person, but there are certainly extremes on both ends of the spectrum (working 80 hours a week v. refusing to work 8h 0m 1s under any non-emergency circumstance no matter what), and I've worked with both of them and neither are very enjoyable to be around.
I've had meetings scheduled that go past the end of my day. Or on a day where I work a different schedule (6-2 or 10-6 or whatever) a normal meeting outside of my schedule for the day. Sometimes professionalism dictates you suck it up and work more than 8 hours in a day. If you have a reasonable manager, just work less than 8 the next day! It's not that big of a deal, and to say "well I'll be in for 8 hours tomorrow so I'm leaving now you can go to hell" is not a reasonable way to handle it.
I don't think it has anything to do with fear. It has to do with understanding that life (yes even non-emergency events) don't always fit into a neat 8-hour or 9-hour window, and adjusting yourself accordingly.
I've often worked 10 or more hours in a day for non emergency reasons. I've often worked 5 hours or less in a day to make up for it. I still manage a roughly 40 hour or less work week and it's no less "sane" than any other approach.
Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#13I don't know what's the perfect amount of work every week, but I'm sure anything > 40h is wrong, and you should add commute time if more than 30min/day, otherwise it's a fake figure. In 36-40h/week it's possible to do a lot of things. If you can't often is not because of the time, but because the same people wanting you to work more vaporize your time with meetings, conference calls, emails, phone calls, at a rate that makes it impossible for you to work. Or your coworkers are tempesting you with questions. Or your boss is switching your goal every day not allowing you to produce properly. Or you lack discipline to sit down and work instead of surfing random websites. Anyway whatever the problem is, the solution is NEVER to work more than 40h. Working more can just lead to a shitty life, depression, burn-out, and so forth.
Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#14Where I live IT workers are not fairly valued, the average one can charge and still get contracts is around USD $30/hr. As such, reducing working hours will make it really difficult to pay bills (forget about early retirement). So, instead of working less I work on developing products that bring in passive income. These products are not the next ubers, just small B2B apps that serve local/niche markets. I started this strategy a couple of years ago and now half my income comes from selling my time while the other half comes from selling saas. Furthermore, time is limited so income from selling dev hours can only increase if rates increase or if extra hands are hired. Selling saas does not have this growth restriction.
Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#15I read up to the part where he said he worked at google, then shut my computer down and jumped out of a window.
It IS always Google isn't it? That's what turned me off of Quora. For me every other post is, "I work at Google and I think this", or the flip side someone asking about Google.
Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#16Just put in my two week's notice yesterday. I've been putting in a stupid amount of hours (80+) while my colleagues in other departments barely hit the 40 hour mark. This is a good omen.
Why put in your notice? Why not just cut back your hours? Especially if everybody else is - walking out seems a little drastic in this case.
Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#17The problem is never more working hours. Nobody minds working extra hours as long as they are paid for it. The problem really is companies expecting people to do far more then anything they are ready to pay for. Sometime its even more worse when a few people have to make up for other people, and then watch the lazy group get rewarded better for political reasons. The real issue is resentment not extra working hours.
They don't?
Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#18I went to a talk once on leadership. One of the suggestions was to get your "go to hell kit" ready. That is, get enough money in the bank (whatever that means for you) so that you can walk away if things cross your personal lines, be they moral / work-life balance, whatever. It's a good thing if there's pressure to work silly hours. In my first job (recent grad) before I left the job, I'd been working 5 weekends stra…
> You're just reducing your hourly rate.
This is how I've always explained to people who constantly work overtime in salaried positions where they don't actually get paid for that overtime.
You can at look at it one of 2 ways.
1. Your billable self stopped at the 8-hour mark on a given weekday and every hour after that, including weekends, you're just giving away free labor to the company. Just think about that every time you're working overtime, every minute after 8-hours you're freely giving away to the company. This is your personal free time.
2. Or, like patrickdavey said, you dilute your hourly worth. Say you're a dev who makes $90K, that's roughly $43.xx/hr for a 40 hour work week. But if you're actually working 50hr work weeks you're now worth $34.xx, and so on. The company just saved money on you (or they are making money off you).
Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#19The problem is never more working hours. Nobody minds working extra hours as long as they are paid for it. The problem really is companies expecting people to do far more then anything they are ready to pay for. Sometime its even more worse when a few people have to make up for other people, and then watch the lazy group get rewarded better for political reasons. The real issue is resentment not extra working hours.
> Nobody minds working extra hours as long as they are paid for it.
"As long as they are paid for it" may already be fairyland. A usual clause in employment contracts for developers in Germany goes like "The salary is X per month. Overtime is satisfied by this."
Re: The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
#20One red flag is this: does a company zealously track every hour of vacation time but not even give you a place to log overtime? These two things should be treated with equal importance because they are fundamentally the same measurement. If they expect you to take precisely 2 weeks of vacation a year then be sure to reward them by doing precisely 8 hours of work each day. If they have leniency in vacation, reward them with some leniency in when you are willing to handle emergency situations.