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How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

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Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#171

Post by rajathagasthya »

barry-cotter wrote: post #135
rajathagasthya wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? They are talking specifically about students a.k.a people who are literate and have a degree. How's citing literacy or poverty statistics relevant?

India has real problems. Needing to take out a large loan to get a tertiary education when you have completed secondary education in a country where a quarter of the population are illiterate is not a problem. The money that is spent on making education free for students at a tertiary level could be spent on improving primary education and it should be. No state in India is as rich as Ireland was in 1970. That's arou…

> The money that is spent on making education free for students at a tertiary level could be spent on improving primary education and it should be.

Sources on that? Education is not free at a tertiary level. It's just really cheap. Also, your premise is completely opposite to the reality. Primary education in India has seen huge progress. Yes, there's still room for improvement, but the plans are in place. For example, public schools are mostly free and girls below a certain age gets free education. The concern is about low higher education enrollment levels, which stood only at about 24% in 2013 [1]. If tertiary education was free, this should've been much higher.

Coming back to the original comment, people usually don't take huge loans for education in India like in the US. So the chances of you being homeless if you lose your job is lower.

[1] http://data.uis.unesco.org/

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#172

Post by coldtea »

ScottAS wrote: post #160
j7ake wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to be thinking of a career of 30+ years rather than a 3 year sprint. It's cool you're spending your time producing, but don't forget you need to take care of yourself and hone your fundamentals (linear algebra, data structures, algorithms, your field).

Well... As pg mentions in one of his essays: the startup game is about getting the rewards of a 30 year career out of 4 years. If you truly believe that you are building something that matters and you are going to win, 80 hour weeks make a lot of sense.

As pg doesn't mention though, statically you won't reap "the rewards of a 30 year career out of 4 years" regardless of how hard you work and whether you "truly believe that you are building something that matters and you are going to win".

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#173

Post by coldtea »

Sorreah wrote: post #66
LoSboccacc wrote: post #59

A: you hire young one that have no idea what they're doing and jump into problems both feet without thinking a path ahead and for every programmer claims to work that much, you also get two of them complaining on the costant shit the overworked one produces and have to fix strange bug half their time eventually the software becomes a mess of tangled issues and advancement grinds to an halt irregardless of amount of t…

My last job was exactly that. I was dropped in as an almost-30 year old, working with young 20 year olds still in school. I was fired a few months later, with the main reason being that I usually left the office 9 or 10 hours after coming in and only occasionally worked the 12+ hour days that the rest did. With a small codebase and self contained projects, I can't really say quality suffered. Only the employees.

>I was fired a few months later, with the main reason being that I usually left the office 9 or 10 hours after coming in and only occasionally worked the 12+ hour days that the rest did.

Such practices are illegal (or at least frowned upon) in most of the civilized world.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#174

Post by brogrammernot »

TP4Cornholio wrote: post #30
brogrammernot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, yes. However, I would say typical early stage startup work is 55 hours/week. Basically 10 hours day through the week, and a couple hours on the weekend.

What's your experience on the average workweek for mid/later stage startups?

Again, n=1 but I've experienced and have friends who have experienced around 50 hours/week for mid/later stage startups.

The stress is lower because you usually have more cash flow or significant rounds that make the work more enjoyable and you have a better comfort of working overall.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#175

Post by olgeorge »

lloeki wrote: post #92
LoSboccacc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge time sink is thinking. I just mentally plan the most effective and long term solution before coding the task at hand, so whatever I write doesn't come to bite me later. From the outside, it looks like I'm fiddling. And most of the time, it goes on even when on in office because the mind can't be turned on and off easily it goes on and on ever at home

> From the outside, it looks like I'm fiddling. Indeed, sometimes I'm stuck "watching" something on the screen (it looks like I'm watching a movie) maybe for extended periods of time. Then suddenly I jump and grab a pen and paper, and in a couple of minutes I get everything I've been building up written down, which helps me in solving the last details. The opposite is true too, sometimes I'm in a bind and can't get m…

What are you guys coding that makes you think so much? Most of the time I either code or research a particular tech. I rarely have to think about stuff too much...

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#176

Post by olgeorge »

mack73 wrote: post #73
drblast wrote: post #11

I seem to be alone in this, but I actually do about 25-30 hours of actual programming work each week. And that's sit-down-and-concentrate-and-build-shit work. I'm pretty ruthless about declining extraneous meetings and I keep my door closed most of the time. I think it's reasonable to have 25% of a 40-hour week be for meetings, helping other people, eating lunch, sitting in on interviews, and learning/trying out new…

Putting in 25-30 good, quality hours at work each week and then 30 more hours a week on my pet project, I would not classify an hour as good depending on if I produced code or not. A good hour too me is one where I could keep my concentration on work, thinking or coding. It's doable, working two shifts. It takes a 30 minute walk from work to home to reset and prepare myself for shift #2. If my boss want both those sh…

Most jobs require 8 hour day. If you add 6 on top of that, plus walk to-from work, that's 15 hours per day on just work. When do you sleep and eat?

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#177

Post by gorthol »

That how I would maximize developer productivity (but NOT working hours) if I owned a company:

- Let them work at home, at any time they want. Just reserve some hours for meetings or stand-ups if you want. Don't control the hours, control that the tasks are progressing.

- Open source parts of the codebase, let the developers own some modules or components on their github accounts. This way the quality of the code will be a personal matter to them.

- If shit goes down or hard deadlines approach (this happens) pay overtime and do a post-mortem analysis of what happened but DON'T turn that into a blame fest just cold analysis because most often than not its random factors of life (downtime for family or health reasons, whatever) and of coding not being a hard science (that external library that looked so sweet turned a minefield for example ) the real causes. Anybody trying to do that in the postmortem should be called out.

- If the last point happens too much, fire the manager/lead/CTO (normal programmers should be fired too sometimes but only when their performance is substandard and this is sometimes that will be easy to see day by day).

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#178

Post by gorthol »

drblast wrote: post #11

I seem to be alone in this, but I actually do about 25-30 hours of actual programming work each week. And that's sit-down-and-concentrate-and-build-shit work. I'm pretty ruthless about declining extraneous meetings and I keep my door closed most of the time. I think it's reasonable to have 25% of a 40-hour week be for meetings, helping other people, eating lunch, sitting in on interviews, and learning/trying out new…

I've bursts. Sometimes I can work three days non stop and sometimes I strugle to write any good code. Luckily I've some margin to decide on what to work every day so I do documentation or unit/integration testing the days my brain is downclocked.

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#179

Post by [deleted] »

tomsmeding wrote: post #33
harrygallagher4 wrote: post #3

My first programming job (actually, just my first job) was technically a 40 hour/week job, but in the employee handbook it said something along the lines of: "The day is typically regarded as 8AM to 8PM." They didn't pay very well either. Brian is right, I totally hated my job, hated my boss, hated pretty much the entire company, and quit in 5 months. I was pretty disappointed. I'm still cautious about getting back i…

That sounds horrible. I'm still at university anyway, but it seems to me that there should be a mechanism for detecting these companies and shutting them down , if they don't recover. I sincerely hope you'll find a job (industry, academia or otherwise) doing something you like doing in a place that you like. Good luck!

[deleted]

Re: How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

#180

Post by rhapsodic »

coldtea wrote: post #173
Sorreah wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last job was exactly that. I was dropped in as an almost-30 year old, working with young 20 year olds still in school. I was fired a few months later, with the main reason being that I usually left the office 9 or 10 hours after coming in and only occasionally worked the 12+ hour days that the rest did. With a small codebase and self contained projects, I can't really say quality suffered. Only the employees.

> I was fired a few months later, with the main reason being that I usually left the office 9 or 10 hours after coming in and only occasionally worked the 12+ hour days that the rest did. Such practices are illegal (or at least frowned upon) in most of the civilized world.

> Such practices are illegal (or at least frowned upon) in most of the civilized world.

It's called "employment-at-will", and it's not that uncommon.

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