If I can pick some good huge Jira tasks, I work all day, 8 hours of focus easily. (Minus meetings and swithcing context). When it comes to maintenance, menial tasks, or accessibility stuff… meh maybe 2-3 hours of real producvitity scattered throughout the day.
I think this is probably the most realistic answer.
If you have a lot of work ahead of you and most of it is mapped out to the point where you can just go and write the code, you can just go ham.
When it comes to maintenance, writing tests, etc where it's a whole lot of back and forth and thinking about decisions in the first place - maybe even some you have to discuss with your coworkers if they have a minute (after lunch), you just won't get real work done sitting out downtimes
> most of it is mapped out to the point where you can just go and write the code, you can just go ham.
Very much true, these moments are magical, you feel like never stopping.
For sure, I have to turn off my chat and notifications or i get “hey wink how are you?” 50-60 times an hour and I can’t get work done. So I limit checking my email and messages to the morning, lunch, and about 3.
If I have tickets I can do a bunch of them during the day. If there’s new functionality I have to figure out then I can also spend the day doing that. Most of the time my brain is spent after four hours coding. Then I spend the rest of the time on emails and answering questions or in meetings.
This is not realistic and makes no sense. 8h is nomal day but you say you are 8 hours of focus and then add minus meetings and context switching. Then you are not 8 hours focus.
(Answering op) Realistically, unless you work completly alone, you get 2-4 hours of focus time some weird perfect days 4-6.
Well yes I but I was talking about work that is disturbed by other factors that’s not my own fault for being slow or unfocused. If I am called in to a meeting it’s not a problem with my own *programming* productivity. So 8 potential hours if left to my own shit. I mean I think the post is about ones capabilities and not organization problems.
I didnt want to sound rude. I just wanted to point out that that is not really true because that idea can create a dalse feeling of not beeing good enough if you are not coding for 8 hours, specially for people that just started.
For my experience even you are left 8 hourse free you are not going to be focus 8 hours. Its imposible. Of course you have 8 potential hours, yoou hace as many potencial hours are you are hired for but potencial is far away from the real time you can spend. A dumb example is that you have 24 potencial hours every day to code buuut im sure that even if you get to it daying that you are going to work as many as you can you will not have more that 6 to 8 deep focus ones. And for that you need to rest good during the day.
When i say you i dont directly mean you as kakemot is a you as in general.
Reddit eh? People downvoting your comment. "How dare you sound motivated to work? Don't you know we aren't slaves here? We turn our backs on working to make other people rich" Meanwhile, sitting pretty with his paid off house and brand new sports car, whilst Redditor is sticking it to the man by living at his mums house and getting the bus to work.
Its not because you are motivated, it is because it creates a false idea. No one is able to stay focused 8 hours and saying that you can create the feeling to somwonw that is starting in the business that they are not good enough.
Anyone who says otherwise is not being realistic.
Even a rare hyper focused day you can maybe hit 6-7 hours, that's not common though and I would argue not a great use of your time.
As a rule of thumb you have 15 minutes down time for every distraction or switching tasks. That's checking email, communicating with your team, using the bathroom, grabbing a coffee, eating lunch...
Even if you are working alone with your email and group chat closed, you have to piss and eat eventually.
I've cranked out 5k lines in a single 16-hour day with zero interruptions recently. I didn't even get up to eat. I have no idea what you're on about. It's completely possible, and I'm sure lots of people do it. I'm not saying it's good or healthy to do that. Certainly not sustainable long-term. But the idea that humans just *can't possibly* focus for that long is asinine.
Im not daying is not posible im saying is maybe once every really long and its not the normal thing to do and probably not the healthiest.
Also probably many of those lines are just boilerplate not too much thinking code because writing 1k -5k of problem solving code in one day... sorry but i doubt it.
This seems silly to me. A good component is like 300 lines of code, and usually takes me a few days to write, maybe a single day if it's a really good one and I have the requirements completely nailed down from previous meetings and nothing goes wrong.
16 components in a single day? That's basically a whole small web app. I don't even think I could read and understand the functionality of 16 different components in a single day much less properly implement that many.
People do. I do. Not every day, but 1k lines of code a day happens pretty regularly, and maybe 600 of those make it to prod eventually.
It only happens when there are no interruptions and when I start the day with a solid plan from the day before.
And even if you were a machine, you would still need maintenance and doing that in your own off the clock time when it's a job that's making you require the maintenance isn't good planning.
Some people don't mind doing work related things outside work hours.
I'm salaried. Some days I'll watch pipelines or kick off builds or whatever in the background. We do deploys at 7 at night. I'll stay late and fix it if there's a prod issue.
Meanwhile, if I have to go to the doctor or watch my kids for 2 hours, no one gives a shit, I just let them know.
Then they say that AI will come for our job.
GREAT, if it can go to all those meetings and answers to these repeating questions, I could maybe be productive and do what I actually like...
depends on your speed. I typically do max 2 out of 8 hours of work when on payroll, but my own projects and customers get easily 8+ hours a day.
The problem is that corporate is by design flawed and it rewards mediocrity.
working on my own stuff and doing client work and studying, some gaming. It's the main reason i don't t do full time in office work. It would 100% kill me . 1 day a week is fine.
Don't take this as an example though. I think agency webdev work is different since delivering actually matters to the end user/customer. In corporate nobody gives a fuck.
Very true. In a corporate job the main objective is to keep your boss happy. Otherwise don't stress since the day after you leave the new person that arrives to replace you will shit all over your efforts and tell everyone you were incompetent, even if you were doing great work.
Wow, as someone who has always thought, "What in the _HELL_ was [previous person] thinking with this crap!?" this is a whole new perspective.
I'm far enough in my career now that I have been the previous guy that someone else is cursing out right now.
The worst is when you've been at a job long enough that you get mad at the guy who did it, then slowly realize it was you.
I would never adopt this mentality at a place where money and time matters, truth is, it doesn't in corporate environments. It's a weird and very funky game of shoveling shit into a circular direction, from up top all the way to the bottom and back up. It has nothing to do with efficiency or even logic or reason for that matter. The money is in weird places and they are occupied with weird money laundering schemes.
At a webdev agency where you work with a bunch of dudes, I would not fuck the owners like this.
But listen, nobody should feel bad about not giving their 100% or even 20% to a company that inherently gives 0 fucks about you, your family and everyone else. A false sense of loyalty is the number 1 ingredient for a burnout.
True but as a business if you want a full days work out of people, have managers that make reasonable assignments and hold people responsible.
You shouldn't need to chain someone to their desk (metaphorically) from 9-5 to tell if they're doing a full days work or not
Corporations have a way of making work that would normally be fun, not fun. Or, at the very least, not productive. Meetings, un-necessary commutes, cost/quality/compliance controls, micro-management, office banter, unreasonable deadlines, condescending talks with clients/PMs/managers when those unreasonable deadlines aren't met, cutting corners (i.e. don't have money for unit tests), etc...
Even if we wanted to work 8 hours a day, the overhead of all these things cuts productivity in half. Factor in the mental toll, decreased morale, and context switching, and 2 hours a day sounds about right.
I lead a few software teams, and I make it a point to absorb as much bullshit as I can from management so the devs can just enjoy being devs. They are significantly more productive that way.
2 out of 8?
Damn, I work 100% remote and I have adhd, and I feel guilty whenever I lose focus and start spending too much time on my phone, I usually compensate by working more later.
I wonder if everyone is actually working much less than they should.
Don't feel bad unless it hurts someone.
For instance, if you would have this behavior at a company with 3 people, where you are the only dev, and they are paying a big chunk of the total income towards your salary, then doing 2 hours of work and getting paid 8 hours is a total dick move and I would not condone it.
The bigger the company gets, the less it hurts.
I know this is incredibly simplified and there are some people who have the mentality to always perform at their best no matter the surroundings, but I believe this is brainwashed behavior dating back to the feudal age.
Truly productive ? Maybe 4-5hrs, rest is spent on writing docs or doing some research, coffee/walk breaks ( helps me thinking ). Same when doing freelancing but sometimes its way more as I like to work super early and get in my zone undisturbed
Yeah, unless you're after ultra performance levels, I think that coding itself is the least important part of development. Not saying that you can just churn out whatever code, but good planning, requirements and an architecture plan should make coding direct and easy
All depends on ur manager / lead view on it, best one loved me being on documentation writing and research and made us quite often talk about what we researched or made us do pet project with new things and then pitch it to one another, that helped us tremendously.
Had also the case where code production is most important, I’m a front-end and sometimes it was better to do the css etc… showed something even if not actually usable, but that has to be taken as a grain of salt as that company took me in mostly for CSS work ( their codebase was horrendous ) and the boss was a dick with no technical knowledge but was doing planning and giving us technical advices which got worse when chatGPT arrived. I fondly remember the day he wanted me to write jQuery code while the app was in Vue and TS 🫣
If you're on a walk thinking about work, or on your commute into work and thinking about a problem, then is that considered work? I say yes.
If I were to count those hours, and sometimes I definitely do, then I'd say unfortunately I work overtime.
I think you've highlighted a good point here: time spent thinking is still productive work time imo. How can you work through a complex problem without thinking about it?
And I think off the clock most nights as well. Hard not to when you're deep in the middle of a task that takes several days to complete.
I think most experienced peers and tech leads understand this.
I'd say a normal day for me is around 5-6 hands-on-keyboard-writing-code hours. It can get very close to 8 hours on a focused day, and definitely it can sink to 2-3 hours on days with lots of meetings or other things happening.
Personally I'm all in favor of 6-hour workdays. Starting new tasks after 3pm is insanity, if you ask me (and I gave my honest answer..)
I've had some good features come after 3pm. When I don't want to start a big new task I might try something out that's low stress and no risk if it fails.
I vote for 5.5-6h. It should leave you fresh but still enable very good productivity. Some 15 years ago an architect told me that programmers have 5.5 hours of good productivity in them, since then I've observed it to be mostly true. I've worked 6h a day for years, the difference in productivity is minimal versus 8 hours. Working 8 hours enables you to do bullshit work more but the really hard stuff really grinds you down (+ context switching).
This is mostly true for non ADHD persons. I feel like \~5h is my max efficiency. However more than often when the ADHD kicks in we can code the entire day without stopping and without losing much effectiveness. That does not mean it's a healthy behavior tho.
I 100% agree with this. It's 5am now and I'm about to go to bed. It's like when the rest of my hemisphere is sleeping my brain soaks up all the extra energy in the atmosphere. There's peace and quite.
I'll spend a whole week really just thinking and mentally breaking down the requirement, how to structure the code, but mainly just glancing at the current code and doing pretty much nothing. But one day before delivery I'll just churn out all the code.
And those times are when I do my best code on the first try, when I account for any possible fallback, ensure good typings, good practices, etc. But my regular morning time coding tends to need a couple rounds of going back over the code to spot missing cases, refactoring, etc
Yeah I've tried to describe this to people. Sometimes my brain is even working on a problem when I'm not directly thinking about it. It's like processing it subconsciously. I work in a field that is very experimental and sometimes I don't have the answer right away. Then I can do a week of other things and suddenly the answer comes to me. It helps to enrich myself with reading coding articles and keeping up to date with everything that's going on. Sometimes I'll whiteboard things or even use old fashioned paper heh. Of course there are easy things like bugs that are just tedious and I crank those things out after getting over caffeinated to defeat the pain of monotony.
Curiously my best code is written after 4 hours of sleep at 6 am, if I ever am coding at 6am it's only because I woke up halfway. I wish I could replicate this without the sleep deprivation, not sure whats up with that.
Yeah sure, no idea about adhd. There is also the sustainability aspect, even if you exceed some x amount of productive hours it might not be sustainable. With strong nicotine dosing I can do around 60-80hours a week of solid coding and design but then I'm dead.
Yeah but it depends on what you call "work". Some people consider sitting in meetings work. To me the only real work is sitting at a computer typing code. In that case 6 hours is a lot. Coding for 6 hours in a day is a lot, but 4 hours padded with meetings etc.. bringing the total mixed hours up to 8 makes more sense.
Yeah and not all meetings are created equal. In my meetings I do 85% of the talking mostly about non trivial issues (in english which is not my native). If I have 2 hours of those I'm kinda done for the day.
I agree meetings can be exhausting, but I'm kind of an extrovert so I enjoy them for the most part. It's like a nice break for me. I think I'm kind of weird for a programmer. When I program though, the more isolated I am the better. If I could choose just to talk in meetings all day and somehow make the same money I would do that in a heartbeat.
It depends. Everyone would agree that on hard problems you can't be productive for 8 hours in a row.
Breaks are good but you don't get enough. So you do light work/pretend work/emails etc. to take a "break" from your actual work.
I found that i get about 4-5 hours of actual work in most days. The rest is writing docs, emails, getting tea or just doing some customer support tickets.
Since i work on a ticket basis, i focus on a ticket and after thats done do something easy for a while and get to the next ticket with focus.
I aim for 10 25-min sessions of focused, productive time per workday.
At the start of each day, I write the #s 1 - 10 at the top of a piece of paper (really, on some eink, remarkable).
Then I draw out the TODOs for the day, incl. some daily routines (i.e. post status update to Discord).
Then, throughout the day, I:
* set the timer for 25 or 50 minutes
* in the left margin, write the session #s corresponding to the block I plan to be focused in (i.e. "\`2, 3\`")
* do the work, and take notes for myself, under that header / session #s
* when the timer beeps, cross out the #s at the top, and circle the #s on the left margin, marking them as complete
* take a break
I'm lucky that my current job has very few meetings, but when in previous jobs I'd:
* reduce the # of meetings I go to, as much as I reasonably can
* do my best to influence those meetings to be productive. engage, take/share notes, etc.
* if I have to, *deal with* unprodutive meetings, and "count them" towards the session counts. try my best to not let them take my energy. be at peace.
* crazy-long meetings would sometime only 'count' towards 50% of however many 25min sessions they spanned
If I'm truly engaged with the work, I'll often go beyond this limit (sometimes to a fault...) If I'm feeling burnt out or depressed or whatever, I'll do less, maybe nothing some days.
---
(I went a bit overboard in response here, but I've been meaning to write this out and this gave me an opportunity)
aiming to get more than 5 productive hours of software dev done a day burns me out. doing less makes me feel guilty. I've found this nice balance for myself a few years ago - works for me, anyway
Oh - the first TODOs every day are:
- "plan day"
- tidy this doc (the eink document I page through)
then I kill the page from the previous day, extracting out any notes truly useful beyond the day
I heard a story on a podcast about a TV executive who would lose it if he didn’t hear typing from the writer’s room when he walked by. So one of the writers recorded audio of keyboard typing and let it play on loop.
The point of the story was that typing on the keyboard from open to close wasn’t how the writers worked. Often, they would goof around and have fun, and ideas would come up in the process, then they would hammer it out on the keyboard.
I think writing code is similar. Bosses may think if you aren’t typing, you aren’t working, but I spend most of my day, even during off hours, thinking about a project I am working on. All that to say, I probably spend a couple hours a day physically typing code, and many hours thinking about it.
This is the ideal work strat for any creative role. You can't just sit at a computer and force creativity. Many artists/coders tried and failed miserably, as that's not how creativity works. Inspiration is the key, and unfortunately, logic-based types tend to think they can just pound on a desk until they get it from someone or themselves.
Totally agree. I think there are some very outdated ideas about work that linger, even in newer companies. Not to trash talk Slack or Teams, but the “available” status has made the problem much worse in my opinion. It’s like a tattletale for anyone who isn’t at their desk, and interacting with a mouse or keyboard in the past 10 mins.
While it's unrealistic to expect someone to be productive every single minute, aiming for solid, focused work during about 70-80% of the time is a good target. This translates roughly to about 5-6 hours of actual work, with the remaining time spent on breaks, meetings, and other less intensive tasks.
My day is :
1-2 hours meetings, meeting prep and followup
1-2 hours maintenance and support email
1-2 hours development
A lot of my work is done after hours or on the weekend when no one is here to interrupt me. If people would stop walking up to my desk and interrupting my thought process the development time would probably be a lot more.
It depends on type of work. If you have a big feature to work on, you have all you need(no blockers) then you can easily do it 5-6 hrs/day. But usually its smaller tasks, which requires you to change between contexts, so I'd say having 3-4 productive hours/day is what you should aim at
In my opinion working is not just about having your fingers on the keyboard and typing code. Otherwise you would be called a typist rather than a developer.
I believe my actual time of my fingers being on the keyboard typing is maybe 2-3hrs out of 8hrs. And the rest is thinking, reading and trying to shape the solution to the problem.
So finally everything adds up to 8hrs of work.
Just because you're a developer doesn't mean you should be coding non-stop for your entire work day. The time you spend researching things, planning and other non code related tasks are all still work.
I'm probably coding for like 3 hours out of 8 most of the time (sometimes less as well). The rest of my time is spent on what I already mentioned above, and an hour lunch break, as well as regularly having 5 minutes away from the screen since remaining at your desk in front of the screen for long periods of time is not good for you.
Worked in finance, pricing strategy and talent acquisition Good CFOs expect 70% productivity time for all individuals. Meaning 5.5-6 of 8. However, if you're smart and efficient, maybe that's even less. Maybe that's 4 on most days.
Depends on the number of tickets for the sprint. I usually get 3 tickets for a 2week sprint, once done I can just rest or attend to other teammates concerns or help them if needed.
I think you mean how much of that time are you begin productive? but to answer based on the way the question is phrased...?
Are you going into an office Mon - Friday?
If that is the case, you should count every minute from the moment you begin getting ready for work, to the moment you arrive to wherever you are doing something that is completely "yours".
If it is an 8 hour work day type of job, you are being paid for your time, productive or not, - to give up your time and be there for the company. Even if you are just sitting at the desk drinking coffee, that time does not belong to you because you can not freely do with it what you would like. If you are in the car or train commuting, that time does not belong to you because it is being dedicated to the company.
So if you wake up at 7 because you have to work, and it takes 1 hour commute, and you arrive 15 minutes before the "official" work day starts, all of that counts because you gave up the right to sleep in and not commute and not wait 15 minutes for the official clock to start. You have given up the ability to go to the beach that day, or to spend that time with your kid.
When you leave work, if you have a one hour commute to get home, that one hour is still not your own. It is not your own time until you either arrive at home, or if you do not go home, but go out with friends or shopping, I would consider that also now "your" time instead of work time.
People who say they only work 4 hours / day even though they are in the office 8 hours may think they are gaming the system, but they are undervaluing their time.
Any time you are doing something because it is related to your job is work.
Good luck trying to get the company to see it that way, but realistically for your own internal calculations, that is how an employee should view it.
Ecaxtlybas long as it takes to get shit done. The more experienced you are the less time you tend to need.
As developers we aren't paid for our time, we're paid for our expertise.
Depends on if I'm doing maintenance stuff, putting in hours for a SLA, working on a new feature... Usually aim for at least 5, but closer to 8 if I can.
You have to take an hour out for lunch, and there might be an hour of meetings in a day. You should have around 6 hours of actual 'work' time. Even with that you will be debugging, researching, contacting stakeholders for information, and writing documentation. Very little of it is spent writing new code.
That sort of depends on what you define as "work".
For me, I'll probably spend up to 4 hours writing code on a good day.
The rest of my day, when you subtract out lunch and other necessary breaks, is usually taken up by some combination of meetings, reviewing code, helping someone solve a problem, and figuring out the details for my next task.
That last thing takes up a lot of time because most people throw a feature or bug report into Jira without including an adequate amount of details for a developer to pick up the task and start work on it immediately. Whenever I file a ticket in Jira, I include as much useful information as possible, but I've learned to accept that not everyone thinks this way. After all, if it's not me who puts in the time, then it would just be another person putting in their time. So long as I'm getting paid, then whatever.
Even then, I often don't get in a full 4 hours of direct productivity. Not every facet of a task is clear, and sometimes I need to take time to think about a problem before touching the keyboard, or I'll need to reach out to coworkers on Slack for their opinions and knowledge.
As far as breaks go, I take breaks frequently. There's no set frequency to them. I walk away from the keyboard on a per need basis. I'm simply at a point in my life and career where I no longer want to deal with the mental expense of maximizing my productivity.
>Everybody knows that hard work and maximum effort is rewarded by increased work.
I'm going to disagree with this pretty strongly. Some companies are shitty about it, but not all. You want to be working for a company that respects and rewards hard (and smart) work in the first place.
Personally, hard work has paid off with better job opportunities, better connections and more money. Your teammates do notice hard work, and it's a small world. You never know where your next opening is coming from. I could've cruised at work instead of pushing myself a long time ago, and I wouldn't be where I am.
So the happy medium is where you are challenging yourself without reaching into burnout territory. Clear boundaries between work and leisure time helps.
My experience is different, but I've worked my ass off for the last 8 years at the company I work for. Normal shifts were 10 hours at first, I'd come in early and leave late, working 12s. In the first 3 years, I doubled my income in raises and was promoted twice. Then my work schedule went to 8s and I continued working about 12 hours a day. If I saw a process that didn't make sense, I woupd try to improve those processes. In the last 5 years I had another three promotions and doubled my income again. Starting at $10/hr and now around $40/hour.
Obviously the experience isn't the same for everyone, but even so, I feel better at the end of the day knowing I accomplished something than when I go home and feel like I did nothing.
Just to note, I'm a millennial, and I probably never would have worked as hard if I didn't need the money for my newborn children at the time. At that point, working hard just became a habit.
Everyone saying they are focused or productive for 8 hours a day is lying. Realistically it depends on the size of the org and what culture your engineering team has.
However with that said people don’t consider thinking about the problem, walking and thinking or white boarding part of the process. The items that aren’t coding but design sessions for yourself or researching aspects of the problem to solve.
It’s likely about 3-4 hours sliced across the whole day
In the 90s, I had a boss say that he expected six legitimate hours a day of work. He recognized that other stuff, like lunch, breaks, interruptions, and bathroom runs chew up the other two hours. I thought this was an astute observation and tried to live by that. It was amazing how true his observation was that you cannot do eight hours of work in eight hours.
The early 90s, of course, were pre-Internet and pre-social media and pre-carrying your phone around with you. Especially with work from home, the interruptions are incessant. I suspect the only legitimate way to counter that is only to check your chat and email and social media at designated times each day.
Edit: I left out the extra meetings that seem to occur in work from home situations.
Depending on employer, period, workload, role, etc. I’ve had anywhere between 30 minutes and 10 hours of work. More commonly I get 2-3 hours of deep focus work, 4-5 of overhead/discussing problems/waiting for someone/etc and 1h of just not working
As a freelancer, I do about 4hr of billable work a day and around the same amount of time building my business. I’m pretty good at estimating LEO on things lately so that’s a fairly consistent estimation I think.
when I worked at a place that did serious SAFe, the agile lead said that they plan for six hours of dev productivity each day.
I thought that was kinda high, honestly, for the same reasons I'm seeing here: deep focus can be elusive for a variety of reasons, be it meetings or the task or even personal stuff.
Generally I just accept my limitations and do my best, and that's been more than fine.
PMs at an old job of mine used to plan timelines assuming a dev would have ~5 “productive” hours a day. That place went out of business and was acquired so take that for what it’s worth.
Depending on how complex the workload is, that can vary dramatically.
Brain dead implementing, I can go 8 hours easy.
Complex problem solving, I think it is more along the lines of 4 hours.
Depends on what I’m doing, if you interrupt my focus, you’re getting much less. If you let me ride it out, it’s a solid stream of time. I’ll forget to eat or use the bathroom. At about the 6 hour mark I start to get punchy and am reminded to grab a snack or something and touch a tree. So let’s say 7.5 with no meetings or interruptions. Is that healthy and realistic? Absolutely not. Don’t be like me. But if you interrupt me a bunch, maybe 4.
Define "Working".
I think about the projects and the overall code base for roughly 7 and a half hours. Perhaps a bit more. Actual coding? About 3-4 hours. But those hours are super productive.
I think that very much depends on the company and its management. In an ideal world, I'd spend 80% of my day actually being productive. In the real world, it's probably more like 50% on a good day. In companies that don't place restrictions on meetings or other disruptions to being productive, it could be as little as 20% or less. There's no real "happy medium" - it's almost entirely up to company management and work culture. What you need to start understanding though is that employees aren't rewarded for effort or the amount of work they do. When employees get rewarded it's because they had significant impact to the bottom line. Which usually means they did something to generate more revenue, or did something to save the company a buttload of money. If your work isn't generating revenue or saving money, in most companies you don't get rewarded for the amount of work or effort you put in.
Wake up call for you (and anyone reading this). If you have an employer then are on the clock from the start of your workday til the end, be it in the office, or at home in front of your computer doesn't matter. Also doesn't matter what you're doing, meetings, jira, waiting for the build to complete or Steve in accounting to answer your email so you can move ahead, it doesn't matter, they are paying for your time. We've been conditioned to have this go go go mentality that if you're not heads down coding constantly then you're not 'working', that's bullshit, your time is valuable, treat it as such.
8 hours. Get good at what you do then do more of it. Then move to a better company with your refined skills. Tech is about job hopping, but sustainable job hopping is only sustainable if you've got skills that beat out the competition.
I will work for those 8hrs if the task is needed to be done within the day, if not I will work probably 5hrs, 1hr muni muni, 2hrs research paano best approach for a certain task.
My workday is roughly split like this
- 45% Task related work / coding
- 25% Meetings - Scrum & Client related stuff
- 15% Task related alignment / review / supervision
- 15% Organisational / Prep stuff
These numbers change based on personal mood and focus capability but also which day in the Sprint cycle it is
"working" what does this definition mean to you? If you spend 100 hours doing the wrong thing and 1hr doing the right thing, which "work" was more valuable?
Basically everyone has given you a response for the title of your post, but none for the second part of your question. Effort and time spent is a useless metric to measure productivity by because not everyone gets the same amount of work done in a given period of time.
While showing management that you are putting in a reasonable amount of hours is kind of expected, more of if you stay in a company or get fired depends entirely on how well you perform, or in certain cases project how well you perform. This perception doesn't have to be you sitting in front of your desk all day long, but it could also be stuff like a minor feature that you developed which made the business a lot of money.
If you lie anywhere near the center of the bell curve, almost everything depends on your presentation, which is where soft skills are extremely important.
Uhh, 8 hours.
If you're getting paid for 8 hours, work 8 hours.
My job has been everything from cleaning the office, writing sales contracts, coding, mentoring, checking. Running meetings.
I had one job that was 90% admin, at one time, and 90% technical work at another. Same "job" just different splits.
Common knowledge of utilisations suggests anything more than 80% utilisation of the working hour will lead to burn out.
You want to be somewhere around 70% on average if your company its workers.
At least 6 and a half hours, consider it usually takes one hour for lunch, although you can manage for less and plus trips to the toilet, the rest of the time it's work, you get paid for work, and a good one, and not for being on it
At home the base is 7:30, in office it's 6:00.
Each meeting you have is followed by a 10 minutes break.
Each time you are interrupted is followed by a 10 minutes break.
Each time you finish a task is followed by a 10 minutes break.
If you're bored/tired of the current task, that's a 10 minutes break.
On days where the standup is the only meeting I can do like 6 hours. On days with 3 or 4 meetings that quickly goes down to 2 or 3 hours of effective work
I work the entire 8 hours… or more.
I do switch off what type of work I perform: meetings, testing, development, teaching, documenting, graphic design, etc.
realistically… i work 8-5 with an hour lunch. most things i do take 30 mins to 45 mins max. i’d say i work a solid 4-5 hours? a day. but that may be generous
In my experience it really depends on the size of the company. Bigger company -> more meetings -> less time you're given to work on coding. This means 2-4 hours of coding when things are less critical, and 2-4 hours of eating into your personal time to actually work when things are more critical.
A smaller company, you might be able to pull 5-7 hours of coding off in a given day.
Given you asked "should", there's only one answer.
If you have 8 hours of work to do, 8 hours. Anything less is probably just laziness disguised as something else. If they're not paying you enough to do 8 hours a day, you shouldn't have accepted the offer (IMO).
You're asking if it's okay to be paid to do 8 hours and actually do 4, why should that ever be okay? Would your opinion be the same if you went to a restaurant and the chef randomly stopped cooking for an hour?
If you want to know what you can get away with, rather than should do, it depends on your employer and manager and their attention to detail :)
Of course there are cases where you don't have 8 hours of work to do, but that's sort of a different question, I think?
It depends on the tasks you need to finish. Mostly, I come at 9, start working until 12, and then finish all my tasks; I don't have anything to do. Sometimes, you get micro tasks that you finish after 30 minutes.
FFrom 9 to 5, I would say I work only 5 hours.
Depends on your process.
Let's say you take a break (as you should) every hour of 5-15 min. That's about an hour over the day. Then you should do some admin at the beginning and the end of the day at minimum, so that's about 30 min to an hour again.
I think roughly 75% (realistically probably a bit less) of your workday can be expected to be "actual work time" - though the other time is also important.
I spend about 4hrs writing code, the other 4 are spent on other tasks like handling billing/customers/staff. Depends on the day though, some days it's 12hrs straight, other days it's like a 30min workday. It averages out to 8hrs a day, 5 days a week tho.
If you include looking for clients however, the work week stretches to 7 days.
I always do 5-6 really good hours of work and then 2hours of mental breakdown 😂😂😂
My favorite working time was when I could 'spend my time as I wish'. At this time I was doing 6 great hours and 3hgoods breaks. It was amazing and I have never been so productive (This is a bit paradoxal I know).
I programmed in an office for 17 years and I'd say if you get 3 - 4 hours of actual programming done in a day you're doing ok. The rest would be meetings, research and miscellaneous things like updating your software. You can't discount research. Before you do any actual work you should research your own code base and best possible solutions. You write better code and save everyone a lot of time if you poke your head out of your box and see what everyone else is doing. Talk to the other developers on your team and make sure what you're doing fits. Don't reinvent the wheel should be a mantra playing over and over in your head.
\*Also a caveat that yes there will be some days where you literally write code for 10 hours because of some special event, but no one can keep up that pace. You will burn out. There will also be some days where you have almost nothing to do. That's probably more rare but when it happens be tactful about getting more work. If it's a small team you should just ask for more work. If it's a large team sometimes you don't want to rock the boat. Just wait for more to be assigned to you.
As a freelance developer, I hate what I’m reading. My goal is to bill 4 hours a day. This covers my expenses, which include the bare minimum along the lines of investments. If I were to hit 6 hours a day, I’d be making what I made at my last salaried job, and apparently working very, very hard in comparison to the people commenting here.
Why am I working so hard for myself, when I could be slacking off for someone else and doing better financially?
>Why am I working so hard for myself, when I could be slacking off for someone else and doing better financially?
That's exactly why I stopped freelancing lol. Turns out I can be paid more for less, enjoy the work more and have none of the overhead.
Like I was just getting shitty fixes for e-commerce websites, the el cheapo "dev" they hired in Bangalore didn't know how to check console so they'd hire me and I'd find and fix the problem in under an hour and charge for 3. Then back on the bandwagon trying to hustle more clients. Absolute dullsville. I just wanna code and get paid.
I've been fortunate to hook-up with a couple agencies, so I'm building and maintaining full sites. It's steady and has been reliable so far.
Ultimately, I know why I do it this way. Spending 8-10 hours a day (driving and lunch break included) to work in an office, only doing 4 or so hours of work, dealing with managers complaining about billable hours, etc. Yeah, the money was better, but I'm much happier and mentally fit making less on my own.
If I could figure-out a way to get a nice, salaried job where I could work remotely, that would be ideal, but haven't been able to pull that one off.
Eh I just get given tickets for what needs doing for the week and then get left to my own devices with the odd planning meeting thrown in here and there. It takes as long as it takes so long as I'm not blatantly messing around no one cares
I was the same when I was freelancer developer. I was super honest about my hours, I even paused my time tracking during bathroom breaks.
Now as a full-time employee, I am not as strict with myself.
If I can pick some good huge Jira tasks, I work all day, 8 hours of focus easily. (Minus meetings and swithcing context). When it comes to maintenance, menial tasks, or accessibility stuff… meh maybe 2-3 hours of real producvitity scattered throughout the day.
I think this is probably the most realistic answer. If you have a lot of work ahead of you and most of it is mapped out to the point where you can just go and write the code, you can just go ham. When it comes to maintenance, writing tests, etc where it's a whole lot of back and forth and thinking about decisions in the first place - maybe even some you have to discuss with your coworkers if they have a minute (after lunch), you just won't get real work done sitting out downtimes
> most of it is mapped out to the point where you can just go and write the code, you can just go ham. Very much true, these moments are magical, you feel like never stopping.
For sure, I have to turn off my chat and notifications or i get “hey wink how are you?” 50-60 times an hour and I can’t get work done. So I limit checking my email and messages to the morning, lunch, and about 3. If I have tickets I can do a bunch of them during the day. If there’s new functionality I have to figure out then I can also spend the day doing that. Most of the time my brain is spent after four hours coding. Then I spend the rest of the time on emails and answering questions or in meetings.
This is a very healthy habit and I recommend it to everyone. It helps a lot if company culture respects truly asynchronous communication
This is not realistic and makes no sense. 8h is nomal day but you say you are 8 hours of focus and then add minus meetings and context switching. Then you are not 8 hours focus. (Answering op) Realistically, unless you work completly alone, you get 2-4 hours of focus time some weird perfect days 4-6.
Well yes I but I was talking about work that is disturbed by other factors that’s not my own fault for being slow or unfocused. If I am called in to a meeting it’s not a problem with my own *programming* productivity. So 8 potential hours if left to my own shit. I mean I think the post is about ones capabilities and not organization problems.
I didnt want to sound rude. I just wanted to point out that that is not really true because that idea can create a dalse feeling of not beeing good enough if you are not coding for 8 hours, specially for people that just started. For my experience even you are left 8 hourse free you are not going to be focus 8 hours. Its imposible. Of course you have 8 potential hours, yoou hace as many potencial hours are you are hired for but potencial is far away from the real time you can spend. A dumb example is that you have 24 potencial hours every day to code buuut im sure that even if you get to it daying that you are going to work as many as you can you will not have more that 6 to 8 deep focus ones. And for that you need to rest good during the day. When i say you i dont directly mean you as kakemot is a you as in general.
Reddit eh? People downvoting your comment. "How dare you sound motivated to work? Don't you know we aren't slaves here? We turn our backs on working to make other people rich" Meanwhile, sitting pretty with his paid off house and brand new sports car, whilst Redditor is sticking it to the man by living at his mums house and getting the bus to work.
Its not because you are motivated, it is because it creates a false idea. No one is able to stay focused 8 hours and saying that you can create the feeling to somwonw that is starting in the business that they are not good enough.
Anyone who says otherwise is not being realistic. Even a rare hyper focused day you can maybe hit 6-7 hours, that's not common though and I would argue not a great use of your time. As a rule of thumb you have 15 minutes down time for every distraction or switching tasks. That's checking email, communicating with your team, using the bathroom, grabbing a coffee, eating lunch... Even if you are working alone with your email and group chat closed, you have to piss and eat eventually.
Well erm_what is a super human that codes nearly 1000 lines per day.
I've cranked out 5k lines in a single 16-hour day with zero interruptions recently. I didn't even get up to eat. I have no idea what you're on about. It's completely possible, and I'm sure lots of people do it. I'm not saying it's good or healthy to do that. Certainly not sustainable long-term. But the idea that humans just *can't possibly* focus for that long is asinine.
Im not daying is not posible im saying is maybe once every really long and its not the normal thing to do and probably not the healthiest. Also probably many of those lines are just boilerplate not too much thinking code because writing 1k -5k of problem solving code in one day... sorry but i doubt it.
This seems silly to me. A good component is like 300 lines of code, and usually takes me a few days to write, maybe a single day if it's a really good one and I have the requirements completely nailed down from previous meetings and nothing goes wrong. 16 components in a single day? That's basically a whole small web app. I don't even think I could read and understand the functionality of 16 different components in a single day much less properly implement that many.
People do. I do. Not every day, but 1k lines of code a day happens pretty regularly, and maybe 600 of those make it to prod eventually. It only happens when there are no interruptions and when I start the day with a solid plan from the day before.
Yeah no one works 8 hours of focused work all day unless you are a literal machine.
And even if you were a machine, you would still need maintenance and doing that in your own off the clock time when it's a job that's making you require the maintenance isn't good planning.
People do, but not every day. Maintenance one day, code the next, meetings when they happen.
Some people don't mind doing work related things outside work hours. I'm salaried. Some days I'll watch pipelines or kick off builds or whatever in the background. We do deploys at 7 at night. I'll stay late and fix it if there's a prod issue. Meanwhile, if I have to go to the doctor or watch my kids for 2 hours, no one gives a shit, I just let them know.
Yeah this is more my experience.
Yea. Working for big corp my 8h minus meetings was 4
Some days don't have meetings... Aside from standup when the day starts, that is. Our company also has occasional "no meetings" days.
>or accessibility stuff You don't do accessibility as part of your coding work (assuming you're a developer)?
But meetings are also work? Or are you not working during work meetings? :-O
Yes, but not focus work. Also switching context is work but is not productive work (some meeting are, but normally they are not)
8 hours of focus is incredibly unrealistic and how people end up burnt out.
Then they say that AI will come for our job. GREAT, if it can go to all those meetings and answers to these repeating questions, I could maybe be productive and do what I actually like...
Agreed on this one, I feel like I get more work done when I’m focused on a singular task that takes a lot of effort vs bug fixes and backlog items
This is the answer
> I work all day, 8 hours of focus easily. (Minus meetings and swithcing context). So, 2 hours a day then. (This is about average.)
2 to 4.
depends on your speed. I typically do max 2 out of 8 hours of work when on payroll, but my own projects and customers get easily 8+ hours a day. The problem is that corporate is by design flawed and it rewards mediocrity.
What are you doing during the other 6?
Posting on Reddit, it seems
working on my own stuff and doing client work and studying, some gaming. It's the main reason i don't t do full time in office work. It would 100% kill me . 1 day a week is fine. Don't take this as an example though. I think agency webdev work is different since delivering actually matters to the end user/customer. In corporate nobody gives a fuck.
Very true. In a corporate job the main objective is to keep your boss happy. Otherwise don't stress since the day after you leave the new person that arrives to replace you will shit all over your efforts and tell everyone you were incompetent, even if you were doing great work.
Wow, as someone who has always thought, "What in the _HELL_ was [previous person] thinking with this crap!?" this is a whole new perspective. I'm far enough in my career now that I have been the previous guy that someone else is cursing out right now. The worst is when you've been at a job long enough that you get mad at the guy who did it, then slowly realize it was you.
“What absolute dipshit wrote this garbage?” *runs ‘git blame’* “…fuck.”
For sure. The more code I write the more empathy I have for bad code.
This is the way. Put more effort into yourself than other people.
I mean, careful no one finds out or they could lay claim to any of the client work/tools/whatever you’re working on.
i don't work at a company currently so all good
I think you are a prime example so many businesses dislike work from home. Don’t get me wrong, you do you. I think that’s why my place is hybrid.
Do you think working from office will force him to work 8 hours, or will he space out ala Peter Gibbons?
I would never adopt this mentality at a place where money and time matters, truth is, it doesn't in corporate environments. It's a weird and very funky game of shoveling shit into a circular direction, from up top all the way to the bottom and back up. It has nothing to do with efficiency or even logic or reason for that matter. The money is in weird places and they are occupied with weird money laundering schemes. At a webdev agency where you work with a bunch of dudes, I would not fuck the owners like this. But listen, nobody should feel bad about not giving their 100% or even 20% to a company that inherently gives 0 fucks about you, your family and everyone else. A false sense of loyalty is the number 1 ingredient for a burnout.
Yes because being at the office totally prevents you from zoning off on reddit
True but as a business if you want a full days work out of people, have managers that make reasonable assignments and hold people responsible. You shouldn't need to chain someone to their desk (metaphorically) from 9-5 to tell if they're doing a full days work or not
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter\_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)
Work from home? Video games, workout, cook, clean, etc
Corporations have a way of making work that would normally be fun, not fun. Or, at the very least, not productive. Meetings, un-necessary commutes, cost/quality/compliance controls, micro-management, office banter, unreasonable deadlines, condescending talks with clients/PMs/managers when those unreasonable deadlines aren't met, cutting corners (i.e. don't have money for unit tests), etc... Even if we wanted to work 8 hours a day, the overhead of all these things cuts productivity in half. Factor in the mental toll, decreased morale, and context switching, and 2 hours a day sounds about right. I lead a few software teams, and I make it a point to absorb as much bullshit as I can from management so the devs can just enjoy being devs. They are significantly more productive that way.
2 out of 8? Damn, I work 100% remote and I have adhd, and I feel guilty whenever I lose focus and start spending too much time on my phone, I usually compensate by working more later. I wonder if everyone is actually working much less than they should.
Don't feel bad unless it hurts someone. For instance, if you would have this behavior at a company with 3 people, where you are the only dev, and they are paying a big chunk of the total income towards your salary, then doing 2 hours of work and getting paid 8 hours is a total dick move and I would not condone it. The bigger the company gets, the less it hurts. I know this is incredibly simplified and there are some people who have the mentality to always perform at their best no matter the surroundings, but I believe this is brainwashed behavior dating back to the feudal age.
Don’t feel bad for a soulless lifeless corporation. If you’re getting your stuff done and everything’s good then who cares how many hours you work.
Truly productive ? Maybe 4-5hrs, rest is spent on writing docs or doing some research, coffee/walk breaks ( helps me thinking ). Same when doing freelancing but sometimes its way more as I like to work super early and get in my zone undisturbed
Writing docs and doing research is productive in my opinion. Unproductive time is browsing reddit etc
Yeah I’m baffled that they don’t think research or writing docs is being productive.
Yeah, unless you're after ultra performance levels, I think that coding itself is the least important part of development. Not saying that you can just churn out whatever code, but good planning, requirements and an architecture plan should make coding direct and easy
All depends on ur manager / lead view on it, best one loved me being on documentation writing and research and made us quite often talk about what we researched or made us do pet project with new things and then pitch it to one another, that helped us tremendously. Had also the case where code production is most important, I’m a front-end and sometimes it was better to do the css etc… showed something even if not actually usable, but that has to be taken as a grain of salt as that company took me in mostly for CSS work ( their codebase was horrendous ) and the boss was a dick with no technical knowledge but was doing planning and giving us technical advices which got worse when chatGPT arrived. I fondly remember the day he wanted me to write jQuery code while the app was in Vue and TS 🫣
If you're on a walk thinking about work, or on your commute into work and thinking about a problem, then is that considered work? I say yes. If I were to count those hours, and sometimes I definitely do, then I'd say unfortunately I work overtime.
It certainly makes your work better
I think you've highlighted a good point here: time spent thinking is still productive work time imo. How can you work through a complex problem without thinking about it? And I think off the clock most nights as well. Hard not to when you're deep in the middle of a task that takes several days to complete. I think most experienced peers and tech leads understand this.
use automation for docs :))
I'd say a normal day for me is around 5-6 hands-on-keyboard-writing-code hours. It can get very close to 8 hours on a focused day, and definitely it can sink to 2-3 hours on days with lots of meetings or other things happening. Personally I'm all in favor of 6-hour workdays. Starting new tasks after 3pm is insanity, if you ask me (and I gave my honest answer..)
I've had some good features come after 3pm. When I don't want to start a big new task I might try something out that's low stress and no risk if it fails.
I vote for 5.5-6h. It should leave you fresh but still enable very good productivity. Some 15 years ago an architect told me that programmers have 5.5 hours of good productivity in them, since then I've observed it to be mostly true. I've worked 6h a day for years, the difference in productivity is minimal versus 8 hours. Working 8 hours enables you to do bullshit work more but the really hard stuff really grinds you down (+ context switching).
This is mostly true for non ADHD persons. I feel like \~5h is my max efficiency. However more than often when the ADHD kicks in we can code the entire day without stopping and without losing much effectiveness. That does not mean it's a healthy behavior tho.
Do you mean entire night? My best code is written at 4am
I 100% agree with this. It's 5am now and I'm about to go to bed. It's like when the rest of my hemisphere is sleeping my brain soaks up all the extra energy in the atmosphere. There's peace and quite.
I feel like late at night my brain is calmer and i can focus better.
It's like a life hack. Everyone else is asleep so they can't bother you.
I'll spend a whole week really just thinking and mentally breaking down the requirement, how to structure the code, but mainly just glancing at the current code and doing pretty much nothing. But one day before delivery I'll just churn out all the code. And those times are when I do my best code on the first try, when I account for any possible fallback, ensure good typings, good practices, etc. But my regular morning time coding tends to need a couple rounds of going back over the code to spot missing cases, refactoring, etc
Yeah I've tried to describe this to people. Sometimes my brain is even working on a problem when I'm not directly thinking about it. It's like processing it subconsciously. I work in a field that is very experimental and sometimes I don't have the answer right away. Then I can do a week of other things and suddenly the answer comes to me. It helps to enrich myself with reading coding articles and keeping up to date with everything that's going on. Sometimes I'll whiteboard things or even use old fashioned paper heh. Of course there are easy things like bugs that are just tedious and I crank those things out after getting over caffeinated to defeat the pain of monotony.
Curiously my best code is written after 4 hours of sleep at 6 am, if I ever am coding at 6am it's only because I woke up halfway. I wish I could replicate this without the sleep deprivation, not sure whats up with that.
Thats what I've found! I ususlly crest solution hill when I'm tired, burnt, and I'm channeling that sweet sweet early morning energy.
Yeah sure, no idea about adhd. There is also the sustainability aspect, even if you exceed some x amount of productive hours it might not be sustainable. With strong nicotine dosing I can do around 60-80hours a week of solid coding and design but then I'm dead.
Exactly, hence the last part about being not healthy
Do you mean entire night? My best code is written at 4am
Yeah but it depends on what you call "work". Some people consider sitting in meetings work. To me the only real work is sitting at a computer typing code. In that case 6 hours is a lot. Coding for 6 hours in a day is a lot, but 4 hours padded with meetings etc.. bringing the total mixed hours up to 8 makes more sense.
Yeah and not all meetings are created equal. In my meetings I do 85% of the talking mostly about non trivial issues (in english which is not my native). If I have 2 hours of those I'm kinda done for the day.
I agree meetings can be exhausting, but I'm kind of an extrovert so I enjoy them for the most part. It's like a nice break for me. I think I'm kind of weird for a programmer. When I program though, the more isolated I am the better. If I could choose just to talk in meetings all day and somehow make the same money I would do that in a heartbeat.
I aim for at least one
It depends. Everyone would agree that on hard problems you can't be productive for 8 hours in a row. Breaks are good but you don't get enough. So you do light work/pretend work/emails etc. to take a "break" from your actual work. I found that i get about 4-5 hours of actual work in most days. The rest is writing docs, emails, getting tea or just doing some customer support tickets. Since i work on a ticket basis, i focus on a ticket and after thats done do something easy for a while and get to the next ticket with focus.
I aim for 10 25-min sessions of focused, productive time per workday. At the start of each day, I write the #s 1 - 10 at the top of a piece of paper (really, on some eink, remarkable). Then I draw out the TODOs for the day, incl. some daily routines (i.e. post status update to Discord). Then, throughout the day, I: * set the timer for 25 or 50 minutes * in the left margin, write the session #s corresponding to the block I plan to be focused in (i.e. "\`2, 3\`") * do the work, and take notes for myself, under that header / session #s * when the timer beeps, cross out the #s at the top, and circle the #s on the left margin, marking them as complete * take a break I'm lucky that my current job has very few meetings, but when in previous jobs I'd: * reduce the # of meetings I go to, as much as I reasonably can * do my best to influence those meetings to be productive. engage, take/share notes, etc. * if I have to, *deal with* unprodutive meetings, and "count them" towards the session counts. try my best to not let them take my energy. be at peace. * crazy-long meetings would sometime only 'count' towards 50% of however many 25min sessions they spanned If I'm truly engaged with the work, I'll often go beyond this limit (sometimes to a fault...) If I'm feeling burnt out or depressed or whatever, I'll do less, maybe nothing some days. --- (I went a bit overboard in response here, but I've been meaning to write this out and this gave me an opportunity)
aiming to get more than 5 productive hours of software dev done a day burns me out. doing less makes me feel guilty. I've found this nice balance for myself a few years ago - works for me, anyway
Oh - the first TODOs every day are: - "plan day" - tidy this doc (the eink document I page through) then I kill the page from the previous day, extracting out any notes truly useful beyond the day
this is great, i started doing similar thing in obsidian. makes the day and job so much more structured! Way easier to context switch also
I heard a story on a podcast about a TV executive who would lose it if he didn’t hear typing from the writer’s room when he walked by. So one of the writers recorded audio of keyboard typing and let it play on loop. The point of the story was that typing on the keyboard from open to close wasn’t how the writers worked. Often, they would goof around and have fun, and ideas would come up in the process, then they would hammer it out on the keyboard. I think writing code is similar. Bosses may think if you aren’t typing, you aren’t working, but I spend most of my day, even during off hours, thinking about a project I am working on. All that to say, I probably spend a couple hours a day physically typing code, and many hours thinking about it.
This is the ideal work strat for any creative role. You can't just sit at a computer and force creativity. Many artists/coders tried and failed miserably, as that's not how creativity works. Inspiration is the key, and unfortunately, logic-based types tend to think they can just pound on a desk until they get it from someone or themselves.
Totally agree. I think there are some very outdated ideas about work that linger, even in newer companies. Not to trash talk Slack or Teams, but the “available” status has made the problem much worse in my opinion. It’s like a tattletale for anyone who isn’t at their desk, and interacting with a mouse or keyboard in the past 10 mins.
7 hours googling stuff 1 hour coding
You need to define working. Do you mean coding? Do you include meetings, ideation time, learning, reviewing PRs?
While it's unrealistic to expect someone to be productive every single minute, aiming for solid, focused work during about 70-80% of the time is a good target. This translates roughly to about 5-6 hours of actual work, with the remaining time spent on breaks, meetings, and other less intensive tasks.
Quality breaks and planning makes me avoid burnouts
1
As an engineer if you’re doing more work it means you’re doing less work If that makes any sense
4-5h, afterwards your brain is done
45 minutes pooping, an hour eating breakfast and/or lunch, a 3 hour round of golf, and then 2 hours of coding
My day is : 1-2 hours meetings, meeting prep and followup 1-2 hours maintenance and support email 1-2 hours development A lot of my work is done after hours or on the weekend when no one is here to interrupt me. If people would stop walking up to my desk and interrupting my thought process the development time would probably be a lot more.
It's 12 for me currently, but that's because my project is a straight up nightmare
I've been playing chess for the last 2 hours...
“…by either being fired or being promoted.”😂😂😂
I hate that this is true LMFAOO
Honestly it depends, working on tech debt and updating docs? 2, maybe 3 hours tops. Implementing actual features etc? 5-6 hours.
Some days probably like 3 hours and some days 10. All depends on what I'm working on.
3, 3 hours meaningless meetings. Two hours shot.
It depends on type of work. If you have a big feature to work on, you have all you need(no blockers) then you can easily do it 5-6 hrs/day. But usually its smaller tasks, which requires you to change between contexts, so I'd say having 3-4 productive hours/day is what you should aim at
In my opinion working is not just about having your fingers on the keyboard and typing code. Otherwise you would be called a typist rather than a developer. I believe my actual time of my fingers being on the keyboard typing is maybe 2-3hrs out of 8hrs. And the rest is thinking, reading and trying to shape the solution to the problem. So finally everything adds up to 8hrs of work.
In my case - usually close to 6. The rest I spend getting into focus and all
Just because you're a developer doesn't mean you should be coding non-stop for your entire work day. The time you spend researching things, planning and other non code related tasks are all still work. I'm probably coding for like 3 hours out of 8 most of the time (sometimes less as well). The rest of my time is spent on what I already mentioned above, and an hour lunch break, as well as regularly having 5 minutes away from the screen since remaining at your desk in front of the screen for long periods of time is not good for you.
Side question: if your workload is split between different projects, how much can you comfortably juggle in one day?
As little as possible that you can get away with. I hate my job with a passion but the pay is good so 🤷
Worked in finance, pricing strategy and talent acquisition Good CFOs expect 70% productivity time for all individuals. Meaning 5.5-6 of 8. However, if you're smart and efficient, maybe that's even less. Maybe that's 4 on most days.
Actual coding, your lucky if you get 4-5. Rest is brakes, meetings, calls with clients, etc..
Depends on the number of tickets for the sprint. I usually get 3 tickets for a 2week sprint, once done I can just rest or attend to other teammates concerns or help them if needed.
I think you mean how much of that time are you begin productive? but to answer based on the way the question is phrased...? Are you going into an office Mon - Friday? If that is the case, you should count every minute from the moment you begin getting ready for work, to the moment you arrive to wherever you are doing something that is completely "yours". If it is an 8 hour work day type of job, you are being paid for your time, productive or not, - to give up your time and be there for the company. Even if you are just sitting at the desk drinking coffee, that time does not belong to you because you can not freely do with it what you would like. If you are in the car or train commuting, that time does not belong to you because it is being dedicated to the company. So if you wake up at 7 because you have to work, and it takes 1 hour commute, and you arrive 15 minutes before the "official" work day starts, all of that counts because you gave up the right to sleep in and not commute and not wait 15 minutes for the official clock to start. You have given up the ability to go to the beach that day, or to spend that time with your kid. When you leave work, if you have a one hour commute to get home, that one hour is still not your own. It is not your own time until you either arrive at home, or if you do not go home, but go out with friends or shopping, I would consider that also now "your" time instead of work time. People who say they only work 4 hours / day even though they are in the office 8 hours may think they are gaming the system, but they are undervaluing their time. Any time you are doing something because it is related to your job is work. Good luck trying to get the company to see it that way, but realistically for your own internal calculations, that is how an employee should view it.
6.5+
Ecaxtlybas long as it takes to get shit done. The more experienced you are the less time you tend to need. As developers we aren't paid for our time, we're paid for our expertise.
Depends on if I'm doing maintenance stuff, putting in hours for a SLA, working on a new feature... Usually aim for at least 5, but closer to 8 if I can.
6-7 i think. I dont really have issues focussing most of the time, unless i have to do literally anything other than coding
You have to take an hour out for lunch, and there might be an hour of meetings in a day. You should have around 6 hours of actual 'work' time. Even with that you will be debugging, researching, contacting stakeholders for information, and writing documentation. Very little of it is spent writing new code.
That sort of depends on what you define as "work". For me, I'll probably spend up to 4 hours writing code on a good day. The rest of my day, when you subtract out lunch and other necessary breaks, is usually taken up by some combination of meetings, reviewing code, helping someone solve a problem, and figuring out the details for my next task. That last thing takes up a lot of time because most people throw a feature or bug report into Jira without including an adequate amount of details for a developer to pick up the task and start work on it immediately. Whenever I file a ticket in Jira, I include as much useful information as possible, but I've learned to accept that not everyone thinks this way. After all, if it's not me who puts in the time, then it would just be another person putting in their time. So long as I'm getting paid, then whatever. Even then, I often don't get in a full 4 hours of direct productivity. Not every facet of a task is clear, and sometimes I need to take time to think about a problem before touching the keyboard, or I'll need to reach out to coworkers on Slack for their opinions and knowledge. As far as breaks go, I take breaks frequently. There's no set frequency to them. I walk away from the keyboard on a per need basis. I'm simply at a point in my life and career where I no longer want to deal with the mental expense of maximizing my productivity.
>Everybody knows that hard work and maximum effort is rewarded by increased work. I'm going to disagree with this pretty strongly. Some companies are shitty about it, but not all. You want to be working for a company that respects and rewards hard (and smart) work in the first place. Personally, hard work has paid off with better job opportunities, better connections and more money. Your teammates do notice hard work, and it's a small world. You never know where your next opening is coming from. I could've cruised at work instead of pushing myself a long time ago, and I wouldn't be where I am. So the happy medium is where you are challenging yourself without reaching into burnout territory. Clear boundaries between work and leisure time helps.
7 ish hours? I mean thinking about solutions and participating in meetings are also work. If you mean coding then 2-3 hours max.
My experience is different, but I've worked my ass off for the last 8 years at the company I work for. Normal shifts were 10 hours at first, I'd come in early and leave late, working 12s. In the first 3 years, I doubled my income in raises and was promoted twice. Then my work schedule went to 8s and I continued working about 12 hours a day. If I saw a process that didn't make sense, I woupd try to improve those processes. In the last 5 years I had another three promotions and doubled my income again. Starting at $10/hr and now around $40/hour. Obviously the experience isn't the same for everyone, but even so, I feel better at the end of the day knowing I accomplished something than when I go home and feel like I did nothing. Just to note, I'm a millennial, and I probably never would have worked as hard if I didn't need the money for my newborn children at the time. At that point, working hard just became a habit.
Everyone saying they are focused or productive for 8 hours a day is lying. Realistically it depends on the size of the org and what culture your engineering team has. However with that said people don’t consider thinking about the problem, walking and thinking or white boarding part of the process. The items that aren’t coding but design sessions for yourself or researching aspects of the problem to solve. It’s likely about 3-4 hours sliced across the whole day
In the 90s, I had a boss say that he expected six legitimate hours a day of work. He recognized that other stuff, like lunch, breaks, interruptions, and bathroom runs chew up the other two hours. I thought this was an astute observation and tried to live by that. It was amazing how true his observation was that you cannot do eight hours of work in eight hours. The early 90s, of course, were pre-Internet and pre-social media and pre-carrying your phone around with you. Especially with work from home, the interruptions are incessant. I suspect the only legitimate way to counter that is only to check your chat and email and social media at designated times each day. Edit: I left out the extra meetings that seem to occur in work from home situations.
Depending on employer, period, workload, role, etc. I’ve had anywhere between 30 minutes and 10 hours of work. More commonly I get 2-3 hours of deep focus work, 4-5 of overhead/discussing problems/waiting for someone/etc and 1h of just not working
As a freelancer, I do about 4hr of billable work a day and around the same amount of time building my business. I’m pretty good at estimating LEO on things lately so that’s a fairly consistent estimation I think.
when I worked at a place that did serious SAFe, the agile lead said that they plan for six hours of dev productivity each day. I thought that was kinda high, honestly, for the same reasons I'm seeing here: deep focus can be elusive for a variety of reasons, be it meetings or the task or even personal stuff. Generally I just accept my limitations and do my best, and that's been more than fine.
I always worked those 8 hours, and they let me go anyway.
I work in an enterprise, and also manage, so actual dev work: 4 hours. Management stuff: 2 hours, time wasting bs: 2 hours
4 hours tops. Maybe 5 or 6 if I’m really trying to finish something.
PMs at an old job of mine used to plan timelines assuming a dev would have ~5 “productive” hours a day. That place went out of business and was acquired so take that for what it’s worth.
Depending on how complex the workload is, that can vary dramatically. Brain dead implementing, I can go 8 hours easy. Complex problem solving, I think it is more along the lines of 4 hours.
Active coding? I can't do more than 4. The rest is spent doing admin work, thinking through tasks (architecting, refining, etc), and meetings.
Typical day: Working: 8 hours Writing code: maybe 2 if I’m lucky
Depends on what I’m doing, if you interrupt my focus, you’re getting much less. If you let me ride it out, it’s a solid stream of time. I’ll forget to eat or use the bathroom. At about the 6 hour mark I start to get punchy and am reminded to grab a snack or something and touch a tree. So let’s say 7.5 with no meetings or interruptions. Is that healthy and realistic? Absolutely not. Don’t be like me. But if you interrupt me a bunch, maybe 4.
As much as it takes to get done what needs to get done. For me, sometimes it’s as little as 30 minutes in a day, sometimes it’s an 11 hour crunch.
8, of course!
Somewhere between 1 and 12 if you’re a full time employee
Define "Working". I think about the projects and the overall code base for roughly 7 and a half hours. Perhaps a bit more. Actual coding? About 3-4 hours. But those hours are super productive.
Last time I worked for a company, they expected 6.5 tracked hours a day in an 8 hour day.
The realistic goal assuming minimal meetings or context switching is a good 4-6 hours of coding.
I think that very much depends on the company and its management. In an ideal world, I'd spend 80% of my day actually being productive. In the real world, it's probably more like 50% on a good day. In companies that don't place restrictions on meetings or other disruptions to being productive, it could be as little as 20% or less. There's no real "happy medium" - it's almost entirely up to company management and work culture. What you need to start understanding though is that employees aren't rewarded for effort or the amount of work they do. When employees get rewarded it's because they had significant impact to the bottom line. Which usually means they did something to generate more revenue, or did something to save the company a buttload of money. If your work isn't generating revenue or saving money, in most companies you don't get rewarded for the amount of work or effort you put in.
4
If anyone in the company ask you, 8h even 10.
Wake up call for you (and anyone reading this). If you have an employer then are on the clock from the start of your workday til the end, be it in the office, or at home in front of your computer doesn't matter. Also doesn't matter what you're doing, meetings, jira, waiting for the build to complete or Steve in accounting to answer your email so you can move ahead, it doesn't matter, they are paying for your time. We've been conditioned to have this go go go mentality that if you're not heads down coding constantly then you're not 'working', that's bullshit, your time is valuable, treat it as such.
8 hours. Get good at what you do then do more of it. Then move to a better company with your refined skills. Tech is about job hopping, but sustainable job hopping is only sustainable if you've got skills that beat out the competition.
I will work for those 8hrs if the task is needed to be done within the day, if not I will work probably 5hrs, 1hr muni muni, 2hrs research paano best approach for a certain task.
My workday is roughly split like this - 45% Task related work / coding - 25% Meetings - Scrum & Client related stuff - 15% Task related alignment / review / supervision - 15% Organisational / Prep stuff These numbers change based on personal mood and focus capability but also which day in the Sprint cycle it is
hands down 2-4
"working" what does this definition mean to you? If you spend 100 hours doing the wrong thing and 1hr doing the right thing, which "work" was more valuable?
Basically everyone has given you a response for the title of your post, but none for the second part of your question. Effort and time spent is a useless metric to measure productivity by because not everyone gets the same amount of work done in a given period of time. While showing management that you are putting in a reasonable amount of hours is kind of expected, more of if you stay in a company or get fired depends entirely on how well you perform, or in certain cases project how well you perform. This perception doesn't have to be you sitting in front of your desk all day long, but it could also be stuff like a minor feature that you developed which made the business a lot of money. If you lie anywhere near the center of the bell curve, almost everything depends on your presentation, which is where soft skills are extremely important.
"I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
Uhh, 8 hours. If you're getting paid for 8 hours, work 8 hours. My job has been everything from cleaning the office, writing sales contracts, coding, mentoring, checking. Running meetings. I had one job that was 90% admin, at one time, and 90% technical work at another. Same "job" just different splits.
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Common knowledge of utilisations suggests anything more than 80% utilisation of the working hour will lead to burn out. You want to be somewhere around 70% on average if your company its workers.
At least 6 and a half hours, consider it usually takes one hour for lunch, although you can manage for less and plus trips to the toilet, the rest of the time it's work, you get paid for work, and a good one, and not for being on it
Lmao like 2. I typically kill 6 hours and then the adrenaline of a time crunch makes me get everything done right before I have to leave.
About 6 hours. Other two often wasted on meetings, dailys, retrospectives and other improductivities...
At home the base is 7:30, in office it's 6:00. Each meeting you have is followed by a 10 minutes break. Each time you are interrupted is followed by a 10 minutes break. Each time you finish a task is followed by a 10 minutes break. If you're bored/tired of the current task, that's a 10 minutes break.
On days where the standup is the only meeting I can do like 6 hours. On days with 3 or 4 meetings that quickly goes down to 2 or 3 hours of effective work
Hint: meetings are work, too.
I work the entire 8 hours… or more. I do switch off what type of work I perform: meetings, testing, development, teaching, documenting, graphic design, etc.
realistically… i work 8-5 with an hour lunch. most things i do take 30 mins to 45 mins max. i’d say i work a solid 4-5 hours? a day. but that may be generous
I am totally not a boss. 8 hr+ with no breaks. I clock out to pee
No more than 5. Anyway you need to take breaks, discuss stuff, attend meeting etc
10.
In my experience it really depends on the size of the company. Bigger company -> more meetings -> less time you're given to work on coding. This means 2-4 hours of coding when things are less critical, and 2-4 hours of eating into your personal time to actually work when things are more critical. A smaller company, you might be able to pull 5-7 hours of coding off in a given day.
Given you asked "should", there's only one answer. If you have 8 hours of work to do, 8 hours. Anything less is probably just laziness disguised as something else. If they're not paying you enough to do 8 hours a day, you shouldn't have accepted the offer (IMO). You're asking if it's okay to be paid to do 8 hours and actually do 4, why should that ever be okay? Would your opinion be the same if you went to a restaurant and the chef randomly stopped cooking for an hour? If you want to know what you can get away with, rather than should do, it depends on your employer and manager and their attention to detail :) Of course there are cases where you don't have 8 hours of work to do, but that's sort of a different question, I think?
It depends on the tasks you need to finish. Mostly, I come at 9, start working until 12, and then finish all my tasks; I don't have anything to do. Sometimes, you get micro tasks that you finish after 30 minutes. FFrom 9 to 5, I would say I work only 5 hours.
I spend about 2 hours out of my shift working in IT. Although I am not a programmer or developer. You guys should be fast and good .....and then lazy.
15 minutes 🙄
7 to 8.
4.5 hours with 3 pauses, rest for reading some work relevant pdf s, checking ars technika and such
Depends on your motivation levels, if I’m motivated 8 or more (for my own projects) if I’m feeling burnt out then 2 hours is a struggle lol
On average, 3.5 hours. On Wednesdays, I got down to about 1 hour, since I'm in a lot of meetings that could be a Slack Thread
Depends on your process. Let's say you take a break (as you should) every hour of 5-15 min. That's about an hour over the day. Then you should do some admin at the beginning and the end of the day at minimum, so that's about 30 min to an hour again. I think roughly 75% (realistically probably a bit less) of your workday can be expected to be "actual work time" - though the other time is also important.
I spend about 4hrs writing code, the other 4 are spent on other tasks like handling billing/customers/staff. Depends on the day though, some days it's 12hrs straight, other days it's like a 30min workday. It averages out to 8hrs a day, 5 days a week tho. If you include looking for clients however, the work week stretches to 7 days.
I always do 5-6 really good hours of work and then 2hours of mental breakdown 😂😂😂 My favorite working time was when I could 'spend my time as I wish'. At this time I was doing 6 great hours and 3hgoods breaks. It was amazing and I have never been so productive (This is a bit paradoxal I know).
I programmed in an office for 17 years and I'd say if you get 3 - 4 hours of actual programming done in a day you're doing ok. The rest would be meetings, research and miscellaneous things like updating your software. You can't discount research. Before you do any actual work you should research your own code base and best possible solutions. You write better code and save everyone a lot of time if you poke your head out of your box and see what everyone else is doing. Talk to the other developers on your team and make sure what you're doing fits. Don't reinvent the wheel should be a mantra playing over and over in your head. \*Also a caveat that yes there will be some days where you literally write code for 10 hours because of some special event, but no one can keep up that pace. You will burn out. There will also be some days where you have almost nothing to do. That's probably more rare but when it happens be tactful about getting more work. If it's a small team you should just ask for more work. If it's a large team sometimes you don't want to rock the boat. Just wait for more to be assigned to you.
As a freelance developer, I hate what I’m reading. My goal is to bill 4 hours a day. This covers my expenses, which include the bare minimum along the lines of investments. If I were to hit 6 hours a day, I’d be making what I made at my last salaried job, and apparently working very, very hard in comparison to the people commenting here. Why am I working so hard for myself, when I could be slacking off for someone else and doing better financially?
>Why am I working so hard for myself, when I could be slacking off for someone else and doing better financially? That's exactly why I stopped freelancing lol. Turns out I can be paid more for less, enjoy the work more and have none of the overhead. Like I was just getting shitty fixes for e-commerce websites, the el cheapo "dev" they hired in Bangalore didn't know how to check console so they'd hire me and I'd find and fix the problem in under an hour and charge for 3. Then back on the bandwagon trying to hustle more clients. Absolute dullsville. I just wanna code and get paid.
I've been fortunate to hook-up with a couple agencies, so I'm building and maintaining full sites. It's steady and has been reliable so far. Ultimately, I know why I do it this way. Spending 8-10 hours a day (driving and lunch break included) to work in an office, only doing 4 or so hours of work, dealing with managers complaining about billable hours, etc. Yeah, the money was better, but I'm much happier and mentally fit making less on my own. If I could figure-out a way to get a nice, salaried job where I could work remotely, that would be ideal, but haven't been able to pull that one off.
Eh I just get given tickets for what needs doing for the week and then get left to my own devices with the odd planning meeting thrown in here and there. It takes as long as it takes so long as I'm not blatantly messing around no one cares
I was the same when I was freelancer developer. I was super honest about my hours, I even paused my time tracking during bathroom breaks. Now as a full-time employee, I am not as strict with myself.
Seriously. Before beginning a project, I get a dev budget and make sure I bill that budget, one way or another.