What is your average amount of hours a day you enjoy at a job, jobs you've had with the most enjoyable hours a day and what made them especially enjoyable and so forth.
Sorry you are enduring that though, I know what that feels like and it sucks. I luckily haven't had that feeling in a long time, but it sticks with you.
So really in my mind that means we're looking at varying levels of "not hate". I do not hate the actual work I do 90+% of the time. It's not the most interesting, but I don't feel as if it is pointless.
Unfortunately, similar to the managers thread, the actual time I spend coding is not all that goes into the job. I don't manage anyone, but I find the human interaction portion of my current job incredibly frustrating. From communication styles to manners of expression to priorities when it comes to dealing with teammates we just don't seem to mesh well, and so any day I have a pointless meeting that the organizer is late for immediately saps me of all my motivation.
I need to get out. Software engineering really takes your soul away.
In all seriousness, for me job satisfaction comes from not just enjoying what you do but believing in what your company is doing. Otherwise it's "just a job." If you can align doing something you enjoy, such as coding, with something you believe in then you're going to be much less likely asking yourself how many hours per day of your job are enjoyable.
Now working in “real agile” where every ticket is (supposed to be) a day’s work or less and everyone’s constantly at full capacity with stupid “implement whizzbang feature because management say so” tickets. Still doing similar work technically, but now it’s absolutely soul-draining! Hooray!
Enterprise agile!
If I drink a double espresso and have a somewhat well-defined task, I can get about 1-2 hours of "cruising" where I'm in Zen Mode(tm) implementing it or learning it.
Otherwise, it's pretty bad and I look out the window and laugh at how meaningless it makes my day, week, month.
I probably enjoy 5-6 hours of work, but I try to mix some wireframes, planning, research, education and code. Rest is news, reading about tech, and chatting with coworkers. Helping people online with questions specific to the framework/language I use.
It baffles me that I spend my energy building a silly Drupal/Ember CMS. But when I go home I write advanced stock algorithms.
Here is some clickbait I ran across this morning, for the most part you just have to read the paragraph titles. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/25/suzy-welch-4-signs-its-defin...
My gut feeling is that anybody clicking on this link might be looking for a change? (I know I am.)
Do you work remote, or does your employer allow to go earlier/work on your own stuff in your office?
I just bang out my regular work, then I can do what I want (kinda). Nobody is really looking over my shoulder and as long as I meet my deadlines things seem to be fine. (Until they are not.)
People are challenges are always going to be there, so I focus on how to influence people and for those that are toxic, I try to keep it positive as best as I can.
The rest is meetings, phone calls or dealing with stuff that isn't technically my job but landed on my desk as the only techie on staff (which averages about an hour a day ranging from hitting external IT with a wrench to speccing out new technology etc).
I think the job I had with the most enjoyable moment-to-moment time was doing grounds maintenance on a golf course. It was nice to wake up early and spend hours outside. Nice mix of things to do, clear (if sisyphean) goals, and interesting coworkers.