One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

This isn't surprising, because devs have a tendency to focus on the hard bits of coding as being their work. Why not, right? It's probably the most satisfying too, so we forget the bits where we document, explain to colleagues, organize, etc. Don't forget that a lot of "not working" such as browsing a certain orange-and-beige website actually IS work as well: you wouldn't be updated on what's going on in the tech world if you didn't read some new things regularly.

However consider that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do. Typically you'll never find one of those people saying they don't do much. In fact, many of them feel compelled to sit in the office - face time - to look busy. If you were to narrowly define their work like I've done with software devs, many people would end up with maybe a couple of hours a day, mainly reading some docs to decide what their business unit should do.

A lot of comments here are to the effect that the things they do when "not working" are actually work of some fashion.

For me, I promise you that is not the case. I've always been a lazy motherfucker. I didn't get into automating things with technology because I liked to work, after all. Over the past 10 years I'd say I did honestly work a full work day when I was my most productive, but my median work day was probably around 3 hours/day. As in, I spent the rest of it reading books in a terminal so it looked like I was doing work, or something similarly useless to my employer.

My employer never complained, and in fact I earned a reputation for being the guy who can get to the bottom of hard problems, deliver the simplest and quickest solution to an immediate need, or reason out and mitigate for all the ways something could go wrong. I would say I was actually good at my job despite not actually working that much. Thus, I am constantly annoyed that my employer is so insistent on butts-in-seats, to the extent that during a global pandemic I've only been working from home during the time I was contagious with the goddamned plague (all of my department caught it thanks to this policy).

Due to my rapidly failing mental health, I'd say I put in a median 3 hours/week of work right now. Still, very few people seem to have noticed and no one has said anything.

3-4 hours of deep work is fairly standard I think. The rest of the time is not necessarily something I wouldn't define as "hard work" (emails, meetings, etc...) - but it's not slacking either.

This is a bad survey, both for questions of selection (busy people don’t do surveys like this) and the nebulous question of what constitutes real work (my guess: this is telling you who has lots of meeting, Jira, etc. overhead).

My real question: is this just clickbait or is this fodder for the kinds of companies which market things like monitoring software to toxic managers? I have memories of working at a consulting shop which tried to entertain the idea that the reason they weren’t profitable wasn’t due to two of the partners cutting deals below estimated costs but rather something like people slacking or not tracking their time precisely enough. Tracking at 5 minute intervals didn’t change the big picture but it did dramatically increase the amount of time spent on time tracking.

If anything, this demonstrates how ludicrous the idea of "working/not working" as a binary concept is.

Including overhead I am well over 12 hours/day but pure coding... Really depends on how many times people disturb me with 'stuff'.

I have worked with many freelancers and worked (as tech consultant) in many big and small businesses; a lot of capable tech people, in my experience, vastly understate the time they actually work. When they are in meetings, all day, they feel they didn't work and report hours accordingly. I have to point out to them regularly that even though they reported 3 hours, I was in meetings with them for 6 (and yes, I find that generally quite pointless so I understand the sentiment), so I think it's closer to 8-9 hours.

“How many real hours of work do you put in each day?”

Am I supposed to count meetings I didn't need to be on, or that could've been an email, or that get rescheduled at the last minute for 15 minutes later than originally?

Meetings can really disrupt my day, I think most devs understand the ramp up it can take to get into a problem, and having meetings spaced out all day can really hit that. But also, does anyone count when you're on home time and it you suddenly have an idea on how to solve a work problem that's was bugging you throughout the day and couldn't find a decent approach, and didn't really write much code.

There is less incentive to do work when your output is the same as those who work twice (or many times more) as much. When you watch your coworkers fumble through constant framework and trendy tool bullshit instead of actually solving for the business requirements you really want to do the right thing and bypass the stupidity to deliver actual results back to the business. Doing that, however, often results in retribution, so you just sit there not doing work.

I've worked at a few large orgs, 100s sometimes 1000+ developers. If the majority of them did more than an hour or two of work a day I'd be shocked.

I'm pretty sure I put in about 3-4 hours of real work when I was in office too. If you count meetings, answering emails, and operational work, it is hard to put in a standard 8 hours of real work.

Also, the comment that the Amazon employee made is similar to what I hear across other online forums such as Reddit and Twitter. Seems Amazon has created a really toxic environment for everyone involved.

Can we change this clickbait title?

- "working" is not defined clearly so it's possible everybody meant a different thing - "admit" implies some sort of guilt on the developer side.

As many people pointed out it depends what "working" means. If this is focus mode/deep work, than it's quite a lot. If it means 3 to 4 hours of light work (e-mails, waiting on conferences, chatting with co-workers etc) and the rest is social media and things totally not related to the job then it's a different story.

This sounds about right for focused thinking work. Also probably an average. For me if I'm really in deep on a problem, then I work much more than that as I try and figure it out, including evenings and weekends. But... once its done, that might be followed by some "light" work days.

1/3 of tech workers admit to working 3 to 4 hours, while 2/3 of tech workers admit to sucking at tech work. Leaving less than 10% who know what they're doing and working full days doing the real tech work. Just ask any company.

And isn't that wonderful? "admit" implies they should feel ashamed?

Why do we care about how many hours people are working? Good looking people make tens of thousands of dollars for showing up at a party for 1-2 hours. Influencers make thousands for recommending a product in a few minutes.

Tech workers have a valuable and, in the grand scheme of things, rare ability that is immensely useful to Humankind. Perhaps some very talented people can do top quality work for a couple of hours a day, but deliver immense value in these two hours. Is this a reason for concern?

Most knowledge workers have about the same amount of productive/active work; the rest is fluff/goofing off/socializing.

This reminds me very much of an EWD quote:

"My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."

I would be proud to get 3-4 hours of "real" work done a day, and I'd be very happy with any employee that did the same. I think most people in jobs that require some degree of problem-solving would agree.

Is it me or the article reads as "Not everyone works what they should, look at these slackers.."?

Also I don't know exactly how they measure this, but I have a feeling it might be the time people spend pressing buttons..

Large number of posts here about how people do work when they're not really working that were posted on this social media site during standard working hours.

To contrast that with my anecdata, I regularly work over 12 hours a day. Of course, not all of that is paid.

As others have said, it all depends on what you call "work".

I used to say I coded for only 1 month a year. The other 11 I was debugging, documenting, testing, releasing and supporting.

So the other two thirds are just lying.

I am pretty envious. I have worked 10 for the past 6 years. I am probably an idiot for doing so.

I am officially working half time. You know what that means :)

I work more than that, but I don't admit it...

Why else do you think I'm commenting here?

Which companies? I'll start applying :-)

the other 6-7 hours is meetings