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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

At 3 hours a day, you work as much as everyone else does. [0]

[0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...

I did an HN poll, how many hours per day do you work including meetings and etc, and the answer was a normal distribution around 6 hours a day.

https://imgur.com/qdSltlM

The left axis is years of seniority.

For a lot of people "meetings" aren't productive work. They may be necessary for communication but they are not actual work for a lot of people. It's entirely different if you're a manager or someone else whose main job is largely communication.

At least with work from home, I generally do not consider my meetings part of my work because I can go and do work in my meeting.

Here's how I phrased the question: https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1

Did you segment this for presentation purposes, or were there only 3 ranges to choose from? I‘m asking because the latter could also mean that most people work 4h. Deducing [4;8] = 6 would not really work.

Only three stages, the average there could be different than 6.

I see, thanks!

i don't think you have enough data to be linking this as if it has meaning. N=104 is not a large sample size.

It depends what you are measuring. It looks like the rough distribution is robust across seniority strata, hinting at the sample size probably being adequate.

104 seems enough to be meaningful. Might have a fair margin of error but that's ok. Why do you think otherwise?

Out of curiosity, what is the math you used to determine it's not a large sample size?

N=104 is a fine sample size for some things - especially given how much comfort you have for error.

This isn't a great study in general, because, realistically, there isn't a large range for the work hours. And the majority of them were grouped into one bucket => 4-8 hours.

That's the biggest problem.

The second biggest is that - presumably - not all of the respondents work 5 days per week.

The third is that - without a large sample size - your margin of error is going to cover a pretty big chunk. If your finding is 6 hours +/- 1 hour, 95% CI - that's pretty unsurprising.

You need a large sample size because there are ~115M workers in the US. What are the odds these 104 people are a decent representation of all ~115M voters??

If there's only 10,000 people this applies to that read HackerNews, then - if you fixed everything else - your CI wouldn't be super low.

It all depends on how you count your hours.

When you are a developer, and you only count the minutes that you are at your computer coding, I highly doubt many would reach 3 hours per day.

If I’m your boss, sitting next to you and in full view of your screen, and I’m there for 8 hours working, will the average person work a real 8 hours?

If you're my boss and doing this, then you're getting none of your own work done.

If you're my boss and doing this, then you're going to see me leave the company.

That's me also. Maybe not fair as I'm more likely to be the boss since I have 20+ years of experience but no way am I working under those constraints.

> If I’m your boss, sitting next to you and in full view of your screen, and I’m there for 8 hours working, will the average person work a real 8 hours?

You probably get a few weeks of “real 8 hours” before your best employees find somewhere less oppressive to work and leave your micromanaged company.

Your bad employees will stay because they don’t have better options.

if you're doing this I'm quitting and going to work in one of the thousands of firms where this doesn't happen, and potentially for better pay?

If you're my boss watching me that closely, I'm going to be reading up on the OSS workforce sabotage manual.

When I was a junior engineer, I quit a position over this. My manager had a direct line of sight from his desk into my screen and would give me passive aggressive comments if I wasn’t always on task.

I was the best performing engineer at that company, handling a contract that was worth >20% of their revenue by myself. They loved me at that company, and I wish I had been honest with the feedback I gave during my exit interview, but I just couldn’t tell the guy my issues were with him.

Curious but did you not think to bring it up before quitting if it was such a big factor in your leaving? You'd have decent clout with your manager's manager in making sure he doesn't micromanage or give passive aggressive comments.

The company had less than 20 employees, everybody knew each other, and my manager was the owner, a self-made man with a really high opinion of himself due to survivorship bias. Also, it was my first job after my failed startup right out of college. It was really tough for me to give feedback, and I didn’t even know if I was just being lazy or the problem was the way things were being run.

Looking back at it, I understand why I quit, but back then I couldn’t even put it in words. Thankfully, I managed to keep all the friendships I made, including my ex boss.

This question doesn't parse well. What does this "average person" have to do with me?

If you're my boss, and I'm reading your question, will the average boss communicate clearly?

I wouldn't be.

I simply can't sit and focus working for 8 hours a day. Especially if its hard. I'm not a robot.

If I thought you were sitting there just to watch me to try and force me to work more, I'd leave.

I think for me doing dev, 4 hours is about the max before the quality of work drops off significantly.

I can't remember the last time I worked more than 3 hours, being done by lunch time everyday is great. If I work in the afternoon it is just mandatory meetings.

Which is the best argument for WFH, really. At 3h a day + 1h commuting, it's 6h a day wasted for being in an office, crazy.

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