People don't work as much as they say | Hacker News Reader

People don't work as much as they say

drmaciver.substack.com

492 pointsexolymph305 comments

I’ve been reading some variant of this, for many years.

One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen.

I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time), and it would have been irresponsible, in the extreme, to put myself into the critical path (because it was no guarantee that I would be able to reliably work). I sometimes tasked myself with projects for work, but they were almost always ignored by my company, and that hurt.

I’ve heard that being a soldier in a combat zone is long hours of idleness, punctuated by short periods of terror and stress.

That pretty much describes my time as a manager, without the “terror” part (and the bullets and explosions).

It sucked.

I now work at home, on my own technical tasks. I get a lot done. My personal productivity is through the roof.

I take a lot of breaks. Sometimes, I even nap.

But I don’t have a time clock. I will often start coding, at 6AM (sometimes, before I even get in the shower, after my morning exercise), and will continue to code, until I hit the sack. I often test my software, while I’m sitting in bed, and will enter issues, from my iPad.

When I have a problem that I’m chasing, or I am in the middle of a big implementation phase, I can work for many hours, straight. I will barely come up for air, and I feel absolutely exhausted, when I finally step back (nap time!).

I’m not particularly concerned about a measured life. I get a lot done; far more than I ever did, when I was being paid.

And I’m having a blast.

I feel you in terms of the hacker lifestyle you’re describing. I often work from home too (1-3d/w). Fully emersed and free, getting a lot done. But I‘ve found going for a >1h walk a day really helps. The body feels more awake, my eyes are more relaxed, my thoughts are reordered and some new inspirations and ideas emerge.

I start each day, with a 2-mile walk (not today. Lots of snow, but I’ll be getting my exercise, later).

I use the time to triage my day. Works a charm.

I am currently a manager and the few times where I have said “I am going to write part of this solution my team is working on.” Were the times that I got a big pile of management work and blocked the team. I have since learned my lesson.

"A big steaming pile of management work" might be a more apt description... ;-)

What’s the point of earning the money?

It’s for another day. Currently his happiness is in exactly what he is doing. He is building and creating.

Do you know the commenter I replied to personally or are you guessing?

> I sometimes tasked myself with projects for work, but they were almost always ignored by my company, and that hurt.

Experienced this on multiple occasions especially recently and it does indeed hurt - especially when you know what a difference it could make to users or fellow developers and it’s ignored or ignored and then some higher up miraculously suddenly invents an identical idea several months down the line.

Bonus points if it’s a whole team effort for almost two years that gets more or less scrapped despite the obvious need for it as a dependency for multiple teams.

As a manager, I quickly realized that trying to be a technical contributor was a subtle and insidious form of micromanagement. Also, I could give myself my pick of the coolest tasks, which was unfair.

Why did you feel that making direct technical contributions was micromanagement?

Not the person you replied to, but it's because manager's will never truly fit into a project. Most people don't want to go against the manager, or question decisions made by the manager.

Even if the manager specifically says "Hey everyone, give me some feedback. Be open and honest" - That's a trap. No one will ever actually do that, because if you bruise your manager's ego, they have the power to make your life a living hell.

As someone who has worked with managers who did tried to get too involved in projects, they just become a dictator. Since the manager will play an oversight role in the project, any small issues will be visible to them at all times. Normally, the team could work out small roadblocks on their own to keep stress low. If the manager is involved, they'll often try to "make themselves useful" and slow things down. Let's not even mention manager statements like "Hey guys, let's keep a note of this so we can work on restructuring our processes in case this happens in the future"... (Because everyone loves redrafting SOPs every 2 months, right?).

A good manager is one that stays out of the way and lets you do your job. Having a manager on a project kinda feels like that episode of The Office when Michael comes to Jim's party and everyone was just kinda standing around awkwardly.

I've been a hands on contributor and manager for long time. I do three things that seem to make this a lot more functional:

1) I pick what I'm going to work on after the rest of the team picks their tickets.

2) I fix one bug per day, not matter what.

3) HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person's Opinion) is not an acceptable reason to make a decision.

It's worked well for me, your milage may vary.

At least that's what you think. I'm sure your direct reports have a lot of opinions on that setup that they'll never reveal. I say this with 100% confidence.

> I'm sure your direct reports have a lot of opinions on that setup that they'll never reveal.

Then I'll never know how to make things better. It's dysfunctional when you can't communicate safely and equally dysfunctional when problems are hidden for fear of a manager's ego.

Yup, but unfortunately the world is filled with dysfunctional people. Functionality is the exception not the rule :(

Because you either manage people / goals / interactions with other teams or do front line work.

If you cross the barrier the people in your team will be put under pressure having to do things like for example disagreeing with technical decision or debating something in a code review with... the same person that has the power to promote or fire them.

It creates a power gradient in every day activities.

That's "stealth" micromanagement regardless of the good intentions and technical skills of the manager.

It sounds like you're saying that even reviewing code of subordinates is micromanagement? If you have a team of junior developers, who should review their code? Someone from another team?

The alternative is you give yourself the low priority low probability work. The 'noodle around this nasty thing nobody wants to touch' work that delivers tech debt reduction or a velocity win. It can be very fulfilling, but no critical path, no OKR or delivery date etc etc

this is right. no, you don't get the big win. but you do get to put in that cleanup that everyone is always talking about. and you get to actually write the tests that no one else has time for.

you kind of have to do this. idk how I could function effectively if I didn't have a reason to be looking at the code all the time.

yep, The self-assign for many managers should be boring spikes, documentation and execution tasks. You will need to get your tech fix somewhere other than your day-to-day.

Each hour put in as a manager is many times the return of you as an IC (for better or worse). As technical work is an endless pit of time, it’s very difficult to be a hands on manager that’s effective.

Very entertaining to read a thread of managers telling themselves they shouldn't do any work, and then simultaneously describing not doing any work as "many times the return of you as an IC" (presumably counting themselves not interfering with the people doing the actual work as equivalent to doing the sum of that work).

Managers do work. They decide you what need to be done, when it’s due, they coordinate processes inside and outside the team, they (hopefully) review what gets implemented, make sure the team has the physical things it needs, build budgets and roadmaps, isolate the team from organizational bullshit, work on hiring and more.

It’s quite simple - you as a manager can only do the work of one IC but your are responsible for multiple ICs. If they sit idle, make the wrong decisions, are demoralized or leave the company, you hurt the org much more than help by technical contributions yourself.

I’d put the cutoff at about a team of 6. Below 6 you can do technical work yourself, above 6 you’re better off taking care of your team.

I don’t especially care what people think of the job I did, or how I did it. I made enough to be where I am, today, and I like it.

It was what it was, and it is what it is.

I just wrote about my own experience, and my own feelings about that experience, as opposed to rendering judgment (look through my posting history, here, and you’ll find very little judgment of others. I am too old and tired to fight. I have better things to do with my time, other than TCP/IP posturing).

If you think "hands on keyboard coding" is the primary/only form of work that matters, then you've missed out on a lot.

Of the best managers I've worked for, one of the most obviously important things they did was keep other teams off our backs. Constant interruptions, shifting priorities, "just a quick question", and the like do more to destroy a team and its progress than anything else. Their name doesn't get attached to lines of code or completed items but a lot more things get completed as a result.

If you want that then hire someone to stand outside your office with a stick and reply rudely to emails. We don't need to give them hiring/firing/promotion/rewards authority.

As an IC you can't tell other teams managers or higher ups or PMs to fuck off if they call you directly and tell you they think what you are doing isn't good. Or if they ask for unreasonable stuff. At least without fear of getting fired. A manager needs to prevent this from happening

So the problem managers solve is the problem of there being other managers?

Don't forget sales/marketing overpromisers and nosy executives who get in the developers' hair.

Completely alarming this comment is being down voted. It's 100% true.

I guess it depends on what the person is doing. A guy with a stick won't be negotiating timelines and requirements, explaining why things can't / won't / weren't done, dealing with fallout or shifting the requirements / timelines of others based on teams productivity.

Do they need to be the one with hiring/firing/promotion/rewards authority? I don't know.

Your imagination is very far from the reality of what managers do. I’ll give you a run-down of my day:

1) reading emails. These emails generally consist of a few categories of things — stuff I need to be informed about, questions, asks for permission (a special form of question), documents (generally decision and decision docs, or stuff from Product), and meeting requests.

2) meetings. These meetings generally consist of stuff that couldn’t be handled over email, but is a lot of the same stuff. It’s also status updates, not from my staff, but with my peers. 1:1s and staff meeting (mine and my manager’s) are the balance.

3) There is no 3. Really, it’s a full time job to do 1 and 2. Every now and then I will carve out some time to write a document myself, but in general that gets delegated because I will do it more slowly than someone who doesn’t have a pile of time-sensitive email and meetings to deal with.

You are mistaken, this is literally - word for word - my imagination of what managers do.

Well then you are mistaken in your characterization of this not being work.

Replying to emails and sitting in meetings thinking of the best way to tell other people how to do the actual work isn't work, no.

Oh I forgot - we give the people who do this control over the employment of the people who do the actual work. Very weird system.

And yet one that billions of people participate in. You are either a genius of epic proportions or just wrong in your thinking here. As long as people in coordinated groups get more done than individuals, I believe you are wrong.

People in coordinated groups do not necessarily require someone to sit around in meetings and send emails telling the rest of them what to do.

How is coordination achieved otherwise?

Btw, I never said “telling the rest of them what to do.” That is a complete misconception of management, at least the way I believe the best managers practice it. I only get involved in decisions that my team has been unable to make themselves. Even then, I rarely find myself having to be the decider. My role is to facilitate a good decision, not to tell people what to do. The team looks to me for prioritization and providing context, not to top-down manage them.

The other guy is definitely a bit jumpy and as a programmer I can't agree with him (fully) but that part of your comments stood out to me:

> And yet one that billions of people participate in.

Most of humanity participated in slavery for a long time as well. A lot of Europe's city dwellers enjoyed watching the hanging of criminals at dawn or sun-down, too. People also developed the mass habit of accusing a neighbor they don't like for being a witch and were hoping to have them burned (because the neighbor's chicken pecked your watermelon seeds or whatever; yeah, people are that petty).

Appealing to statistics and what the majority does is missing the point of the big power imbalances that are sadly one of the constants in every human society or system.

It doesn't help that many programmers are rather introverted and prefer passive resistance as opposed to having a good and informative one-on-one meeting, of course. And many managers are stuck in the unenviable position of having to develop skills to extract valuable actionable info from introverted people who prefer to sabotage them behind their backs. I recognize that and I sympathize.

But the inconvenient truth is, and one many managers forget about all the time, is that most of us have zero decision power -- which is quite the shame because we need it in no small amount of situations.

Formulas like Scrum (or anything "agile" really) are a complete and pathetic joke. The process must adapt to the task at hand. The best performing teams I've been in had zero process -- they only had some 10-15 ground rules like "if you are stuck for more than a day please raise the issue with the rest of the team; nobody will think you're stupid, we'll only try to unblock you". Whatever needed to be done, we used our own breed of process that best served it. On the rare occasions Scrum was actually useful btw. Most of the time the schema was more or less "enable your ICs, actively seek to unblock them, then leave them the hell alone, they know what they're doing".

You alluded to (in another comment) that you don't make the decisions; that you facilitate the people to arrive at the right decision. Kudos to you but you should still recognize that you're the minority, sadly.

Most programmers are forced to work with managers whose ego is easily bruised. That's a fact of life, one that can't be fixed by going to another job because the odds are at least 90% that it will be the same there as well.

So yeah, there are problems on both sides, that's unquestionable. I mostly went on to rant about how appealing to statistics is a poor strategy to evaluate if a given system is good (which doesn't at all explain how many companies started getting more bang for their buck after they moved to a 4-day working week btw; among other examples).

I undoubtedly compressed too much into too few sentences. My allusion to genius||wrong is raising exactly this concern. How do you decide which? For me in this argument it comes down to results. Why do people organize in this way? As I stated,I believe groups get more done than individuals and that coordinating those groups becomes the central feature of management. It can be done poorly or well, but if it facilitates the group being more productive than an individual it is superior from a pragmatic perspective.

Former manager here - you'd be very surprised at how much effort it takes to act as a human shield for your developers to keep the interruptions to a minimum and keep their roadmap stable. It's work, and it can be delicate. Try running interference with a company president who wants to bother your developers when they're trying to get something out the door, or trying to make sure stupid ideas die before they become your team's problem.

Why do people keep saying that managers solve the problem of existing in the same company as other managers as though that’s a compelling point?

I'm not sure what's more unsettling to me: That we have managers here who believe that reading emails and sitting in meetings is considered contributing and making an actual difference... Or that HN has this many managers on it who apparently really cannot code or directly contribute alongside their team; yet are posting on a more technical forum, on a regular basis. Strange. Guess it's like a hockey fan who watches every game but has never laced up skates themselves.

No kidding... We got managers here saying they don't know a lick of Python their "IC's" [1] work on, or they can only contribute by ordering pizza when their team is working hard. Seriously...talk about textbook Dunning-Kruger. It use to be people got promoted to manager from becoming experts in the task they would now manage... Now they are spawned from business school, I guess. It's fine to be a manager and manage a team, set goals, deliverables etc etc... yes, it's a real job. But damn you for not being able to roll up your own sleeves and put pen to paper with the rest of your team to achieve those goals.

[1] This business jargon term has seriously got to go. It's bullshit and oddly demeaning.

I pick boring tasks that have been sitting on the backlog for a very long time usually .

And you are a hero.

One of my favorite jobs was managing about a dozen Python programmers for 3 years…because I don’t know a lick of Python and it forced me to focus on the team more than the tasks.

I got a lot of joy out of helping everybody develop, find their groove and helping them coordinate and learn from each other.

The business demands I was shielding them from were extremely stressful though. A million things that everybody wanted done yesterday in wildly different directions.

At some point in trying to make concessions on the business side I started losing the support of a couple of senior guys on the team though. After a couple of months it was pretty clear there was no getting that confidence back. When the demands from both sides became too high to resolve, I didn’t have any choice but to move on. Really frustrating too because I gave so much to that job and team, but you can tell when you’ve lost people and there’s no easy fix like refactoring the code to make it all better.

As a manager, trust is the only thing that allows you to be effective; when your team knows that you are really looking out for them.

It sounds like you were trying to be too nice and were trying to appease both sides; that’s a losing proposition. You are working with adults, and adults should be able to handle bad news (if handled properly), and a good manager should be able to bring the bad news but at the same time give enough context so that everyone understands.

Maybe. It was my first time being full time management only. Balanced it effectively for the better part of 3 years. There were a lot of unique challenges (in the non-exaggerated sense) and learning experiences in that job.

In a perfect world you would be right, but spend some time with a bunch of clueless executives who don't know how clueless they are (or are trying to pretend they do have a clue) and you'll realize there's no amount of context that will help them realize why there's bad news.

There's been times where it's the right thing to get involved, and other times when it's not. For example, we had an issue with full ticket completion: sometimes 3 of 5 requirements would get complete, and then the work was merged. I wouldn't review line-by-line, but I would cross-check the features and note if I found something missing. To be clear, I would not dictate how to do the work. In the meantime, we instituted processes to ensure work was completed in full, and once the team norm'ed around the new process, I stepped back.

> One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen.

As a manager-of-managers, when I hear that a manager is doing "a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen", it's usually a sign that something has gone wrong.

Don't get me wrong: I don't expect everyone to be productive 100% of the day, but if managers are reaching a point where even they feel like they have too much free time then one of two things has happened:

1) The company has grossly over-hired for the workload at hand. If all the tasks are done and the manager couldn't find anything to do if they tried, it's possible that the company just hired way too many people or greatly under-shot their workloads.

This really does happen at some companies that get so big and profitable that executives start chasing headcount and having the biggest department they can get away with. You end up with so many managers that most of them spend their days sitting around or, even worse, inventing new and unnecessary work for their teams just to fill time. It's not good.

2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job is. Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) - This often happens when developers who haven't experienced good management or managerial mentoring get promoted into their own management positions and assume their job is literally just to delegate to the engineers and then check on them until it's done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there is always more for managers to be doing: Reviewing/updating documentation, helping with hands-on testing of the product, observing or interacting with customers to get a deeper understanding of the problem, coordinating with the sales team to get a better understanding of their domain, and the list goes on. Many of these tasks aren't immediately obvious without proper managerial mentorship, and they might be downright foreign if your only experience with managers has been of the delegate-and-wait variety.

Personally, my experience was that I was far busier as a manager than I ever was as an IC. IC work is more narrowly scoped and easier to constrain to specific time limits, or get targets and deadlines shifted according to however much work could be done. As a manager, the amount of work that could be done was both never-ending and also extremely varied, comprising tens or maybe hundreds of possible tasks that often needed attention in parallel, combined with the inter-personal demands of managing people and constant hiring.

"2) Or: Managers have too narrow of a view of what their job is. Speaking generally (not accusing the parent comment) - This often happens when developers who haven't experienced good management or managerial mentoring get promoted into their own management positions and assume their job is literally just to delegate to the engineers and then check on them until it's done. In non-stagnant tech companies, there is always more for managers to be doing: Reviewing/updating documentation, helping with hands-on testing of the product, observing or interacting with customers to get a deeper understanding of the problem, coordinating with the sales team to get a better understanding of their domain, and the list goes on. Many of these tasks aren't immediately obvious without proper managerial mentorship, and they might be downright foreign if your only experience with managers has been of the delegate-and-wait variety."

Big companies tend to hire "specialists" to do all those tasks you mentioned, which I think is a mistake. If the purpose of those tasks is to improve the function of product development, which can be rephrased as "make the coders more effective" then each of those people require a high bandwidth communication channel to the coders. You can only have so many people that you communicate a lot with, and so the effectiveness of those people in improving the effectiveness of product development is limited. Their job is to make sure the devs arent working in silos but they all just end up forming their own silos because its simply not practical to have high bandwidth communication with all these different groups of specialists.

Im talking about designers, product managers, project managers, user researchers, data analysts etc ...

My broader point is that I agree with your vision of what a manager should do but IME it's not how larger companies tend to be structured.

Even then, the manager needs to reaching out to those specialists, coordinating and nurturing those relationships. No one says the eng manager needs to be all of those roles, but as the member of the team without a "real workload" they should absolutely be the liason to the rest of the org.

There is always more stuff to do but a smart person would quickly notice that only things that show up on metrics or are personally fulfilling are worth doing. The managers I’ve seen promoted chase metrics only and don’t sweat the other stuff. The good ones also take care of the people. The terrible ones try to do everything and anything that they think might be good for the company and ultimately piss everyone off and burn themselves out.

> smart person would quickly notice that only things that show up on metrics or are personally fulfilling are worth doing

In other words, only stupid people have a work ethic?

If you want to word it that way… seems a bit crude you can have work ethic and channel it towards metrics instead

No you're simply wrong. Plenty of smart people have a sense of loyalty and want to do what's best for the company and their colleagues, not just what's expedient for themselves.

And it’s NOTORIOUSLY hard to attribute effective metrics to IT.

From a security standpoint (because that’s my wheelhouse), if you’re not under attack, your metrics suck, if you chase tickets, a lot of them get closed without effective resolution.

We’re not manufacturing widgets, and can’t earn that bonus by making 10% more widgets.

Is it really that bad for a company to have over-hired? Wouldn't it be better for the employees wellbeing to have a company that over-hires rather than under-hires?

As a manager, your main job is to make your ICs effective at doing their work.

That means you need to be dealing with poor performers, rewarding with outstanding performers, trying to improve uneven performers, managing expectations from your management and shielding your team from the vicissitudes of your bosses as much as possible, fighting for things your team needs while shielding them from the demoralizing realities of working for a big company where HR and IT etc. don’t give two shits about the actual mission (if applicable), keeping an accurate budget, making sure your team is individually recognized for their success but that you take the blame for their failures, responding to changes in direction and getting your team on board, being the face of management even when that’s unpopular, and doing all the other little things required to keep the team going as effectively as possible.

There’s a lot of work to do there, and it can be incredibly rewarding when it’s going well and incredibly frustrating when it’s not.

It can also mean you have days when your team is working all out to deliver and the only thing you can do is order pizza and keep distractions away. Those are boring, often frustrating days.

It’s not for everybody, but that’s what I think a good manager does. I think it’s often easier when you manage a team and aren’t an expert at what they do (although you still need to understand at a relatively deep level), since that minimizes the chances of you trying to dive in and solve the problem.

Yeah, I agree with all of this.

Doing this well also requires building relationships with the team and trust. Recognizing little things like how people can be afraid of a project (and that fear can lead to spinning), and how to break things down/prioritize.

In software I think there are also system changes that can make individuals happier (often stuff described in books like the Phoenix project and working effectively with legacy code). A lot of which enable the things you described.

People are happy when they’re productive and goals are clear/make sense (and they have the space to focus on the work for them) and they get recognized for it.

Yeah, well...the consensus seems to be that I was a decent manager. I hated the job, but they kept me for 27 years, so I guess something went well.

Glad it's behind me, though.

27 years is a long time to stay in a job you hate.

I'm an engineering manager with only 4 years in the role, and I think it's more of a lot of things I hate with intense periods of excitement, joy and satisfaction. You might be able to get 20+ years of that, depending on the details. That's why the OP's original analogy of a far less dangerous, corporate version of military combat resonated with me.

Yup. But it wasn't all hate. I worked for a company that I believed in, was a peer with some of the finest scientists and engineers in the world, ran a team of very high-performing engineers, and was proud to be a member of that brand.

I felt good about what I did, even though I didn't enjoy it.

> 27 years is a long time to stay in a job you hate.

This statement shows that we are in a privileged place, indeed. We get to have a career, where we can do work that we enjoy, and make a lot of money at it.

The great majority of people don't get that. Most of my friends don't like their jobs. Some, are very good at what they do, and make a lot of money.

The job was relatively easy. I liked the company I worked for, and my peers. I felt a great deal of Responsibility towards the company, my peers, and my employees. I made enough to live on, and save. I could have made a lot more money, elsewhere. Despite the obvious sneers and judging that I get, I'm actually no slouch.

Nowadays, I work for free, on software that helps others.

WFM. YMMV.

Many managers are bad but can keep the job for a long time. This is because it's not the people that you are managing that judge your performance. So you can very well be a bad manager and still keep your job. The key here is that you only need to be a manager that delivers results. You don't need to be a manager that is good.

Well, many of my employees chose to give me testimonials on my LinkedIn, and they had nothing to gain from it.

Here's a couple:

> Chris was the best manager I've ever reported to. Period. He was supportive of his team, always motivating us to deliver excellence, even under daunting schedules set by the people above him. Because of Chris' support and commitment to his team, he fostered a deep loyalty and respect from our department.

> Chris is passionate about developing software and about technology in general. This means he is always in touch with the latest trends and best practices in the industry. However, he is careful not to introduce a new process or methodology to his group unless it has clear benefits and he has considered the input of everyone affected.

Chris has always been very well-respected by his engineers because his management style allows their best skills to shine. It's not simply a hands-off approach; he'll look to remove roadblocks where he can and offer help in any way possible. He is good at identifying an inefficiency and reaching out to help improve it.

More than just management skills, Chris is a kind, understanding, sensible and fair human being. At one point, we had a six-year run where no one left the group. I hadn't really noticed or appreciated this stability until someone from our HR department pointed out how remarkable it was. This could not have happened without someone like Chris managing the group.

But, what do they know? I'm sure they were mistaken. BTW: One of them was from a chap I laid off.

I never said you were bad. I'm just saying being kept around for a long time doesn't mean someone is a good manager.

Testimonials from employees are a good indicator for a good manager.

"trying to improve uneven performers"

How do you do that? Apparently I'm an inconsistent performer now.

>"trying to improve uneven performers" >How do you do that? Apparently I'm an inconsistent performer now.

I'm unsure if you are asking for advice on how to improve because your current manager marked you as inconsistent or if you think GP is calling all people "who are trying to improve as inconsistent"

I'm a manager. I want to improve ALL of my team. To rephrase, I want each of my members to work on things that benefit themselves (they improve) and benefit the team - if we can't do that, I zoom out: how can they benefit the team, department, the company, the industry, the world. You might notice this means I may find a better place for them on a different team or even outside the company. All of this. ALL OF THIS is trying to help the person in an area that he/she wants to grow in.

Growth opportunities are very diverse: coding a new language, learning at a seminar, teaching at a seminar, side projects, art, games, mentorship

I was marked as inconsistent.

The earlier guy you replied to was a "bad manager". This guy you just replied to is a good one. He gets it. Note how I said a good manager very much assigns the right task to the right people.

It’s hard. At least for me, this is the hardest classes of employees to manager—-it’s much easier to get rid of somebody who is clearly failing or reward and further develop a high performer.

When I say uneven, I’m thinking of somebody who either: (a) is excellent at certain key aspects of their jobs but clearly below expectations in others to the point that it’s an issue, or (b) somebody who performs well but doesn’t always put in enough effort. In both cases, it’s subjective and difficult to determine that it’s to the point where intervention is required, because that’s usually an uncomfortable conversation. Often, you’re the first manager ever telling the person that they need to improve—-even if you’re not the first person to think there’s an issue. Typically, the other person will think you’re an asshole. As another commenter said, they may recognize later on that you were right but normally in the near term, you’ll have strained the relationship. (That’s why managers avoid those conversations. Sometimes it’s cowardice, sometimes it’s deciding that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze today.)

As for how to work on improvement, that always has to be case-by-case considering the issue and the personality. Sometimes the “stop doing that” conversation is enough. Sometimes coaching or mentoring or development experiences can help. If those don’t work, can you shift responsibilities around or find a different role that is a better fit?

Normally you try to gently do those things anyway before you have the direct conversation, and then hope the direct conversation provides some motivation/insight to take it more seriously.

If you’re on the receiving end of that conversation, I guess my advice would be to try to critically self-reflect and see if you can understand where your manager is coming from. If you can, then you’ve both got a common place to start from towards improvement. If you can’t, or you think they’re just being unreasonable about expectations, then it is probably time to move on or hope they move on quickly.

Thanks. Basically I'm told that some stories I complete quickly while others drag out. I'm on a team that works with multiple systems (10ish), multiple languages, multiple stacks/architectures, and am expected to be full stack.

The "improvements" I've been told to make is to document why stories are slow - mostly context switching from prod support, context switching from my role as ASC, and of course just being slow when working with a system or language that I haven't worked on in a while.

So my perspective based on the feedback is, this isn't a performance issue (if it was it would be under communication instead of speed). It solely addresses visibility of the switching. I have requested consistent work, like being full stack in a single stack. The whole point of specialization of labor is to increase speed and quality, yet it seems this management tenent is wholly missed by my organization. You want consistent speed? Give me consistent work.

The best part is I got a 4.5% pay cut, yet they say they want to retain me. All while the company is talking about across the board increases (which I won't be eligible for) and having trouble filling roles that typically stay open for 6 months. Which is it - do I suck, or do you want to keep me?

Time to find a better role at a new org.

I can assure you that much of underperformance is a perception and miscommunication issue. If the employee is motivated and not stupid then if he's underperforming it's because objectives were not communicated or the manager failed to realize that the assignment was impossible not to underperform due to missing some challenging detail.

Many managers don't realize this. Even managers that have a ton of experience, all they do is fire or have harsh conversations with people who "underperform." The truth of the matter is a good manager is rare. 1 out of 10 literally and it's not an experience issue. A good manager is one who is highly highly unbiased and people are generally not like this.

The person you replied to is not a good manager. Based on his reply he is actually below average.

Basically for these managers good employees are those that can predict what the manager wants and how he thinks. If the person is able to guess and predict what his manager wants on a consistent basis, then objectives are more clear to this employee and as a result he can achieve them. These people are then perceived as "good employees".

Due note that a good manager makes objectives for each task unambiguous and crystal clear. A bad manager leaves a lot of room to fuzzy concepts like "quality of work" because he himself isn't clear about what he wants.

I have seen it many times. Employees who are basically geniuses fired because the manager wasn't able to realize how smart the person was. Instead the manager left the employee with vague instructions and expected him to just "get it." The manager didn't know that the employee is an expert in infrastructure and deployed him on writing algorithms...

This is an unwise and inefficient deployment of resources. It is the managers job to determine what each of his employees like and what they are exceptional at and deploy resources accordingly. It is also the managers job to understand in detail the nature of the assignment given to an employee so tasks can be handed out efficiently.

Bad managers tend to throw random people at random tasks without fully understanding the task or the person. In these cases there is an element of luck involved. How hard the task is versus if the person assigned to the task is suited for that task. An employee who handles the task well or is able to temper the expectations of the manager through communication is perceived as "good."

These managers are easily recognizable. I will tell you how to identify them. They perceive the world as employees who are "underperformers" and those who are not. The person you replied to put the world in 3 tiers lol. The world is very nuanced and it is impossible to divide people into three buckets like this. He is the quintessential example of "bad manager."

> The best part is I got a 4.5% pay cut, yet they say they want to retain me. All while the company is talking about across the board increases (which I won't be eligible for) and having trouble filling roles that typically stay open for 6 months. Which is it - do I suck, or do you want to keep me?

They want to keep you, they just don't want to pay you (more than they have to).

After you leave, they will have to hire a new person and give them 120% of your current pay. (And the new person will be less productive, at least at the beginning, simply because they will be new.)

But the company is making the bet that you will stay, at least for a few years, because apparently most people do.

I agree with all of this. But I can honestly say in my entire career I've only had about two good managers. One of the biggest issues in my experience is knowing who the bad/good performers are. Most managers have no idea. I've seen bad performers just let be, and I've seen great performers fired for seemingly no reason at all. Both kill team morale.

I'll add that if a good manager works with an underperforming IC and makes a meaningful difference, it is VERY UNLIKELY the IC will acknowledge this in a timely way, or perhaps even know it happened. The best case scenario I've ever experienced is several years after the fact. That's a long time to wait for some positive external validation.

Oh for sure. My first comment is pretty much me bagging on managers. But in their defense, it's a really hard job. So hard I've never taken it on because I'm positive I wouldn't be good at it. I think my experience of most managers not being as good as I'd like largely boils down to the job being extremely difficult.

I'm not surprised to hear a manager's work can go unnoticed. That's unfortunate :(

I think management is like sorcery. There is no fixed rules and most of it is interaction between people. I fully understand why many technical people shun management work (even when it pays more).

Good management is really rare. One in five or even ten maybe.

One in five to ten for delivering positive business results in a short period of time. AKA these are good managers. They're able to have good results because of themselves. Under promise over deliver. Set lower expectations.

One in fifty, achieve the above but are able to produce teams that regardless of their manager in the future would produce good results at minimum. Great managers don't seem to just focus on the business but also leveling up each individual on the team.

I think plenty of individuals have had mediocre managers and they would describe them as good.

Working with "the best" ICs reshape your perspective of what is a great ICs. Just like managers. Much earlier in my career I used to believe that great ICs were one in 20, then it became fifty and now, two hundred.

> As a manager, your main job is to make your ICs effective at doing their work.

Its a lie manager making dev's effective at their job. All a manager needs to do is communicate the requirements properly most preferably in a written document. That is the only useful thing. Everything else like motivating are just BS which has become very clear in the post covid WFH situation.

Now looking back i can feel the needless interference by managers that slowed down the progress of work. The other sad thing is they assume they have power to fire people to some extent which usually junior engineers believe for the first few years.

Before concluding i had a bad manager, let me say i have had over 10 managers in the past 20 years and its not manager's fault its the job that's BS.

Let’s say that’s the manager’s only job. But “communicating requirements in a written doc” is serious hard work, the same way “typing code in a text editor” is a lot of work. To do the former requires negotiating with other teams, understanding the limits of the audience, estimating effort, and basically developing a rough sketch of the solution in your head to make sure the request is reasonable.

> But “communicating requirements in a written doc” is serious hard work

Precisely. Hence managers delegate this to devs to figure it out themselves and make documentation easy enough for them to understand on a higher level so they can make it look like they understand whats going on. This is what been exposed with WFH.

The important thing that pisses me off is the salary of manager is about 50% higher than IC's. IMO it should not be 70% of IC's salary considering the skills it requires. Manager does not have more responsibility than IC. Manager never takes responsibility for projects failure, its always blamed on IC. Its easy for a manager to get away because usually about 5 IC's will be in a project and one or two failure to deliver features are tolerated. Combine this with attrition its so easy for a manager to not take any responsibility.

This is completely the opposite of my expectation. Gathering requirements should not be a manager's task at all, let alone writing them down.

As a manager I feel my days are always short, I work in a big company and have 1:1s with other departments to develop relationships, to try to influence other team’s roadmaps , to check how other people are doing that used to be on my team and how can I help, to talk with end users, to mentor junior developers… I can pick and choose what I feel has more impact on above.

I also have a vision of where I want the team and the company to be and try to get strategies to achieve it. For example, increases pay bands justification, promotions, career ladder, more training budget, paying for software, approve open source usage requests that are blocking someone etc.

Well done, sounds like a great setup you've created for yourself. I'm a manager and looking for a financially viable way out/back. I haven't coded since I left college and and have some small ideas for some side projects, has anyone here hired offshore coders for small projects like an addin for outlook etc?

It was a long time coming. My stint as a manager helped me to make some great relationships, and I know that I helped a lot of other ICs have great careers, and great personal lives. None of us got rich, and there wasn't a whole lot of crazy (until the last couple of years, when we worked with an American startup, and I couldn't shield my team from the dysfunction).

One of my dreams, was to be in a place, where I could create and craft my own work, without having others take steamers onto it. It's personally gratifying, to know that all the "I could do this better if..." stuff was absolutely right.

These days, I have to keep the scope small, and, still, no one is getting rich, but I am pretty chuffed with what I'm doing.

Can't put a price on that.

> I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time)

The only problem here is an employer claiming ownership of a personal project, assuming the personal project isn’t interfering with employee product delivery and isn’t violating employer security policies.

My solution to this is dual employment. My secondary employer has trouble differentiating work time from personal time so they end up with the most liberal IP assignment policies I have ever seen. Everybody, corporate IP attorneys, know this.

So, unless it’s making money or an employer wants to lay down a provision patent they won’t fight you on it. They are fully aware the alternatives are moving to another company or to stop innovating. As a result most employers with silently bless the personal projects even on company time. They won’t bless these efforts directly because personal projects on company time or property are ethical violations that legally compel the employer to take ownership and shut it down. That is the last thing anybody wants.

It was that (my employers had very good lawyers -especially wrt IP), but also, I felt a great deal of Responsibility towards my company. I know that my attitude is often derided in this crowd, but it was what it was. I did a great deal of work on the side. The job wasn't super-demanding, and I often spent time at my "day job," thinking about the side work; though not actually tapping on a keyboard. Technically, that was a Bozo no-no, but no one got hurt. In fact, a great many people, all over the world, benefitted from it.

I was careful to keep my side work to stuff that did not interfere, or compete, with my corporate employer, so there was never a problem.

My primary motivation now for personal projects is a silent anti-Dunning/Kruger.

As a JavaScript developer everybody wants to tell me how it’s done, what the right way is, and so forth. It’s not worth arguing over because the most incompetent developers tend to be the most vocal ones.

I have been writing JavaScript full time for almost 15 years and most corporate JavaScript I see is complete garbage. How do you know what excellent code is? Numbers. Code size, execution time, maintenance time, defect resolution time, test automation capabilities, new feature delivery time, and so forth. For example if your app takes 4 seconds to load and mine takes 50ms I will just assume I am less wrong, but you can’t advocate for that because will cry about code style and frameworks and other bullshit. So silently I write my personal project.

I have a blast being a senior data scientist, and I've recently turned down a manager role precisely because of the points you raised, despite the better pay. Your comment made me glad of my decision.

Valuable prospective, but (as is the gist of half my comments here): People are even more different than you think.

RescueTime wrote a similar post, but +100 data:

https://rescuetime.wpengine.com/work-life-balance-study-2019...

Look at the second histogram. The average is roughly aligned with OP’s summary, but there is huge variance. These comments have already devolved into people telling each other they are lying, or about to burn out - all I ask is humility in the face of our messy shared reality.

Thank you for listening to my TED Talk, I guess

I think you're completely right, however I'd love to see a graph of average work time claims on HN plotted against this.

There's no denying that there are far more people claiming they work 60-80 hour weeks than would collate with the data that you and OP have provided.

I think these people are generally overworked but are also poor assessors of their own performance, taking worst cases as averages and calling a day in which you finish at 5pm but answer a slack message at 9pm, a 12 hour day.

Not to be too sardonic, but: I'm on call frequently but I don't tell people I've been working for 24 hours because I got a page at midnight, even if it can feel a bit like that by the end of the next day.

We tracked work hours using a custom desktop app in our team (made by the team over several iterations to make it not burdensome), and insisted that devs log time against the downtime category (only during work hours of course).

Some of the more senior devs were very honest about their downtime. Some days they would log 4 out of 8 hours downtime. Usually after a strenuous week or late night deploy. Examples of this are shooting the breeze for an hour, going on a wiki binge etc..

We were all surprised by the actual numbers coming through and the numbers in the various categories. Emails and project admin would average 20% of total team time. “Firefighting” which was attending to unscheduled troubleshooting was 15%.

If you don’t believe someone who says they work X hours per week, you are probably right. We found there is a lot of minutiae, and a lot of down time when tired. Which we didn’t realize until we spent the time to log it.

If you do work long hours, I can heartily recommend implementing an easy time tracking system for yourself with categories. From our experience, it reduced the hours you worked, forced you to get some sleep and exercise, and made you more productive in the hours you do work.

Another study here that uses an estimate for productivity.

https://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

His models show peak productivity between 5 and 6 hours a day.

In my own experience, I have found productivity more related to sleep and exercise than anything else.

Getting 7 hours good sleep (which means winding down for at least 30 minutes before sleep, a stretching exercise or meditation), and enough exercise every day to get the heart rate up.

If I don’t do this for a couple of days, I can be unproductive from hour 2 after waking! We managed to implement a defect metric in my previous team that worked well, my defects went through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.

There is a lot of literature on this correlation, but just thought I would share my own experience.

Could you share some details about that defect metric and how you implemented it? Sounds interesting.

Nothing very automated I am afraid, but we had enough people who cared to do the admin work to make the figures reliable.

We wanted to get a handle on how often work went backwards in our life cycle, and why it went backward.

We had a JIRA lifecycle hook that asked for the reason for moving from SIT state back to Development state, or from UAT state back to Development state etc..

One of which was defect. A defect either being a confirmation that wasn't implemented as per the spec, or an edge case bug.

Test failures were different, we had automated testing so test case failures were picked up before the ticket moved on in the lifecycle.

We could also move completed tickets from Deployed to Review, if a production error was linked to a ticket. This movement could also be tagged as a defect in the same way.

We would then just query the jira database and report on it, by project, by assignee etc..

It wasn't a blame exercise, we were more interested in the % of tickets that moved backwards, and the relative percentages of causes for the move. Another category for example was 'Requirements Changed', we worked with banks, so we had a LOT of these!

I’m impressed that you can produce any code at all on 2 hours of sleep.

In college I learned that after 36 hours I was coding in circles. A fix to package A broke package B. Fixing package B broke package A. Repeat.

I went through the loop three times before I recognized the pattern, and decided it was a good time to pass out.

It's been a minute since I read this study, and I didn't take perfect notes, but iirc, the top line result is that (among munition workers) productivity per hour peaks below 40 hours a week, but total productivity peaks above it.

> “my defects went through the roof after a couple of days of 2 hours sleep.”

2hours sleep or 2hours less sleep? Because 2hrs is approximately none, that would not be at all surprising.

I think that you are right to point out the large variance, but you could have also have said that the 90th percentile was approx 7 hrs of work per workday, and 75th was probably 5-6

I’ve logged my work time (automatically with time tracking apps) for over a decade. I’ve also done a significant amount of hourly-rate consulting where I’m very careful to only bill for actual working time.

When I was younger, one of my early challenges was that I had been misled to believe that only time spent in the editor, writing code counted as “working”. There’s a somewhat pervasive idea among devs that meetings, e-mail, communications, team discussions, and other such facts of business do not count as work when you’re a programmer. It led to some anxiety before I accepted that collaboration and communication is also work, something that seems obvious in retrospect but was difficult to swallow as a young programmer raised on Internet forums.

Some people default to the other extreme, where they seem to count every hour as “work” if they did anything remotely related to work during that hour. By now, I’ve worked with a lot of people who claim 60-80 hour work weeks simply because they check their phone and type out single-sentence replies in Slack or e-mails on evenings and weekends. Some of the laziest, least productive people I've worked with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour grinds every week.

Two better metrics I’ve found for gauging productivity are total hours spent in work mode (in the office, or sitting at my home office desk) and total time spent in time wastes (Hacker News, non-work Slacks, Twitter, and so on). If I’m accumulating more than 30 minutes commenting on HN or scrolling Twitter, it’s a sign that I’m not really engaged with work and I need to shake things up.

I’ve shared my time tracking tools and techniques with a lot of people that I’ve mentored. It’s some times shocking for someone to realize that they’ve been spending 4 hours on social media (Discords, HN and Reddit are social media) during a what’s supposed to be a workday. Many of them gauge their own level of focus as average or better than average before actually tracking it. They might even be surrounded by friends or peers who engage in the same amount of distraction during the day, reinforcing their own behavior. Usually once they see what they’re doing as a hard number they can take steps to break the habit, but for some it’s so deeply engrained that they don’t understand what they’re doing until they see it as a number.

> Some of the laziest, least productive people I've worked with are the same people posting on LinkedIn on Sunday morning about their 80 hour grinds every week.

In my experience, people who claim to regularly work 60-80 hours/week are completely full of it. Yes, there’s this “thought about work for a second, that’s another hour” mentality. But there’s also just a ton of people outright lying about the amount of time they actually sit at a desk.

I worked at Yahoo for a while and nearly everyone told me they worked long hours, like 10 hour days, every day. The vast majority of them were working at most 8. People would talk about working late but they came in even late, too. Showing up at 11am and leaving at 7pm is not a long day. The people claiming to work until 7 were also not actually stating that late typically, because if I stayed until 6 the place was a ghost town. There legitimately were a few people who were working long days, but they very much seemed to be the exception. There was an unhealthy culture of pretending to work absurd hours, though.

I used to work at a company where we could clock in and out if we wanted. If we did, we could keep any extra hours at our convenience as a day off. If we didn't it would be a full workday by default.

I liked the freedom to work long days every now and then, and then take some time off later when I wanted a long weekend or so. A colleague decided that's a great idea and started doing the same, but stopped after a week or two when he realized he's just accruing negative time.

I'm not claiming that I was fully productive with my office hours, just agreeing with you that some people really do think they work more than they actually do.

Interesting post. Would you share your tools and personal tracking techniques here?

You and I seem to have a similar history and current practices. I’m curious, how do you track your active time on your computer?

I use Qbserve on MacOS and I like it, but I haven’t reviewed options in maybe 5 years. It “just works” so I haven’t felt the need to explore.

And that's a self-selected group of people who have enough trouble focusing on work that they went to find an app to monitor whether they're focusing.

The article resonated with my experience as as software developer.

At my first place, a small outsourcing shop, employees were required to log daily activities so hours per day roughly fit to 8 and 40 per week. From the beginning and unlike most of coworkers, I measured my time precisely with https://github.com/Klaster1/timer-5 and soon understood that doing 8 hours per day doesn't happen much and often involves staying late, so instead I simply adjusted the reported numbers to look plausible. In four years, I only received positive feedback on my productivity. What was the management thinking, I have no idea, just like the article says, this was a farce all around.

When I changed the company, the habit to measure productivity stuck. Nowadays, I start working somewhere at 9 and finish at 18, and result is still the same - honest 8 hours of work activity per day happen at best once a month, the average week sums to 30-34 hours. Code-related activities never take more than 3-4 hours per day, that includes both coding and reviews. I get the impression that some of my colleagues might spend more time on the job, but low productivity was never a topic of my performance reviews, management seems content with what they get.

Perspective from the management side at a consulting place: We don't want or need you to log your time to the minute. It's counter-productive and a waste of time. It needs to just be representative and not dishonest (please read that sentence twice).

An hour long meeting booked, that ended up taking 45mins? It's an hour. It's the same reason we don't expect you to stop recording time when you to down the hall to make a coffee or take a bathroom break. The numbers only really makes sense at the aggregate level, and going to a higher level of detail is not reliable because of all the noise and different ways people measure their time.

My experience with timesheets is that they must add up to the hours you're paid for (full-time salaried work, not hourly consulting). That more-or-less guarantees that timesheets are made-up.

My first salaried job was as a salesman; we incurred expenses, which we could claim back. It was explained to us that the system was there to ensure that we weren't out-of-pocket; claims didn't have to actually be true, but you did have to have incurred the expense.

I fairly soon realised that this was a lie; the expenses system was really a salary-augmentation scheme, and you were expected to inflate your claims. Everyone was at it.

8 hours of sleep can undo less than 4 hours of problem-solving activity. Our large brains are already consuming too much body resources.

I have CO2 monitor, which I use to estimate is my brain working or not: when I'm working, CO2 level raises quickly above 1000ppm, so I need to ventilate my room often; when I'm idling, e.g. by playing a simple game, CO2 level is at about 740-790ppm without ventilation for whole day.

When I'm returning from work, I see at CO2 monitor that my head is still working. Yes, I'm able to «work» sustainable 4h per day only, but «work related activity» consumes my brain for whole day.

wow. is this room particularly small?

Does this track w/ respiration rate or heart rate?

I've never thought about this - it seems like it would be hard to measure w/o a more intense face mask vo2 max testing type setup.

What happens if you have a peer that clocks 14 hours per day and work weekends too, for some reason? At our place they started comparing everyone to him. I work like at half his total speed. He often break things or have to redo things or are late to standup and don't really partake in conversations. We've all asked him to slow down and not burn out but he keeps going.

Speaking as a manager, I’d flag this dev as a concern. Very few people can work at this rate without one (or more) of three scenarios playing out:

1. They burn out and clock out mentally or leave altogether

2. They develop psychological issues and destroy their personal life, leading to an unbalanced and unsustainable situation

3. They expect something from the org in return, which normally the org can’t/won’t match (either in the way of product ownership or compensation or role).

Someone like that needs to be constrained. Keep them on the edge and eager to contribute but don’t let them free reign. If the situation and culture allow, try help out to fill the void in their personal life (I ordered one of our guys to leave early twice a week to spend time with his girlfriend because I knew his dedication to work is destroying his relationship. I sent couple of others to weekends in hotels with their SO after long sprints).

Often times people who work a lot are avoiding serious problems at home/family too, so even ordering someone to go home might be ordering them to go back to an abusive partner or something. I know more than one person who used “oh, my job takes so much of my time!” As a socially acceptable reason to avoid interacting with abusive people in their life.

> I sent couple of others to weekends in hotels with their SO after long sprints

It’s a bit odd you’re setting your employees up to maintain their sex lives but I’m sure they appreciate the forced time off after stressful times

He's been going like this for two years.

management should make it clear that working off hours or overtime shouldn’t be done

Have spent a lot of my life doing manual labor, and still slightly in that boat now but do have a proper office job (receptionist). it was incredible for me to experience my first office job and realize this general fact. Not only was my body not sore everyday, but my day was suddenly largely my own, my "labor" was suddenly not defined necessarily by constant action. I dont even really have to think as much as I did working in a kitchen, say.

Its just important to realize that this relationship with labor is a privilege, because trust me, its not "everyone". If that privilege is obtained because you provide something more "skilled", ok, I guess I understand that. There is still an instinctual level where it still feels unjust to me. But thats just my emotions, I understand economics trumps them.

It's a huge privilege! In high school and college I worked a bunch of random jobs, including factory worker, McDonald's cook, and convenience store cashier. It helped me really appreciate the cushiness of office jobs.

But in some ways, it's the source of ongoing frustration. Office culture IME is not very interested in getting direct work done. When I was on the McDonald's breakfast shift, I had a solid block of hours where people knew not to bother me unless something was literally on fire. I could get into a glorious flow state. Even managers, even visiting execs knew to button their lips until the time was right. But these days? There are so many people who are happy to put 30 minutes on my calendar or interrupt me on Slack. They mean well; they just don't know anything else. How I wish they did!

The only thing in an office that gets close to the buzz/flow of a busy service, is dealing with an outage/incident. I miss elements of it, for sure. I do not miss working hard for 50+ hours a week at less than minimum wage (woo salaried).

I was at a construction site as field architect and the field work of a manager is nothing compared to that of the actual workers. So.. I tried coding at work, as I had a "lot" of spare time... and it was impossible. The stressful state of mind makes it impossible to make anything related to coding... the sun, the heat, the stress. Non skilled jobs, that are also menial and with this constant uncertain output, are a doom to those who work them(jobs) because they offer aboslute no progress to those who's lives depend on them. Intellectual and economical progress. Yet I've found people obsessed with field work..

> Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work.

Wow. Once I start doing this kind of work I both have a hard time stopping (as I find working on such problems addictive, both in good ways and in bad) and feel like it takes at least a couple hours of loading state into my brain before I could even begin to be working "at speed" on a hard problem, which means I actively try to schedule my life such that I either can spend a solid zero hours in a day working on hard mental tasks ;P or make myself ready to work until dawn (at which point I simply feel bad I am still awake sometimes more than truly feel like I am ready to stop).

I think I work pretty much the same. Usually get next to nothing done, or am extremely productive for most/all of the day.

I'm in the same boat as you, and yet my hours look like the post author's. One scenario that leads to this is that I simply have other shit to do, and need to hard stop my focus on something that I far too often want to keep working on.

This is partly a delegation problem (I'm trying to free up time by delegating certain things), and partly just a problem of growing up: What interrupts me might sometimes be other work or menial tasks, but it's often also just social life or having to go to to the ice rink.

I'm super happy with my current work-life balance, though a bit unsatisfied at how often I have to context switch. I wish I could just schedule as well as you do, unfortunately when it comes to social engagements for example I'm often more restricted...

That's great until a PM schedules a quick meeting to make sure your progress is tracking their spreadsheet line. And there are 4 or 5 PMs. You end up with your days split into 6 or 7 segments between quick standups and triage meetings and status meetings and emergency customer calls where you're brought in "just in case" and because it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work. And you can't even explain at the PM's next quick progress meeting that you're behind because her quick status meeting has set you back a week, because to her reporting status at a meeting of 15 people is how things progress.

> [B]ecause it takes at least a half hour of concentration just to get back into the zone, your week has passed without you spending any productive time doing hard thinky work.

And when that half hour itself is semi-routinely[0] interrupted, the whole cycle becomes a form of aversion therapy conditioning you to avoid even attempting to concentrate.

Once you're stuck in that rut, you're really screwed because every failed attempt to break out of the cycle just reinforces it, and not being interrupted just means you're worrying about being interrupted instead.

[0] As with other processes, intermittent reinforcement is far more effective than consistency.

I've had a lot of luck with blocking out a couple hours a day for "dedicated work time." You have to aggressively defend that time and reject requests where someone carelessly double-books you anyway to be able to keep that time sacred. I've worked for places who wouldn't respect that and expected me to be "always available". Those places got the level of output from me that they deserved when I found myself unable to concentrate and would just be waiting for the next interruption.

I've found as well that once I get really going on a tough problem, it may consume my life for the next several days in a row, it'll be all I do or think about. I wish I knew how people turn it off after a few hours a day and think about anything else.

While this blog post and reading about his opinions may be interesting, ultimately it's an opinion piece and I strongly dislike when people write opinion pieces and make it sound like they did a study in the title!

For all we know, he may be completely wrong! Maybe he is the outlier and people generally, in fact do perform more "focused work" than two hours a day...

Maybe he isn't overly enthusiastic about his work place, maybe he is in a remote work environment where he isn't inspired to work more efficiently through his peers. Maybe there is a little of everything and he's just trying to warrant this one hour focused work days through "insights".

The reason I'm questioning this is because I have procastrination issues at work and take several short mental breaks, but even I, once I get going and in "the zone" (often later in the work day), I can often do focused work at least twice as long as him. He really gives nothing to go by as for his bold title, which I ask why it's not at least the more undeniably accurate: "I don't work as much as you think".

The OP does mention "being in the zone" as a possibility. He just says that it's rare, inherently not applicable to many kinds of work, and requires optimal conditions that generally don't apply. It's very much the exception, not the rule.

There are definitely people who can work and focus for 8+ hours a day. I can think of my dentist and family doctor. Waiting room is full from morning to evening.

Some of my colleagues work hard. I can see their screen in the open space. They are machines. Never a distraction on the screen.

The article should be "some people don't work so much, I'm one of them".

My wife is an ER physician. It’s a demanding job that requires a ton of focus, so most of her colleagues only work about 30 hours a week.

She’s also worked as a general pediatrician seeing lower acuity patients/well visits. From talking to her, good deal of that job is essentially running on autopilot. That’s why you can do it 8 hours a day.

Yeah, I think we really need to look at the qualitative aspect of the work being done when having these discussions.

A pediatrician may really be working 8 or more hours a day, where 90% of patients are utterly cut-and-dry AND often having pleasant encounters with cute snotty kids and their parents. It doesn't stretch the imagination why this is possible for 8 hours straight.

The "machine-like" programmers that GP mentioned are likely working from cut-and-dry requirements and executing the same code patterns over and over with a stack they know like the inside of their eyelids. Doing this can be pleasurable in a similar way to playing puzzle games. I can see why it would be possible for 8 hours straight.

Pleasant, meditative physical work - what's called "artisanal" anything these days (cooking, carpentry, etc.) - sure.

Then there's programming in a challenging heterogenous environment. Perhaps the requirements are unclear, the stack is new or undependable, you're often interrupted, or have to switch between different kinds of work throughout the day, or your technical abilities are so stretched that absolute and sustained focus is required. Then, good luck getting to those 8 hours in a sustainable fashion.

There are many jobs that are acknowledged to be so difficult when in "go" mode that no one expects 40 weekly hours. This just hasn't penetrated into tech and adjacent industries, that's why we have to engage in these charades.

Can confirm many doctors work insane hours, which are hard to even imagine for people who do office jobs.

The notion that you can only do 4 hours of productive work a day is frankly a luxury. If you have 10 hours of work to do, all of which is essential for people's immediate wellbeing, you find ways of being productive.

Doctors are highly specialized mechanics for the human body. The reason they can work the hours they do is because most of what they do is not creative and can be done on basically autopilot.

MDs also work in a profession with a fairly unique quality: you always get paid more for doing more work, and the work is more or less completely prepackaged into self-contained units for you - i.e. a GP seeing patients more or less breaks their day into a pattern of independently compensated, 15-30 minute slots.

Not exactly. Only some are paid per session, as this is typically private medicine, which is not the normal in most of the world. Publicly funded medicine accounts for the great majority of work done, and these doctors around the World are paid the same regardless of their workload. USA has a very unusual system, internationally.

Also, only part of the job is autopilot, much of it is difficult and taxing. Experts will manage their attention and energy throughout busy days.

The point is that humans can and do work hard and at difficult tasks for long periods day after day. The cost is eventual burnout though, hence why so many doctors quit or go part time.

I've never seen a convincing explanation for why doctors work these long hours that didn't boil down to 'the doctors union restricts the supply of new doctors and limits the tasks that can be delegated to non-doctors'.

As a result, the regular mention of their long hours generally just makes me angry at them rather than grateful to them, but I guess I'm in the minority.

Some of it is capitalism. Here’s a nice introduction to private equity in radiology.

https://www.benwhite.com/medicine/the-private-equity-model-i...

Now with surgery? Again there’s some capitalism but also surgery is hard. Extremely hard. Here’s a link to a common surgery for orthopedics for example. They have to memorize these procedure steps and be very quick. Time on the table for the patient matters for money and for anesthesia (more dangerous for longer GA cases).

https://www.orthobullets.com/knee-and-sports/12234/acl-recon...

Anyways you can be mad about moats and artificial supply constraints for things like dermatology but for surgery and family practice? Not really.

Another factor is geography. Can you imagine doing 12-14 years of school and low paid training, have 250-500k in debt and then move out to a rural area to practice? Many doctors don’t want to do that, so the ones that do are paid well but are usually extremely busy.

Anyways, there’s just a lot of factors that limit supply, it’s not the nefarious doctors union trying to squeeze every last drop.

I don't think there is any country in the world where doctors work for 40 hours, regardless of the economic model.

The world of human disease places some limitations on what can be done. Many people either do not have the grit or the stomach to become doctors (I could easily learn the theory, but I couldn't cope with all the blood, pus, vomit and frequent feeling of helplessness). People develop critical problems at 2 am. A doctor should know their patients and vice versa; they aren't fungible and ping-ponging a sick person between shifts tends to worsen the outcomes.

That plus just having to deal with all of those different personalities. Sick people can be incredibly difficult to deal with. I was in the hospital for an extended period a few years ago. The nurse said she and her colleagues liked treating me. I asked why. She said “because you’re normal.”

Medical school application rates beg to differ.

There's at least 10x more people that want to be doctors than get to be doctors.

They apply, but that does not necessarily mean that they would be able to finish the training. Being a doctor is prestigious and unsuitable candidates might be drawn to the golden haze.

Those application rates are 10:1 in india, but only 2:1 in the usa.

You really have to memorize when you have a checklist the nurse could read off so you don't miss a step? I wouldn't trust my memory to hold a single step of that checklist, I'd refer to it every time.

In "the checklist manifesto" the author suggests one of the main benefits of checklists for medical procedures is that nurses or other lower ranked people in the room who know the doctor is about to kill someone or cut off the wrong leg by mistake can communicate this information without the Doctor ruining their career for making them look stupid.

This isn't my domain by any means, but one common argument for long hours that is that patient handoffs during shift changes can cause information loss, and thus cause medical errors which lead to worse patient outcomes. The shifts are intentionally kept long to reduce the number of times that this handoff has to occur.

Again, this isn't my wheelhouse at all. I'm just repeating something I hear often when this topic comes up.

At the plastic factory, I preferred 12-hour shifts to 8-hour for this reason. I just got more efficient as my shift went longer. I also felt the loss of efficiency whenever I took a vacation. The thing I disapprove of is the sleep deprivation.

I don't think it's as simple as you imagine. Any time you're delegating a task from someone who has double digit years of training to someone who (perhaps) has only a couple, you are likely (but not always) increasing the probability of error, and errors in this domain have real consequences. This includes potential for malpractice lawsuits because "the lazy doctor had their nurse doing all the work".

Whilst I agree that there must be better ways for healthcare staff to work than at max capacity until they burn out... it seems odd to be angry at them for this. Most would prefer a healthy work life balance, and patients would surely prefer a well rested clinician.

This is almost certainly taking a toll on the doctors health. They’re stuck in that situation because of unions, but that isn’t the case for an SWE. We shouldn’t be expected to work at our healths expense.

How are unions responsible for doctors’ long work hours? According to a quick google there are very low rates of unionization and it seems to be a recent phenomenon (I didn’t know there were any.)

Downvotes for asking a Q?

>For the past quarter-century, the American Medical Association and other industry groups have predicted a glut of doctors and worked to limit the number of new physicians. In 1994, the Journal of the American Medical Association predicted a surplus of 165,000 doctors by 2000.

Most residencies are paid for my Medicare funds. The 1997 Balanced Budget Act capped the number of residencies that Medicare funds, which led to fewer physicians. Who pushed for the cap?

>Lawmakers received cover from the American Medical Association (AMA), the Association of American Medical Colleges, and other major stakeholders in American medicine who endorsed caps on funding for residents and other graduate medical education programs. In March 1997, months before the Balanced Budget Act was enacted, the AMA even suggested reducing the number of US residency positions by approximately 25% from 25,000 to fewer than 19,000. “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” said the AMA and other physicians’ groups in a joint statement

https://qz.com/1676207/the-us-is-on-the-verge-of-a-devastati...

And also in the past they have lobbied to shut down medical schools which led to shortages in the 60s. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhpr033066

They have recently pushed for more physicians but those changes will take time.

The AMA is not a union, nor is the American Bar Association, nor is the Society of Actuaries. These are professional organizations. They aren't involved in collective bargaining and they don't call strikes (putting aside for argument's sake the ethical issues with doctors going on strike).

Here's a document from the AMA itself stating their stance on unions (implying they don't consider themselves a union): https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/advocacy-issue-brief-p...

With admin type duties, people in tech can work at least as many hours. That is probably the closest analogy.

Even in normal office jobs. Everyone gets distracted but if I'm having 1-on-1s with direct reports, at 30mins each that's at least 4 hours of calls filling in a morning, plus another misc few calls, like interviewing candidates or whatever, 1 or 2 random fires and you got 8 hours of constantly happening things, and we didn't even look at email or done any actual work yet. I wish I knew wtf these managers with nothing to do are talking about.

I don't think people who say they work 14 hours a day are lying. They just count in everything that is somehow related to their job, like reading about their business in the newspaper or thinking about work in the shower. And that's the crux of the matter, in jobs that don't have clearly assigned shifts or where attendance is measured, the boundaries between work and leisure become blurred. And then again, comparisons of who works how long are completely useless.

I can double my work if I start responding to all the pointless emails I get in my mail box.

I have more important things to do, like doing actual work.

Almost anyone that brags to others about how many hours they work typically count checking their emails while watching TV as work.

That is working though.

Exactly. I spent a decade plus in a job where emails came in routinely until 9-10 at night and often the CEO would send out something on the weekend. Even if I wasn't required to respond or the response was short, this is _absolutely_ work. Over and above that, spending a decade being literally unable to get away from work in that way is like arsenic poisoning. It was like "I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm dead." It's insidious and terrible.

But you shouldn't publicly claim 12 hour work days if you watch TV during those hours, that's ridiculous. That gives a completely wrong impression and may push some who don't know better to actually try and work 12 hours.

I never understood people who bragged about working long hours. Why on earth do they believe that working long hours is something to be admired? I care about what people achieve. Not how many hours they spend achieving it. People can be super busy, spinning their wheels, without achieving much. I see that all the time. I call it “being incompetent”. Not something to be proud of.

how about i leave for my office 10 Am and return home 9-10-11 pm ? usually no sundays. 10 minute commute each side.

Just because you are at the office, doesn't mean you are actually working. Just like me sitting at my desk at home isn't actually working.

The difference is that in the office people pretend to be working.

But if you're there, you're working. You can't spend that time out at a stadium watching a ballgame, or hiking through a forest, or catching up with old friends over coffee, or fixing that stubborn door on your house, or with your family. You're at work, in work mode and your time and energy are alloted to that.

If you work for an agency, and sales is having a tough time closing a deal so there's no work for you today, but you have to be there anyway, ready to work or finding other things to do, maybe upgrading your tools, practicing/learning, then that's still work time. It's not leisure time.

Just because you don't achieve 100% uptime cranking out widgets non-stop at full productivity doesn't mean you're not working. We're people, not industrial factory machines.

You can say 'people are pretending' or 'that's not actually work', but it is. And saying that it's not is just denying reality by casting a moral judgment on it like that.

In the context of of this post I see working as the equivalent of being productive.

I agree with you that sitting at my desk or being in the office is work time regardless of what I am doing and therefore should also be paid.

I agree. I do maybe 6h of clocked in official work, then maybe 2-6 additional hours of reasearch, tinkering, learning, thinking, taking random notes.

But those hours are very blurry and come in random high bursts („being onto something“). They’re important and effective for me but it’s difficult to categorize them or even track them.

I alway liken folk who say they work long hours to Intel cpus in the megahertz race. Sure it runs at 6ghz but it’s useless for a laptop. Performance per watt is where the quality is. I equate that to be forty hours of work per week.

high performance per watt is pretty low value for those of us who haven't moved our laptops from our home/desk in the past 2 years. In fact the whole premise of a laptop has largely been erased under work from home restrictions. Most of the point was to have a portable machine so your employees felt the need/desire to take the device home and continue working after hours.

There's maybe a slight argument to be made for meetings, but even then you're supposed to be paying attention to the meeting, if not then why are you there? One person might need to take notes...

Like the author, I am usually good for two periods of about 90 minutes a day of extreme thinking work. I feel fine about this because in a sense I am always working, even if I just have a few peak periods a day. When I have a job, just about 100% of my intellectual life is thinking about the tech that can help my employer. If I want to read a tech article after dinner, it is just about always about something that might help the business.

I maintain work/life balance by taking a year off work between jobs. In these down time periods I both research a broad spectrum of things that interest me, and that is when I write my books.

I spend a significant part of my day working synchronously (engineering / product / etc. meetings, mandatory unplanned calls to fix some crappy system that is failing in production...) as opposed to working asynchronously (reviewing someone else's PR while they work on something else, reading some spec, etc.).

I work as much as it seems, but I do it in a wildly inefficient way due to my employer's work-hard-not-smart culture. The fact we work 50 hour weeks to do things we could do in 35-40 is hilarious and infuriating at the same time.

Hey, at least you have a paycheck. There are tons of people out there who work 50-hour weeks (artists, musicians) who get less than a decimal of that pay, none of the benefits, and all of the stress.

Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.

That's part of why many people are willing to have a go at these careers despite the well-known abysmal earning expectations.

It's just a lot of very willing supply and rather limited demand that depresses monetary earnings for labour in these sectors.

Compare also pay and conditions for programmers in the games industry vs those working on in-house corporate CRUD applications.

Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.

No, they - in general - do not. A few get this. A few more lucky folks make a living off of it. In the case of an artist, you are probably doing commissions and spend a lot of time on social media, in the post office, and such things just to tread water. Comic artists and animators you've never heard of go about their day in invisibility while they destroy their wrists, elbows, and shoulders for your enjoyment. (a number of these are contract jobs, too, which means no benefits).

Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that.

The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.

That's true yet still feels rosy ;-)

There's a lot of waiting tables, and if lucky, teaching gigs. Paid performance gigs are rarer and not that rosy either, eg, boring wedding music or sporadic & low-paid pop-ified club gigs. In COVID... yikes.

Prestige includes a lot of 'when will you get a real job?'

Even for the rare folks who 'make it', there's often a lot of weirdness, especially around the one-hit wonder commercial music circuit. Unlikely and hard to get there, and often ugly if you do.

Sound rough? Even worse in visual areas because even less money. Gallery scene is basically charity from upper crust and whatever small grants, if you're lucky. More likely, still waiting tables or some other day job. There are commercial gigs, but rarely related to your art: an artist's exploration of abstract oil painting is far from say musclebound video game characters for adolescents. Even if someone likes your aesthetic style, commercial versions for say a big hotel/ commercial/product are dead/generic for accessibility reasons.

I was around a lot of this in my early 20's. The entertainment industry is at odds with art. Happy to be away from it, and empathy for artists pushing through it.

It sounds like the main rewards aren't financial. Why do people pursue these careers?

It's hard to try and make money on something lots of people do as a hobby, it's the same situation in professional sports.

> Most musicians are pretty local or fly under the radar. Band teachers are usually musicians, and i'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of prestige there. Lots of "musicians" are working in such jobs, many are touring local circuits, picking music for commercials, and things like that.

> The most common sort of artist or musician, though, is the unknown one. There are way more artists and musicians than we have space for in our minds. I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting. Even worse, I'm not sure why that would be a substitute for decent pay. Supply and demand obviously aren't the constraints on wages people make them out to be.

I've been working professionally as a music creator for nearly 20 years. I think what separates the musician types you're referring to from actual professionals is an understanding of how to make money with art and when to pivot one's career, e.g. "live gigs are paying me nothing... how else can I make money with my music?" I'd be miserable if I'd stayed in live music beyond my early twenties or believed that teaching was an adequate substitution for being paid to create for a living.

Most hobbyist musicians never work beyond the genre or instrument they initially learned, like a "programmer" who learns HTML as a kid but fails to take their expertise further. It's a severe lack of business acumen, self-awareness, and desire to evolve.

> No, they - in general - do not.

Yes they do. I'm both a musician and a software developer and the difference in social prestige is night and day, depending on how I present myself.

You're trying to refute the statement that musicians and artists get a lot of social prestige, by stating that they make little money and do work that's not glamorous, and that's irrelevant, it's rather actually part of what gives it prestige.

I think it depends on how you define the word prestige. I work as a software engineer but also freelance composing music for mobile games, I wouldn't say that people are exactly "in awe" of what I do in either situation. Neither job is particularly difficult.

It's because you are not performing, it's the performance that's the awe inspiring part.

To remove some of the weasel words:

Posing with a guitar will help you get laid. Even if you don't play remotely well enough to make any money, or for anyone to really care about your music.

> > Artists and musicians specifically get a lot of social prestige. Similarly for actors.

> I'm not sure what sort of prestige you think folks are getting.

Groupies, maybe? I've encountered them hanging on even celebrity impersonators (in Los Angeles) and cover bands (in Las Vegas), not just originals. Not to mention authors and visual artists. Most artistic scenes seem to attract them.

So whose fault is it that they're pay is not decent, if it's not a matter of supply and demand?

>The fact we work 50 hour weeks

50?! but why?

Seriously find a better job.

Working 80 hours a week is unhealthy and a bad idea. I don’t think there is any solid argument against that.

Until recently I was a dev manager for about 20 devs (not all direct). I did work 80 hours a week, still do. I know I am unhealthy. I don’t like doing things that are not technical. I get uncomfortable and bored quickly.

My work gives me complex tech problems constantly. So I feel better working. But I attribute this to an unhealthy grip on life that stemmed from somewhere.

All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week. I had to keep on top of their own hours to tell them to go home and find a girlfriend.

DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it. Only do it if you can honestly say you are unhealthily obsessed with it and can’t actually have a normal life.

Kudos on the self insight there buddy. Not everyone bothers to self reflect about why they do the things they do. But they should.

80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.

I would not call it trivial, but I found that, as a manager, you often have to be a psychologist and spend very large amounts of your time listening to the more personal issues of your colleagues. When I was manager over 400 people (there were managers between me and them but I was ‘the top level’), I spent 80+ hours a week doing my work; 60+ was easily absorbed by motivating people and listening to their stories about imminent divorces, dying parents, spouses or kids, and so on. Then 20 or so hours to do my actual work. It is not for me… I do not want such a position again.

I did 80+ hours as well when I was just writing code and managing servers; about 40/60 respectively. It was more than 80 hours and I missed things, but I was young and made up for it. I would not want to do that again either.

TBH I know people who really only code and have no other life. Seven, rather than six days a week.

I am not entirely sure what is wrong with them. Only one case can be attributed to money. The rest looks like a weird psychological addiction.

“Weird psychological addiction” that’s where I would place it too.

Sometimes it's easier to code all day long than how easy it feels to improve your life. Especially if one excels at work and lacks a social network in life.

100% agree.

If you are good at coding, then you code for a day and create something you are proud of. +1 to self worth.

You send it for code review or deploy and you get positive feedback. +2 to self worth.

A junior dev in house or browsing your open source project loves your code and asks for advice. +3 to self worth.

Compared to.

Go out to a social event for lunch, struggle through the social interactions.

Maybe drink a bit too much because you are stressed.

Get caught in a difficult spot when you tell someone they are wrong (which they were, but you were being rude).

Hang around for the whole afternoon / evening because you told yourself you have to make this work and get a life.

End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.

This is the life of a few socially awkward (and usually high iq) people I have had the pleasure of meeting. And myself.

I think it is healthy to take the second option, get a life, learn to make relationships.

But it’s the hard option. Sitting at the IDE and being good at what you are good at, is much easier.

> End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.

There are definitely ways to mitigate this way of thinking, one being understanding the "spot light effect" the "phenomenon where people tend to overestimate how much others notice aspects of one's appearance or behavior."

Also to do more structured based social activities.

If it’s so painful to hang out then you could do something else. Go for a run/bike/hike, woodworking, gardening, gym, learn a new skill, etc. heck so drugs and play video games. It’s good to have something other than work in your life or one day you’ll have a crisis when things go poorly with work

it doesnt matter if the work is trivial, youre still working. if im dealing with slack pings at 9pm, thats work, even if they just need a thumbs up.

> six days a week.

Anecdotally when I was doing that much work, it was 7 days a week. When I woke in the morning my phone was full of emails slack pings and build issues, and it was closer to midnight when it stopped than 10pm. There is no down time whatsoever in an environment like that, everyone is constantly stressed and overworked and it just makes it worse

Why do it though? You’re ruining your life and halving your normalized hourly rate. There are plenty of companies where 40 hours of effective work is a top performer and things aren’t breaking every week

> You’re ruining your life and halving your normalized hourly rate.

Agreed.

> Why do it though?

It was a boiling frog situation. When I joined, things were good. 35-40 hour weeks, interesting work, great coworkers. The team grew, and all of a sudden I was a knowledge holder in areas. It started with an occasional message from a co worker who had a deadline, and then the deadlines were every 2 weeks, and it wasn't just one coworker, it was multiple coworkers. Then it was other people working late nights and me replying on saturday mornings to their issues because I wasn't really working, it was just a slack message. Then it was me fixing issues on a sunday morning because it was the only time my mailbox wasn't bursting. Around that point I realised what was happening, so I scaled things back to working hours, and started getting negative feedback and comments about "not trying as hard as others" from other managers (not my manager though). My annual review came back as negative because other teams were reliant on me being available, so i went back to being always on for about a year before I got another offer and left on good terms.

It genuinely took me about a year afterwards to realise how bad things had gotten (everyone checks their work email precautionarily at 11pm on a saturday night so they can sleep without worrying, right? That's normal.) I'm much better off now.

Thanks for sharing. I am probably in the same boat. I feel miserable when not working. I managed to improve my situation though

- 100 km running minimum per month. I take this seriously. - Writing notes about work in a notebook. Not publishing but that's the only way I can stay away from other work and not feel bored. - Spending more time on two hobbies: hardware/circuits and cooking.

Things are improving!

Do you feel time running gives you more opportunity for new ideas ?

I used to take 15min jog cuts, it made me have just a few more thoughts ready when I was back at my desk.

To an extent, if you function this way, its not even unhealthy. People give me strange look when I work because I love going fast (in smooth precise way). To them it's abuse, to me it's joy (granted I can stay in my own limits). To me their slow and bored ways are unhealthy. I start twitching.

Yes I am the same. Work sets me goals that I obsess about. I like playing golf, but I can’t obsess about getting my handicap down. I also can’t obsess about a hobby project. I can about a product that I know has a user base. Then the brain goes fast, dopamine kicks in and I can keep going for long hours.

> I did work 80 hours a week, still do

> All my devs wanted to also work 80 hours a week.

> DONT work crazy hours because someone else in your sphere is doing it.

Do as I say, not as I do. The culture of being always on, and working these insane hours comes from management allowing it or leading by it. It's utterly meaningless for you tell your reports to not work crazy hours only to show them that you need to do it.

Being a manager puts a power dynamic at play; it's one thing if a team member is working silly hours but if your boss is, it sets the expectation that you can too. By working you are setting the precedent for your team

I agree. And I tried it too. In the end I couldn’t find anything else to do in my downtime. So I went home at 5 and worked from there. Got up early and worked before coming in. I work from home now so the above is moot now.

80h seems really a lot, I guess you don't have a family. Do you sleep? Do you commute? Do you eat, have a shower?

I think for a very short period that it can work, such as a critical deadline. We’ve all been there, adrenaline flowing, target hit, etc. but if that is normalized then no it will kill you in the end.

My view is as a coder if there is real hard work needed, essentially debugging something vexing or a large re-architecting, it needs to be done in an undisturbed 3 hour window, of which I can realistically fit two in a day.

Minor coding tasks like documenting and preparing a commit can be done in any amount of time, but crucially it is time that is allowed to be broken up by meals or meetings. Casual skimming over the code for ideas is also in this category, eg scanning for random TODOs that can be checked off.

I try to gather all my regular calls on the same day, that way I get it out of the way with the least amount of context switching.

2 3 hour long windows in a day? That’s impressive. Most weeks I can fit one of those in. Workings consultancy is not the best for focus work.

I don't normally have two long things to do in a day, I just have a max capacity of 2x hard things, if that day is not broken up by something.

Long term doing 2 hard things a day for a whole week would probably not be sustainable, either you run out of motivation or you run out of hard tasks.

One of the things you do under "hard tasks" is simplify your code so that subsequent tasks fall under "easy tasks". You trade your "must not disturb" time for "can be stopped and started".

The author makes a good point but for me personally those numbers are off.

I have a suspicion that the amount of healthy and productive work depends much on the work environment, the agency and social relationships one has there.

If you’re a well paid wage slave then you have different engagement than an autonomous, respected worker. Excuse the platitude but you get the drift.

Discipline is freedom and empathy is purpose.

"The details of this are somewhat career specific, and my experience is mostly with a mix of software development, writing, coaching, and consulting."

Somewhat career specific is a colossal understatement.

I think every service industry worker is laughing their ass off at this post. That is, if they can get past the tears and fury at the injustice of the world that allowed this post to exist.

I don't share your sarcasm. Working with your body and working with your mind aren't that different, it's just that the mind gets tired quicker. It's very hard to be doing concentrated thinking for 6 hours straight.

Exactly, but if it has to be an us vs. them kinda thing, I’d like to throw in: people who’re working with their body at least have the luxury of being able to remove themselfs from work when they get home. Leaving work as a developer, researcher, whatever, means that your stupid brain brings problem home and distracts you when you should spend time with your family.

I envy people who enjoy and make a living from social interaction or physical work.

I may be wrong, but looking from the outside it looks to me like they are improving themselves as a person and earning a living at the same time.

I need to set aside time to improve my social and physical well being, outside of working time.

Don’t get me wrong I work with interesting people that I love, but we don’t improve our social abilities together

I'd add a 4th point: accept a wider definition of work when counting your hours.

A lot of us are lucky enough to have knowledge based jobs, which require mental tasks of solution design and decision making that are hard to quantify. I regularly get ideas when walking, cooking, driving, etc... and then spend time thinking through a work problem and taking notes. Several times a day I go for a short walk to clear my head of distractions and regain focus, That would be hard to quantify to a theoretical bad manager who wanted you to count hours but for many it is an essential part of knowledge work.

> between one and two hours of hard thinky work

Bertrand Russell once observed that philosophy is really hard; even very good philosophers only spend a few minutes per year doing it.

I spend most of my time thinking what needs to be done, and how to do it. Then I make the simplest possible prototype/POC and re-check my ideas. Then I think about use cases (test cases, actually) and keep iterating making small modifications (usually) to the code and finding more edge cases. My point is, the actual amount of time actually doing code-writing is very small, most time is spent figuring things out (thinking on the high level design/algorithm), writing out the ideas as code is usually the least part of the work. Finally I do cleanups/refactor, which are quite simple to do, but take non trivial amounts of time, including writting more documentation (e.g. code comments and descriptions for the PR for reviewers and for later reference).

I am sure this is true for many people, but it doesn't resonate with me at all. I usually end up working way more hours (focus working, not browsing HN or Reddit between PRs) than I'm supposed to. It is so easy for me to get sucked into a task and not be able to put it down until I'm done, and then get sucked into the next task even if it it's after-hours. And once I have momentum it is very difficult for me to stop until I feel some sense of completion, even though the task is expected to be spread out across several days. I think it is a sign of workaholism and it's something I am trying to work on.

Honestly it depends. Work can means a few different things. I doubt a farmer is working less than what he says. When Musk says he works 100h a week, that's probably even less than the reality, he is probably working 7*(24 - 7hour sleep) per week.

Not all work needs 100% focus. When you are CEO and you go in the kitchen and you smalltalk with employees, is it work or not work ? Imagine if the CEO didn't do it, people would say the CEO is not talking with employees.

But if the question is : Do people lie ? Yeah of course, like for any other subject

How much of that 100+ hours includes surfing the internet and posting memes to Twitter? Not criticizing him, everyone needs time to unwind…

Probably not much, but in any case, this is part of why he is successful in business, so you can't remove it as non work.

I‘m not trying to defend Musk, but his Twitter activities are highly efficient marketing.

Knowledge work is not "work" in the traditional sense. If your job is to stamp forms, you can probably be productive the entire day. Not so much when your job is cognitively demanding, then the job is "thinking deeply", and the human species simply cannot sustain that for so long.

As you get more experienced, you may require less deep thinking to do your job, which boost productivity. However in our current world all fields are changing so rapidly that this is mostly wishful thinking.

The other factor is of course whether you're allowed to be productive. Even a day with "just" 3 or 4 meetings is practically destroyed from a productivity point of view, and this doesn't even account for email and chat. So even if willing to be more productive, you just can't. This particular problem never seems addressed, quite the opposite: "we need to collaborate more".

No, we don't. When you have 5 tasks and each task depends on others and requires a lot of collaboration then it's a crappy task, from a productivity point of view.

Aside from the distractions of professional communication, we should be honest about the additional distractions from personal devices. When I started work, nobody had a smartphone. Just a workstation with restricted internet. So there were few temptations.

Now it's unstoppable. It's right there in your pocket, begging for attention. Add in email, which the average person checks once every 6 minutes, and the conclusion is that we have near-zero concentration time.

It's a sad thing. If we would control distractions and carve out very clean packages of work, knowledge workers could probably switch to 4 hour workdays, 6 as a transition. The rest is fluff anyway. Why not double the work packages then, to meet 8 hours? Because our species simply can't.

But anyway, it won't happen. Let's just keep telling ourselves we work 10-12 hours whilst we piss our life away to a collective illusion.

Yep. Anyone claiming to be working more than 40 hrs is implicitly revealing that their job doesn't require much thinking.

It is possible in crunch time to work harder on difficult problems, but not for longer than a few weeks at a time followed by a few weeks of rest. Regardless how you account for the time.

I arrange my work so that it doesn't require much sitting and thinking. Instead I come up with a way that I can write code to visualize what's going on, iteratively test solutions, or read to select from approaches on the Web. I guess you're right, when it comes to something I would have to invent from scratch I panic about having to think for myself.

People keep repeating this but it's really pretty silly.

When people say they work 8 hours they don't mean they are 100% focused on doing revolutionary innovative work for 8 hours. Not all work is like factory work where you can do more or less the same thing all day, and that's fine.

And for what it's worth, plenty of people, including myself, can regularly do 10+ hour days of productive work. It's definitely not impossible.

People don't understand what to call work, some include all of the dependancies others think those are just free. For me to work 8h means I'm generally working towards some goal, this includes getting a coffee and resting.

I have an extension in VS Code that tracks time spent coding, and sends me a weekly summary. While I’m unsure how accurate the time algorithm is, on my “home office with no meetings” days it says I get around 5 hours of code time, which sounds about accurate. Interestingly it claims the the global average is 52 minutes, which I can definitely get on days with many interruptions.

Can you share that?

I believe it's this one, searching online

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=software...

How do you measure if you are coding in the extension? I wonder if it counts activity (keystroke, mouse) or uf having the window focused (while grabbing a quick coffee, for instance) counts.

I'm not the parent you're replying to, but get similar stats on the average. I use RescueTime together with Neovim, and it works by activity. So if I leave for a coffee it stops logging the time I spend, and the window needs to be in focus. I also have the browser extensions setup, as to separate the time spent in editor compared to in browsers. The git repository is also logged, so I can see how much time is spent with what repository (normally use multiple repos at the same time). Not affiliated with RescueTime in any way, just a happy user.

Work is not work. That’s a single data point. I can mention few cases I experienced: student learning last week for exam. 100 hours week is nothing unusual here. Of course it’s not sustainable and does not take longer than few weeks. PhD student writing paper for most important conference of the year - 80 hours week. Working for your own startup 60 hour a week is imho absolutely normal. These are cases for personal gain. Now let’s talk about salaried jobs when one gets paid for sitting in the office or be green in Teams all day. And that’s the case where 10 hours each week of actual work is absolutely sufficient. I am pretty sure that productive hours are proportional to gain. Why should I do 50 hours a week for the Big Corp when my salary will be exactly the same as after productive 15 hours weekly!? There are individuals, that like what they do, so they enjoy daily tasks and are productive closer to 40 hours weekly. Luckily I know few such people, they are very inspiring.

I am now in 2 projects in parallel and most of the work time is consumed by meetings. Meetings eat up so much energy that I have none left to utilize the time-slots in between meetings to get things done.

Yeah mentally I estimate the dead time created around meetings as 2x the length of the actual meeting. A "quick checkin" actually kills an hour, an all-hands meeting may well write off the entire day.

I can quibble with the specific hours, but this resonates a lot with me.

My average day looks something like:

Hour 0-0.5: Get ready for the workday - messages, email, write standup report, take a shower.

Hour 0.5-1: standup meeting + offline meetings.

Hour 1-2: meetings or brain work

Hour 2-3: mealtime, active availability

Hour 3-5: active availability, light work, meetings

Hour 5-7: brain work (I do my best brain work at the end of the day typcially)

I'd be curious what others schedules look like.

I have the similar schedule like you do. I even plan a short 0.5 - 1h training between morning and lunch. And like you, I am more productive in the afternoon, at the end of the day.

Let me try as I think I am almost your opposite.

Hour 0-0.5: get back to whatever I left the previous day... most productive 0.5 hour of the day with a fresh mind.

Hour 0.5-1.5: meetings, status updates, syncing with others...

Hour 1.5-3.0: more intense coding. May be bug hunting, new feature, more testing...

Hour 3.0-4.0: lunch.

Hour 4.0-5.0: typically helping other team members or discussing bugs/new features etc. Or doing "research", keeping up-to-date reading whatever (software related), including HN.

Hour 5.0-5.5: coffee break, thinking about personal stuff usually, have a little snack or something.

Hour 5.5-7.0: more coding. Much lower productivity though, typically leave things to finish in the 0.5 hour I am most productive the next day. Might read news and non-work related things to give my brain a little break every now and then.

Interesting! Thank you for responding.

What's striking to me is that if we break it down, it seems like for you by category it'd be:

Hard task/"brain" time: 2-3.5 hours depending on that last section

Light task time (including wakeup time): 2-3 hours

"Active availability" time: ~1 hour?

Personal time: 1.5 hours

and for me by category it'd be:

Hard task/"brain" time: ~2.5 hours depending on my after-lunch section

Light task time (including wakeup time): 3 hours

"Active availability" but not working time: 1 hour

Personal time: 1 hour

So even though it's distributed differently, the amount of time we spend on the types of tasks are pretty similar.

I do the hardest thing first thing in the morning, that fresh zest.

If I'm not feeling it (motivation) will try blasting music/getting pumped then start to slowly get into the flow. Usually works.

It's quite an unpopular opinion, but it heavily depends on person. When I was starting my startup, it was usually solid work from 9/10 to 22:00/ 23, 7 days a week. The big difference is, that in those moments, work was well diversified, so when I felt exhausted by creative part, I went to repetitive tasks, then to investigate how legal part works, then to emails etc. It's mostly about having a right tactics.

In current work, there are still people who think that boss will give them 20% more career progression, when they work 20% more than contractual hours. Being quite productive in areas they already know.

So it is possible but I don't believe it's most viable strategy. I prefer much more to work on personal coding projects after work, trying new methods, not on stuff I already know very well.

It may only be unpopular on Hacker News. I saw an engineering account poll their followers on Twitter and this kind of opinion was a tiny minority. I would most likely be finding a way to think eight hours a day even if I weren't at work.

Maybe pair programming doesn't look so bad after all?

Pair programming was definitely more productive for me. But it’s also exhausting to a point where I can’t do more than 3 days in a row.

I don't see how you can reach this conclusion.

You have peer pressure to keep working longer, you get little done and you're wasting your brain power.

It makes sense if someone is junior and learning from the other.

Otherwise it's just an employers' tool to get people to squeeze in more hours of half-assed work (and then work more alone to actually get something done to have something to show for).

Async PRs reviews are way more efficient and less taxing on people.

When I did it (a long time ago) we worked for seven hours or so and went home tired but feeling like we actually accomplished a full day of work. Peer pressure was more about keeping to the normal schedule and taking breaks than putting in more hours.

But the startup died due to not paying enough attention to business issues. Programming productivity isn't everything.

Then I went to Google and my productivity got a lot worse, for many reasons but waiting on code reviews was one. To some extent I could compensate by making unrelated changes in parallel, or even working on a stack of patches and fixing up later patches when earlier ones needed to change. It felt like it was fighting a system that wanted to slow me down, though.

Some people do work a solid 8 hours or whatever per day. Mostly those in more manual jobs as they basically sell their bodies. But in our line of work it's not quite like that. I both work less than 8 hours a day, or more, depending on how you define "work".

The thing is, I'm not paid for my body or my labour. I'm paid for my mind. My employer pays for me to engage myself with the business. My mind never fully disengages. When I start work on Monday I don't "start again" like a rebooted machine. In addition, the mind never fully switches off, even when sleeping. I'll often crack a problem in my sleep and realise it during my morning cleaning cycle.

So no, I might not "work" as much as you think I should, but if you find that surprising then I'm probably far more engaged than you would imagine too.

There are, of course, those who don't work much and aren't as fully engaged. That will always happen. It's important to measure the value people are delivering (and help them improve) but it can't be done using any single metric and certainly not "hours worked".

I think it varies by person a lot but how little people work in general affect people expectations in the workforce. Especially in a market where firing people is hard (because hiring them is expensive) there is going to be a certain leniency towards performance.

When I work for myself I can literally code all day, if I'm working for a client I'll work as much as it's reasonable to hit deliverables, keep the managers happy and keep a good reputation in the company. My prices when working per projects were always too cheap because I found features to be simple to implement; I then switched to what's expected in the industry and charge per day and I make way more, working way less.

Similarly, I know people who can work all day and some who can't and will burn out if they do. The 10x developers exist, but you won't find them at big corp making bank (or if you find them, they'll likely slack like everyone else), they'll be building their own startups and making bank with that.

We're all wired differently.

> part of his skill was in lying to management

I once worked in the warehouse at a (unionized) manufacturer of printer's ink. I was told-off by the Father of Chapel (the union organizer) for working too hard. This was unskilled labour; so the skill I had to master was how to avoid being fired by management for laziness, while not getting told-off by the FoC for excessive zeal.

I used to work pretty long hours (worked 2 jobs - back when I had first kid and was still under mortgage).

Now I spend more time with my kids and try to work as little as I can (optimize "productivity pulse", while minimize total time on computer)

This is my data of 2018 and 2019 respectively:

- https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8881zv58wzve33/2018.png?dl=0

- https://www.dropbox.com/s/55v7g4cn7ol0ix2/2019.png?dl=0

Some personal observations:

- On average, I achieve 75% productivity pulse

- There are some crazy days where I worked over 15 hrs, with maybe 10 ~ 11hrs being productive (read: code)

- Since I was moonlighting, I was most productive on the morning (9am - noon) and after 10pm (kids went to sleep)

- I don't meditate much, but working out really really help!

The author's analysis is so entirely subjective as to what constitutes "work" as to be meaningless. I certainly believe that most creative workers cannot spend 8 hours a day being creatively productive, although even there the variation is enormous. I used to observe a factor of 5 or more difference in productivity between the most productive and least productive of my engineering team, and a lot of that was due to the ability of some to stay focused and fully absorbed in creation for hour after hour, whereas the average engineer simply stopped producing much after a couple of hours. Interestingly, a lot of this was attention span limited. Take the person who was good for 2 hours of productive coding on a product, and give them two significantly separate areas of responsibility, and their productivity would close to double, as they could pull off a mid-day switch and be fully energized for a second shift at the creative keyboard.

But just because you're not doing the highest value / highest drain portion of your job constantly, doesn't mean you're not working. Good managers know to balance workload and expectations.

And as others have noted, this varies enormously from one profession to the next. The nurses in the hospital where I worked as CTO worked 12 hour shifts, and nobody in their right mind would make the argument that they weren't working the entire time. Most worked three 12 hours shifts per week, so they had a short work week, but the doctors they worked with routinely worked 12 hrs/day, often 5 days per week, and then spent part of their 2 "off" days working as well. My daughter-in-law, who teaches elementary school, has no "own time" between 8:00 AM and 4:00PM, other than a half hour break when her students are at lunch, and then works a couple of hours most evenings in addition. It's a rare week during the school year when she doesn't have 45 hours per week in which she is completely "owned" be the job - which is to say, working.

> the doctors they worked with routinely worked 12 hrs/day, often 5 days per week, and then spent part of their 2 "off" days working as well.

I have a lot of trouble believing this. You’re claiming that 60 hours minimum was standard for doctors yet somehow the nurses had enough sway to get away with 36 hours.

Ignoring how much of that as “active work”, I have trouble believing they are even in the facility for that many hours. Maybe residents, because they do get worked to death, but post residency I can’t imagine you could keep doctors while working them like this.

> My daughter-in-law, who teaches elementary school, has no "own time" between 8:00 AM and 4:00PM, other than a half hour break when her students are at lunch, and then works a couple of hours most evenings

I think you missed part of the article. Much of a teacher’s day is not hard mental work. Especially for established teachers who have done the work to build lesson plans already.

Nurses are hourly employees and their employment terms are strongly influenced by the fact that many of the nurses in the employment area were unionized. The fact that they are hourly means there is a compelling financial incentive to limit their work time to 40 hours per week or less. The prevalence of unionized nurses in the market means that even non-union hospitals had to approximate the terms of the unionized ones, or they'd have unmanageable turnover, if they could even maintain staffing (nurses are in many markets scarce relative to demand).

It was an academic medical center, so roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of the staff were residents or fellows. Most of the rest had joint appointments in the clinic or hospital and the medical school and research arm. I know their hours because they largely mimicked my hours. Most started by 6:30AM, and 7:00 at the latest. I often chatted with them in the parking garage 11 or 12 hours later. And not that I said they "routinely worked 12 hour days" not that they did it every day.

My point in both cases is not that they working 60+ hours per week, but that they were working, that is, spending their time in service to the patients and organization, not doing something unrelated or personal, for long, extended shifts.

"Much of a teacher's day is not hard mental work."

It's still work. It requires their full, or nearly so, attention.

You might be right. Some quick searches show several resources saying doctors work an average north of 50 hours/week, with some passing 60.

No, the productivity pareto principle here is very clear, 20% do 80% of the work. This is unbelievably consistent across human organisations. This percentage applies roughly to many things, including sexual partners at college, money earned, academic success, and health issues.

Motivation isn’t fungible and I’ve been in a place where the given schedule is true of me, but that’s not a good place for me, that’s me unhappy and clock watching, a sign of bad times. I want to do more, solve more, continue . The end of day comes around quick.

I like working all day. When I was a consultant, there was basically no other option that didn't involve outright lying to and stealing from clients. Not working while being paid to work made me feel anxious, and wasn't relaxing at all.

Now that I'm not a consultant for a larger company, I can definitely get away with taking significant breaks during the day. But, the bigger problem to me is not having the opportunity to get as much work done as I want: endless meetings, requests for feedback, Slack conversations, etc., make it hard to actually get as much done as I've planned to get done. This is the "maker's hours" problem.

> Despite having over 10 years of experience, some of my colleagues feel the need to explain basic concepts that I already know. I'm assigned the easiest tasks. No one comes to me for help, although I'm the most knowledgable. No one takes my opinions into consideration.

I'm a white straight guy with 18 years of experience (although Slavic), but exactly the same things happen all the time in office. Not saying his story might be different, but often people attribute struggles to race/gender/nationality, while it's actually just competition or just how things are.

I feel this. I am automatically suspicious of anyone who has to drop the number of hours they worked a certain day, or frequently flexes that they are still working at a late hour. Why do you need us to know?

It explains why I'm up later.

I guess I'll add my anecdote.

For me this really depends on whether I'm "into it" or not. When I'm doing what I need to do but my heart isn't in it, I mostly match the "a few hours of real work per day" descriptions, doing my tasks in between some reading and chatting or whatever. Push it too hard, and I start getting into burn out territory.

But when I'm excited and really enjoying myself, watch out, I'm a fucking productivity monster. I can work cheerfully and with high energy basically nonstop, like I have to force myself to eat and sleep. I can do this many months in a row--empirically for the better part of a year before I chill out and go back to baseline. During these times taking a break is just annoying, I really want to be working, my mind is still there more or less no matter what I'm doing.

One thing that may be interesting to note is that the degree to which I can do this partially depends on the type of work. I've done lots of different types of work in my life. Here's a tiered list in order of how nonstop I can go when I'm into it:

* S Tier -- I go from the moment I wake until I drop from exhaustion, cheerful, high energy the whole time * programming -- one exception that drops this to A tier sometimes is if the work is particularly intellectually demanding, like tricky math / comp sci stuff, like when I'm trying to do some kind of novel game dev or something * physical labor (eg. house construction)

* A Tier -- I can only do something like 10 hours/day of the main event, rubber-on-road work, while the rest of the time is spent thinking about and planning the main event stuff * art -- stopping this one feels more like fatigue, like the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I have to reset by low effort learning or browsing-with-intent-to-learn other artwork * writing -- this feels different, where after some thousands of words the "spirit isn't with me" anymore, like I know what I would write, but the verve is gone somehow, even though I have plenty of energy for outlining and planning

* B Tier -- I can do this similarly to S tier, wall to wall, high intensity work, but only for about a week to 10 days at a time. * people stuff (eg. group facilitation, mediating conflict, personal coaching)

aside fun on S, A, B...

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/a/172006/46542

My uncle used to work for McDonnell Douglas and regaled me with stories of people standing around or hanging out in the parking lot, basically getting payed to do jack all. At the time he told me this, almost 40 yrs ago now, they were in a slump and were laying off. Nepotism in the hiring practice was prevalent. I would have fired him, personally. Needless to say one can expect most "industries" to be very similar.

Excellent distillation of the problem.

What strikes me most is that it reminds me of reading about studies of hunter-gatherer societies who pretty much spent 4 hours 'working' each day. Seems like these limits might be fairly hard-wired.

And, sure, I can do massive crunch-time sprints with the best of them, but only for limited times.

And management guidance & feedback that aligns with these realities is critical to prevent the environment from becoming toxic.

> Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work.

He then goes on to list all the hours of other stuff he does.

So it sounds like his main point is that he doesn’t spend 40 hours per week on pure “hard thinky work”.

I don’t see why that matters. All the other inter-personal and logistical work is also work.

More importantly, he doesn’t mention any of the time outside of work that he spends mulling things over in the back of his mind. That’s also work.

I do believe you can work 18 hours a day, since that's what I'm doing lately.

But i don't think you can repeat it successfully every day. Since the biggest problem is being able to focus.

I normally start with something very trivial that takes like 3 minutes and low effort and then I hope to be "launched".

If it was a difficult/stressing day at work, it won't work.

Funny, I find the opposite. Maybe it's a desire to feel efficient, but if asked "how long did that take you", I feel like saying ⅔N hours rather than N hours. Then again, I'm a full time employee, so I'm not billing by the hour, like lawyers that get $100 for responding to your email.

Rule of a thumb: If a person brags how much he/she works, he/she likely doesn't work a lot.

Double, if the same person also an activist fighting for equality and 'fair' compensation. In such cases you're likely dealing with a hypocrite who should be terminated on the spot.

Is this true for everyone or is this a special specimen "Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work."?

5 - 10 hours of deep work per week required to get a Phd from Imperial. That's impressive.

PhD studies can be very different. Wet-lab students who do experiments can spend 12 hours a day in a lab cutting mice. But that’s somewhat mechanical work where you repeat the protocol. PhD students are also less experienced and spend a lot of time making mistakes and learning. When I got my fist full-time developer job I spent day and night working as well. After 5-7 years, I was something like the author because I could do non-trivial tasks quickly. It felt like the code was writing itself in the back of my mind while I was drinking coffee or browsing HN.

Like the author says, I think this is pretty normal. Deep work in a flow state is easily 10x more productive than when you're messing around.

10hrs of deep work a week is also a significant amount of time. I doubt most people spend that much time doing deep work each week.

My PhD, in physics, was a mix.

When I was building the physical apparatus itself and plumbing it up, I was working 70 hour weeks because it was more or less mindless physical labor.

When I was writing software to operate the experiment or analyze data, I settled into more of a few hours a day of deep work pattern. Part of that might be the nature of science; after I implemented an idea, it might be hours before the experiment fully responded to my changes or the computers finished crunching numbers. And I needed that feedback to inform what I'd do next.

Writing my dissertation was somewhere in the middle. The actual writing required focus, but a lot of it was tracking down references or making figures, which required some thought but not too deep. That's probably the closest I came to a 40 hour week.

Based on other replies, it sounds like other people have experienced similar relationships of the nature of the work to their capacity to do it.

> Most days I can do somewhere between one and two hours of hard thinky work. Writing, programming, etc. Good days or easy tasks it might be three. It’s rarely four, and over a week almost never averages more than two.

too accurate

Eh, I know it's just an expression but I automatically distrust awfully presumptuous stuff like "as much as you think". The author doesn't have the slightest idea what I think, yet he proclaims to know better and tries to correct me.

Rant aside, it is my experience that the vast majority of people are useless bums. Pretty sure that's nurture as opposed to nature, though. If it weren't learned behaviour, people wouldn't be performing all these rituals in the hopes of obscuring their very uselessness.

That said, I manage 4-6 productive hours a day. Used to be half that at the start of my dev career. Sometimes I do 10, even 12 hours if I have the energy and motivation.

I think you should push for 14 hours like the rest of us

I worked really too much today. I had 10 meetings!!

Somehow I count meetings as … meetings and not work. More like pauses between productive work efforts.

Same with communication.

Only when I produce something tangible I feel that I’m working.

I know this is kind of silly but I feel like sitting in a meeting and getting paid is like cheating. Or replying to an email.

In no way I’m suggesting that time and attention are not valuable - it’s just that these activities feel trivially easy compared to the cognitive load of coding.

Write down notes from meeting for yourself and try to remember what was said - the tl;Dr.

It will make you feel more like working. But also, I found that actually useful in the long term. I did that as experiment and then then some months later I found myself using all that stuff. Not everything was useful, but a good chunk of it was.

> I know this is kind of silly but I feel like sitting in a meeting and getting paid is like cheating. Or replying to an email.

I felt disturbance in the force. As if all the product managers in the world screamed at the same time.

People who talk about how much they work don't work as much as they say.

Great article. I relate to the author's points. Worth a careful read.

4 hours a day of real work seems low, but certainly not 40 hours a week.

What do you define as "real" work? In most productive days of coding I get 4/5 "real" hours of focused, concentrated work. Very, very rarely would I get more than 6 without finishing the day mentally exhausted.

Meetings? Doing more than two back-to-back, hour-long meetings is an ordeal if you want a productive meeting. You can sit there and stare into space for far longer, or just keep minimum attention. But intelligent debate with multiple individuals for longer than that is hard to pull off, especially if you also want to get the productive work as mentioned above.

Meetings of the "just being present" and responding various, random emails that need little care? Feel free to spend 10 hours a day on those, for sure.

4 to 5 hours of real, focused, concentrated work is impressive. I take a long time to recover from a meeting and they're usually in the middle of my day, almost every work day, and often there's more than one. They're also exhausting so I'll have lost some vibrancy by the time I do get back in the flow of actual work.

4 to 5 hours is achievable and easy if you are aligned with your work and team and find it energizing. With a bad team, bad money, or bad product, downright near impossible to care enough for it.

Meetings themselves are the problem and what I'm suggesting are the problem. I don't think team alignment is related to the disruptive havoc caused by meetings. We have a lot of evidence that it takes a long time for a mind to refocus on a task once disturbed.

I say it's impressive you can crank out that level of focused work because I can't get a long stretch of uninterrupted time that you can. Maybe you have fewer meetings?

It's two 2-hour work blocks a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Yes, you have to aggressively block other activities. Working in small teams with similar goals and prescheduled sync points has helped a lot.

But it's like marketing though. You're productive for 50% of the time, but you can't know which 50%. Scheduling one's self 4-day work weeks seems great in theory but you can't force the flow state to happen

As a programmer, I've always felt that, on an average, 4 hours of actual work gets done by me on a daily basis.

This does not include meetings, communication etc.

This is essentially the time spent towards a tangible deliverable.

It's still work, even if it's not the work you want to be doing.

I dont even have the energy to make it through this article

Again, think of ant colonies, it's not far off

The pandemic enabled me to work 3 full time jobs as a software dev 12h a day and I'm making tons of cash and I love it. Burned down a little but I have ways to keep that under control.

12 hours a day doesn't sound like three full-time (emphasis on "full-time") jobs.

Three full-time jobs is 120 hours a week or more than 17 hours every single day, which would leave you with less than 7 hours for food, hygiene, sleep and spending all that cash you're making.

It depends on the age. At 20 something I could easily pull 16 hours of straight hard coding. Now? Forget about it.

So could I. The caveat being that I was only a fraction as productive. roughly guessing, 16 hours was probably worth about 3 of today's.

most of the difference is just the ability to go more directly to the right solution or implementation versus when i was younger I often found out late that something was off and had to change _everything_ to cascade the refactor.

tldr; Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

Office Space (1999)

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