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Comment by wouldbecouldbe | Hacker News Reader

"In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less".

Written as if 6 hours is little. To get a full focused 6 hours is a pretty high number.

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I had the interesting experience of working with a non-tech team for a short period a while ago. I could not believe the pace and lax attitude to work these people had.

When work _was_ done, it was done in the most unoptimised, short-term-thinking way possible. There was seemingly no concern for quality of output (almost presumed that they'd have to do the task again), and deadlines were a vague fairy tale. Most of their time was spent drinking coffee and chatting.

Since then, I've observed that this is just how people work. I had never experienced it because I'd always been in tech, where we actually _like_ what we do.

It's not split at tech/non-tech.

I'm happy to recommend construction crews you can tag along with for a day that will leave you a broken mess of a man with how hard they work. You won't get out of bed for a forthnight after one day of work with proper roofers.

My maid works 16-hour days at breakneck speed as well, with a smile on her face. Sleeps 3 hours, gets on with life. I don't know how she does it.

Likewise I've seen plenty of tech teams adding negative value. Their bosses would be better off paying them to play xbox all day.

I'd call it pride, but that's not the root cause either.

> My maid works 16-hour days at breakneck speed as well, with a smile on her face. Sleeps 3 hours, gets on with life. I don't know how she does it.

Have you considered not working your maid to death?

I assume his is one of the multiple jobs she has. But happy to have him confirm or deny that.

Have you considered it is not the only house she takes care of?

I'm responsible for ~6 hours per day out of that schedule. I pay above market for those hours, but she chooses/needs to work this many hours for her own reasons.

I'd never think someone could be happy or productive spending most of their waking hours working, but here we are. I'm sure she's at least a 1.5x maid compared to your average worker, too.

No judgement intended, but why do you have a maid for 6 hours per day? Unless they're doing child-raising duties as well?

    My maid works 16 hours a day

This is an unusual thing to contribute to the conversation.

Bragging about working a maid twice the average working hours of the day probably doesn't look to other people like you think it looks.

It's a bit like bragging about how rude you are to wait staff, or how much you discipline your wife.

I thought it was pretty clear that their maid "maids" multiple homes. It's not like there's 16 hours of cleaning to do in one house every day.

For what it's worth, in countries that do employ live-in maids, it's fairly common to give them 16 hours of work every day under the theory that idle hands do the Devil's work. And since the average house does not have 16 hours worth of daily cleaning, they just invent bullshit, like washing the car every single day and mopping the floor not just daily, but twice in a row.

https://mothership.sg/2018/03/maid-schedule-daily-singapore-...

Damn that's fucked up. Where I'm from maids are a service you pay for, you don't set their working hours. Didn't consider that it's different elsewhere.

You're not wrong there. On further reflection I see it's not tech per se, but maybe more broadly; jobs people didn't choose, but ended up in. If you weren't interested enough to choose your job, then obviously you won't have motivation to do it well.

Go hang around with your finance, HR, or even sales teams. It's incredible.

You're definitely on to something with the 'interest' angle. I've seen the same thing in tech people working for extremely non-tech businesses for sure.

I guess some amount of the population is just not that interested in work! Which is fine by me but I do hope they find fulfilment elsewhere.

“We like what we do.” Bingo! Well, that’s half the story, at least.

I think there are three factors: passion, traction, and friction. There are plenty of passionate people in less technical domains. They tend to be slowed down because either it’s hard for them to get traction on an idea that doesn’t have a clear and concrete benefit (which technical outputs often do) and then because they expect friction in the form of rewrites, edits, and back and forths based largely on aesthetics, vibes, or a manager’s need to feel like they’ve made a mark too.

Back when I had billable hours, I'd measure how long I actually work (building small websites), and 6 hours was unusually long.

Now I write and edit text for a living, alone, at home and without interruptions. I usually work from 10 to 16 with plenty of breaks.

8 real hours all day, every day is a pipe dream in creative professions.

Yeah I think I found roughly 4 hours as the average over the course of a month, ranging from zero to about 10.

At my startup we had people track time on ‘real’ work tasks and found that four hours was about the max anyone could (happily and productively) do each day, which was fairly consistent across roles as well.

For me it depends. I'm still fairly new and trying to find good solutions to things, so some times I might get hardly anything done because I'm just thinking about what to do or trying various stuff to see how an idea ends up. But when I'm doing things I know I can spend more than 8 hours working productively.

On average it's probably less than 6 hours of actually writing code per day though.

It comes in bursts. But it averages out to a lowish number. The flip side is that the rest of the time is also work and it includes some important work even. In order to be effective as a programmer, you have to understand what you are building and why. I do a lot of thinking and decision making before I start coding. When I work in a long burst, it's usually after days or weeks of pondering how I'm going to do it. Programmers that do this too much sometimes get stuck not doing anything. This is often called analysis paralysis. A good way to break through that is to start doing stuff. Any stuff. Even if it might be the wrong stuff. Sometimes I solve stuff in my sleep even. I go to bed not knowing a solution to a problem after having worked hours on it. And wake up with a working solution that I can knock out in minutes. So, do I code for six hours a day? No, but work occupies most of my day.

I do both management and coding; so I can see both sides of the equation. Keeping your team motivated and stimulated with interesting work is hard. A lot of work just is drudgery. I know it is because I dread doing these things myself. And then end up doing them anyway. Drudgery is demotivating. Demotivated people drag their feet, especially when drudgery just leads to more drudgery. Often management is simply a matter of getting people to see results coming from their hard work. Break it down, celebrate the progress, do some more. Short feedback loops are a key tool. Even the drudgery gets dealt with when you do that.

I "sleep solve" all the time. I do wish i could turn it off sometimes though (like now, where i woke up at 0230, and while tryin to go back to sleep, was still tryin to solve various logic shit for no reason); its now 0540 and im just up at this point. I do hate that sleep is the only answer to a hard problem, because i just want to swing at it all night (and i do that too, frequently), but the sleep solve usually gives better results.

I also find myself getting drudge woes when the chunks get too big, but sometimes the chunks have to be big (or at least i think they do). I prefer to be challenged and focusing on various efforts throughout the day, and focusing on a single task for multiple days in a row just destroys motivation for me. Its hard to convey this to employers without getting my resume fired right into the trashcan. Yes, i can focus on a single task for extended periods, but i cant really do that long term. Honestly one of the reasons i liked being in the datacenter / doing hosting things, the long focused tasks were there, but there were lots of other things that could be done too; a choose your own adventure, if you will.

Some times if I'm struggling to sleep I write down my thoughts in a slack DM to myself. That way I can forget about it and pick it up when I'm back at work.

While it would be silly to claim that software engineering is the most demanding profession, there’s more to the work hours than the time spent in front of the screen.

In my personal experience a lot of time is spent working “in the head” that does not involve me being in front of my computer - my wife says I have a programming face often when I sit at dinner or when we are out somewhere because I have code running in my head somewhere behind my eyeballs. At peak times this can persist for days (and needs downtime after to recover).

Switching that off is very hard for me - in contrast with when I did some more physical work in the past where you can get your mind back as soon as you down the tools.

I hear you about switching off and not ruminating over programming problems after work hours. I have found that (a) exercising for 30 mins helps put me “in the moment” provides a nice mental break and “palate cleanser” and (b) practicing mindfulness has helped me be more intentional about controlling where my thoughts go.

My thoughts exactly. More than four hours of focused work seems rare or limited to some very focused individuals. They still seem to cling to the old idea that people have to work eight hours. They also seem to not be aware of the fact that this applies most of the population of knowledge workers in complex tasks everywhere, not only in the oh-so-flashy top of the crop Meta and Google. Most people I talked to learned early on that four hours is a good time, and the rest is about knowingly or unknowingly pretending to be busy, talking to coworkers, reading and such.

An hour for lunch, a few 15 minute breaks, a bathroom stop, a conversation in a hallway, makes 6 hrs an 8 hour workday.

Everyone's workday has always been this way.

Maybe everyone's white collar job is this way? There are plenty of jobs, like assembly line work, where an 8 hours day is not likely to be less than 7 hours of work (30 minutes for lunch, two 15 minute breaks). Source: I worked factory jobs for a temp agency over the summer while I was in high school (in 1990, before light industry was gutted in NE Ohio).

Yes, I worked such jobs, unionized even, with the same sort of rules.

(Cheese plant when in college)

But that's the way of it. Different jobs have different requirements, and different cultures. Assembly line work obviously cannot have people wandering off whenever they choose. Most white collar workers, have more choice, and the longer lunch, is part of the pay.

Ye 6h of work per day is really high. A honest answer for a programmer is probably 1h tops plus meetings.

Once I worked at a place for like half a year to a year I have qued up so much work for others that I can't progress myself. And efficiency gets down to like 1-5% or something of what I would produce in a one man project.

1h is a bit low. There are definitely days im full coding a new feature without distractions where I reach 6-8 hours in full focus, but then days after i'm more easily distracted.

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