Ask HN: How much do salaried full-time devs *actually* work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much do salaried full-time devs actually work?

9 pointsparpfish20 comments

I just saw a job posting here where the description said:

> "We spend 70-80 hours a week in the office and, more often than not, work nights and weekends."

My first thought was "if they're expecting somebody to work 2x the standard hours, they need to pay at least 2.5x the standard salary".

But then I started wondering whether I was just out of touch and clinging to some out-of-date expectation of 40hr work weeks.

If anything, as I've progressed in my career I feel like things have loosened up so the actual expectation is 40 hours of "availability" and the actual work is confined to some subset of those hours.

View on HN

Been at my current job 9 years, been coding professionally for ~33, and 43 years total. I occasionally work (code) a 10 hour day if it's a project I'm really into. Most of the time it's 8 hours of "availability" - I spend my mornings online on a laptop in my living room, but still waking up. I work from home, so 9am is my usual wake-up as well as arrive-at-work time. If things are really going haywire when I wake up I'll go into my home office and start working. I rarely have any meetings before 1pm. People who schedule 9am meetings are the worst. I've spoken to my boss maybe 5 times in the last 6 years, he lets me do what I do leading my team, so it's pretty chill.

I also work on my own projects every night from ~8pm to midnight or 2am. So I'm still good to code, but I either get exhausted by, or lose interest in the day job stuff by 6 or 7pm. It's time for dinner, put on a show or a movie and work on the stuff I'm actually passionate about.

I get out on the weekends or work on projects that aren't programming.

Do you have kids?

No.

Anything more than 40 hours is wasted life. You're not going to be rewarded for it. If they're cheap enough to not hire labor, they're going to underpay you for 40 hours of work. It's different if they give you some kind of real ownership stake in the company.

Your employment at the company is only partially due to how good you are. If management blows the company up, well, it was all wasted.

You (and arguably the company) are better off spending your 40 hours being as productive as possible, and using the rest of the time enjoying your evenings, family, books, tv shows, whatever, and recharge until the next day.

I am a full stack hard core developer. I work an average of 12-14 hours a day. (At least 6 days a week)

I can make around $25k usd per month, but I usually don’t spend too much.

I love building products and now with AI, I am getting better at exponential rates.

I’m 33 years old, live in Mexico. I stay fit, maintain a skin care routine and try to be social. I’m single by choice.

I’m sure I’ll be able to find a good wife, once I feel accomplished. But right now, and for the past 10 years, I’ve been going harder and harder.

Patrick Bateman vibes

Got a similar outbound from a recruiter. "Strict office policy, we work 60 hour weeks." was in their bullet points. The salary is less than I make currently at a startup, and the product the company is making is nothing special. I can't even steelman the argument for why someone would write this on a job posting. They want to be honest? They think it will excite a prospect that has no family nor social life?

They must be attempting to select for the naive who haven't figured the owners/investors benefit far more from your 60h work week than you ever will.

I've worked in offices where everybody was there 10-12 hours a day. I've also worked in offices where people were there 8 hours a day. IMO the 8 hour offices spent more time working than the 12 hour offices. Once you're at the office 12 hours a day some of the day is going to be spent on leisure and socializing.

>My first thought was "if they're expecting somebody to work 2x the standard hours, they need to pay at least 2.5x the standard salary".

IMHO, in reality, salaries are only superficially related to any notion of how much or hard one works, or how much value one provides, or can provide. I think it's too complex for me to fully understand why this is, but I've seen too many examples of hard workers earning peanuts, and morons/charlatons earning loads, to believe that there's actually a nice line going up between experience/work ethic and remuneration. Supply and demand is only half the story, nepotism is in there somewhere, "marketing yourself", leverage etc. The point is: this ad is either asking for 80h weeks for 1x salary because they think they can realistically get that, or they think it sends a signal to a type of candidate they want.

Staff engineer at a series b SV startup.

I have to be protective of my time since I’m on the east coast and my west coast colleagues, even after several years, still assume everyone lives in the Bay Area. I’ll sign off and still get a flurry of messages and requests until it’s time for them to leave at 5.

Floor of 40 hours, usually closer to 50.

>We spend 70-80 hours a week in the office and, more often than not, work nights and weekends.

That's a red flag if I ever saw one. Hardly anyone can sustain 70h/w for longer than a year without drastically losing productivity. Not even in their 20's and most certainly not in their 40's.

> longer than a year without drastically losing productivity.

The data suggests you can get away with it for 4 weeks[0]. Then you hit the inflection point.

[0]: https://lostgarden.com/2008/09/28/rules-of-productivity-pres...

Yeah, to be wearing that level of obsession with work as a badge of honour is telling. Alternatively, if there's that much work to be done that this 70-80h/w per employee is a requirement for the business to exist, something is very wrong somewhere and it's only a matter of time before it comes to the surface.

It really depends on the company, and specifically how well the company understands and, more importantly, communicates it's vision.

Some companies are just garbage companies and can't figure out what they want to build, but others are laser focused on tangible goals. There's a whole spectrum in between and companies often move within in over time. Obviously in companies that dont know what they want, devs are less well utilized, while the more a company's management is communicating the vision well, the more utilized, or overutilized, the devs are.

I teach 2-3 days a week from 13:00--16:00.

I freelance 2-3 days a week outside of teaching hours, so 16-24 hours.

My freelance aligns highly with my interests, so my personal programming projects are in fourth row having just had a child. I work in one-hour sprints now, because that's the time I have between the child sleeping.

Anticipating a child, I tried to minimize the hours I spent working without impacting my salary significantly.

I can give you one anecdotal data point FWIW. I work 7-7 Mon-Fri, of which 75% is writing code and 25% is meeting. Beyond that I work at least 10 hours between Fri evening and Sun evening; 80% is writing code -- 20% will be doing some form of process.

I work in a semiconductor company, at a fairly high technical level but I'm no superstar.

That sucks. Treat yourself better.

I work extra hours when I need to and less when I need to. I don't mind working more when it's something interesting. I will work less when I'm burned out. On average I probably do more than 40, but it's not required.

That to me seems like a reasonable expectation from most employers at my salary.

You should be working 4 hours a day. It's 2025.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com