Ask HN: How hard should engineers work?

6 points·earlystage··4 comments

I'm in a small startup and do pretty much every but code. The devs on our team work around 30 hours a week it seems (time spent actually coding). Does this seem reasonable? It seems like on one hand overworking devs isn't good but at the same time are we being hampered by not pushing hard on the dev front?

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Most difficult problems I've tackled, the most complex algorithms, the most elegant code, took less than 30 minutes to type. They took several weeks of working on other things, of pondering the ways to approach it, several false starts and then a spark of genius. Honestly, you can't measure development time in hours spent typing, or even hours in the office. Measure by output.

Don't micromanage the developers. Work with them to set goals, get explanation when goals aren't met, and celebrate when they are.

In my experience, developers actually work way more than the 30-40 hours a week they're "in the office" - they are thinking about the problems they're trying to solve when they're at home or when they're laying in bed, etc. You can't think of it as a clocking in / clocking out type of job.

If the devs aren't hitting their targets, that's a problem. If they are hitting their targets, but you think they are capable of more then make the schedule more aggressive.

However, I should point out that thinking for a living is a little different than many other modes of employment - just because they aren't typing doesn't mean they aren't working.

"just because they aren't typing doesn't mean they aren't working"

The harder the problem, the less time you spend at the keyboard relative to the total project time.

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