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Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree. 9-5 (or 9-6) engineering jobs are a bit crazy - no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact. Many managers understand that and are cool with people just not doing work while at work...

However, I would still prefer to go home than sitting and waiting for 5 or 6pm so I could do something more meaningful, because e.g. side-projects is a gray area while at work and that's fair. Even so, some non-technical higher-ups might think that the engineer is not working hard and just slacking off because everyone else is at the office till 6 or 7.

Some companies recognize that (e.g. Netflix, Twitter, etc) and they don't care where and what are you do, as long as you get stuff done. In an ideal world, every company would treat engineers like that :)

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> no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact.

I disagree with your fact. I know many, many people who can do it. The simple fact that you talk about working on "side-projects" makes me think you have productive, creative hours outside the time you spend on work items.

I do agree that in the current market for software developers, you'd be crazy to not try to get some of your creative time to work on what you want to instead of your employer, but I just don't comprehend all the people acting as if 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of productivity is unattainable.

Perhaps a more accurate statement is that no-one is able to work productively for 8 hours straight, which is what the 9-5 job tries to make you do.

I've yet to really try it, but I always thought that (being single, without family) it would be more reasonable to work for 5 hours, have (at least) an hour break out of the office, and then work for another 5, for 4 days, is a more sensible approach to a 40 hour work week, than 58 with a (relatively) short break for lunch... I doubt that that would amount to 40 "productive" hours, but then again, I don't think the 85 leads to that either.

Even if I wanted to work productively for 8 hours straight, most of the low-level office tasks I'm required to do keep me from doing it -- explain to marketing why X product from Y vendor won't work for our situation, responding to email, meetings that always take up an hour no matter how short the agenda, etc. I think most of the engineers I know have employer-created hurdles that limit them to 4-6 hours daily of truly productive work.

Sounds like most of these things are pretty important for the business (except for maybe the overly long meetings). We'd all like to code in a bubble, but there are other things involved in running a business.

I wasn't arguing that they're unimportant or that I expect to code in a bubble, just that I'm paid to work 40 hours/week and roughly half that time is non-creative and non-coding. It's unreasonable to expect eight straight hours of productive creativity when business needs also require you to do TPS reports with your time at the office.

i've worked with a lot of people in a lot of places, and I think you are kidding yourself if you think most people get 8 hours of work done every day. I'm not saying nobody can do it, but most can't and don't. And that's not a problem. Most people are going to need breaks throughout the day. I suspect many of us here check out hacker news at some point during the day. In moderation that is fine as well (IMO).

For me personally, sometimes I put in 10-12 hours a day for a month or two and then I back off to 4-5 hours for awhile. I can do it in spurts, but 8 hours everyday for years at a time sucks. more than 8 is just unreasonable. If we're being honest I suspect most people do between 4-6 hours of work a day. Perhaps if they weren't forced to be in the office for 8 hours, they could fit that 4-6 hours of work in 4-6 hours instead of 8.

The cleverer managers I've worked with typically include a factor of ~ 70-80% on worker office time. So in a typical 8 hour work day, 6 of those hours would be productively spent on a task at hand.

For an engineer who is sitting at his or her desk, focussed on a single task, I think this is reasonably accurate. Obviously there are a lot of things in an office environment which can further conspire to reduce the amount of productivity much, much lower.

It is unattainable, from the perspective of the employer. As an employer, you just won't get those 8 hrs of productive work a day! Even if most employees can and do have more than 8 hrs of productivity, you just won't ever get more than 50% of that, no matter how many hours you pay them for.

...and it is OK. Yes, you have to pay someone for 8 hrs in order to get 4 hrs of useful work for you company out of them! Yes you have to pay for their side projects even if you like to pretend you don't! And yes you have to pay for people slacking at work... otherwise you don't even get that 50%!

So, as an employer, accept this fact, pay up, and motivate your people to create awesome products that delight the consumers and bring record profits, in this limited amount of useful time that you can squeeze out of people!

I'm totally fine with the position that an employer can't reliably get 8 hours of productive work per day from employees. I just am a bit fed up with people repeating over and over again variations on the theme of "nobody doing creative work can consistently be productive for 40 hours per week" which is something I have personally observed multiple counterexamples from across several industries.

> no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact

How do you know this? Are you sure you aren't extrapolating your own energy levels and assuming everyone else feels as you do?

I know plenty of people with phenomenal drive, focus and energy who are extremely productive for much longer work days.

My own situation is a counterexample. I am at my desk at 6:30am most days, can easily work 14+ hour days virtually without a break, never sleep more than 5 hours a night, and can keep that up indefinitely. I also fit in 2-3 hours sport a day, which is also technically very demanding and needs full concentration. My body may get physically exhausted but somehow my brain just keeps going.

To be fair, the friends of mine who work such extreme hours are all passionate about their jobs, and are the ones in ultimate control of their working hours. They do it out of choice, not because their boss tells them to. If they didn't like their work, they'd find it hard to stay focused for 8 hours too.

Actually reduced cognitive ability (lack of sleep) makes the simplest of tasks more entertaining, it's a large part of the reason they give amphetamine analogues to those who are not challenged by school, and why you'll find that those that are passionate about the the long hours of sorting through trash to commit identity fraud also high on meth.

Another great example of how people don't realize how cognitively impaired they are is hypoxia, just look at how passionate the guy becomes trying to put square shapes in square holes, so passionate he believes he no longer needs an oxygen mask to survive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpLi67NdD4w

That was an eye-opening video. I'm not convinced that amphetamines improve attention by decreasing cognition, though. Is there research on that?

Could you tell us what field you work in, some details about the specifics of your job, your age, and maybe why you want to dedicate all your waking hours to working rather than something else?

Do you understand that what you're describing is anomalous behaviour and ability. In Europe we have legislation to protect people against being forced to work for more than 12 hours at a time because this has been seen to be detrimental to health. I see no reason why your reported lack of external coercion makes it healthier.

With 3 hours of sport (what sport would that be?) you're describing a day of 17+ hours. 2 hours for meals seems pretty reasonable. Commuting, eg to the location where you do your sport would be extremely unlikely to be less than 30 mins. That leaves you < (!) 4½hrs for sleep, toilet, washing, keeping house, family/friends (except sport and eating with them), entertainment ... you don't tell us how many days a week but "keep that up indefinitely" sounds like you don't bother with weekends?

I too would like to know what field of work he is in. I can't imagine doing that indefinitely.

a la google: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~scs/ ?

If these numbers aren't at least a tiny bit exaggerated (which I doubt), let's see how you think about work days like these after 10 years of doing them.

This is difficult to quantify, but I'm guessing if we could graph productivity, it would look a lot like a sleep graph. In maybe the first 3 - 4 hours of sleep, you are deep in. That's the most productive sleep. Though you might go through a few cycles in that time, the cycles are deep. Then the cycles get less and less deep until the final hours in which you are barely sleeping. Some freaks of nature may be able to get by with less than 6 hours of sleep. Most need 7 - 8. We probably know those lazy teens who can seem to sleep all day. Some people might break up their sleep by sleeping for 4 hours, waking up to do something for a few hours and then going back down to sleep for another 4. Regardless, we all go through the same basic processes and have the same needs. Again, I think it really helps just to observe yourself and find out what works best for you. Experiment with many different ways and track that however you can. Maybe even just writing in a journal.

As for the side project, I meant working on a project for the employer. For example, if your job is X project on foobar.com then you might open up Y project on foobar.com as something you believe the site needs that you are more interested in. Again, this would most likely be after your 4 hour productivity burst. Maybe it's something you have been intersted in becoming an expert in. Perhaps one day you could jump ship and find a different employer to hire you for that expertise. Win for you, win for the employer.

This is a very personal/subjective issue. I have no problem at all being productive for 8-12 hours a day. Probably in part because I love what I do.

"no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact"

tell that to a medical resident...or just about any in-hospital physician, for that matter. many, many people work long shifts and are entirely productive.

I've read that Henry Ford came up with the 8 hour work week after doing extensive testing[1]. I think the difference here is that assembly line work is not "creative". So you can do "non-creative work" for longer (8 hours I guess is optimal)... But it seems like this thread is talking about pure creative - e.g. difficult coding - time.

I'm not sure where you draw the line though. Is HTML and CSS mindless enough that it's "not creative"? What about basic unit testing?

I also don't understand how to reconcile this with the countless startup stories of how you spend all your time working... Even PG said he "used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week." and "During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night."[2]. Perhaps he actually did four hours of "intense creative" and the rest was mundane (he does in that same essay claim only 10% of the work was "technically interesting").

[1] http://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-work-time-how-long-should-... [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

I've not worked at a hospital, but I've seen people in somewhat similar circumstances: military exercises, working as leaders at a youth camp -- and while they all get the job done, it's always been clear that they'd do a better job if they had more free time/more sleep -- in short they can work productively (under high strain/stress) for more than 8 hours -- but they'd do better work if they could work fewer hours.

I'd be surprised if the rate of errors didn't go down with work hours (to a certain point) at hospitals as well. And/or patient satisfaction went up.

To put this into (made up) numbers, if we assume that a software architect works either 12, 8 or 4 hours a day, and that at 12 hours a day produces on average 200 "valuedollars" per hour, that's 2400 vd/day. Is it really a stretch to claim that you could, on average, do 3 times better if you only had 4 hours, rather than 12? Paying 3 people 600/hour to work 4 hours a day, you'd get 3 times the value/day (note: note value/pay -- but we all know deadlines are important in projects).

There's plenty of research on this, e.g.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a487169.pdf

For an alternative take:

http://theenergyproject.com/blog/sleep-as-a-competitive-adva...

Humm, I have to disagree with that.

My girlfriend is a medical student from France and did some internship in the US. She is always annoyed by the fact that in the US, the medical employees (especially the residents) work way more than in France, but are also a lot less productive than in France. I do not like to generalize from examples, but saying that they are entirely productive is not true. Also medical professions cannot be easily compared to engineering (not the same type of work, and most of the time the issues are more important in their field (human lives at stakes...)).

No, they are not. They make more mistakes than during shorter shifts, especially towards the end of the shift. An aggravating factor is that they actually believe they can still perform as well after 16 hours of working. This is all well known from research, it's just that it's hard to break ingrained traditions. Look at how long it took for doctors to start washing their hands, after research decisively proved it reduced the number of deaths and complications. In a few decades we will look back on this time and shake our heads at the ridiculousness of doctors, of all people, working 16 hours straight.

"Entirely productive" - but would you look at the mistake rate for the first two hours on-shift versus the last two hours on-shift?

If you do, don't tell anybody. They'd probably quit.

The collective ego and conscience of the medical profession, the way we treat them, tells them they should be unfallable, and mistakes are not only unforgiveable, but actionable. Medical residents should need no sleep whatsoever, should have no downtime et cetera, et cetera.

If we gave them a sane number of hours per shift (by the standards of the rest of the economy) and a reasonable margin to communicate patient status from shift to shift (rounds twice or thrice a day), we would increase labor requirements by 25%. If we gave them a sane number of hours per week, we would increase labor requirements by another 100%.

Work standards initiatives that have been successful include "Towards an 80 hour workweek" (down from 90+): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours#Tow...

Do you want your heart surgeon to have worked 80 hours in the last week, and 24 hours in the last day? Myself, I wouldn't want my doctor using the same public road network as I do, in such conditions.

How many people has this policy killed?

"no one is able to work productively for 8 hours, that's a fact" - this is not a fact at all, where is the proof? Show me the research. I would still challenge it by showing you days when I've easily pulled 12 - 14 hours for 5 and sometimes 6 days of solid work in a week with no burn out. It's all about managing energy and having your internal motivations aligned with the goals and tasks at hand. Not that everyone should be working 12-14 hours but often we need to.

I think you're definitely right that under the right motivation and for certain bursts of time you can work for 12-14 hours of time, but there has been a good amount of research and studies showing long term damage from overworking and undersleeping:

http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-w... http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2012/09/12/why-work... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/why-the-...

i dunno - its certainly possible to be productive after even 20 hours. some of those last terrible bug fixes that make that thing ship...

its not ideal productivity but its better than missing a deadline and losing money

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