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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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