8 Hours of programming a day is too much

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12 points·jmolinaso··4 comments

Once I quit my day job and started consulting, I became deeply aware that most of my usual 8 hour work day is spent doing anything but coding/doing billable work.

Now, after a couple years of self-employment, I feel accomplished if I manage to work (i.e. bill) 4/5 hours a day. Paired to an appropriate pay increase (I'm still billing by the hour -- I know), that's the perfect amount of work to avoid any kind of mental burnout.

More than 5 hours and I'm mentally dead until the next day.

Maybe there's something wrong with my work ethic, or I'm working on exceptionally hard projects (they are not, but I spend most of my time creating and deconstructing abstractions in my head than actual code writing, and that burns an incredible amount of energy), but that's also what scares me when I entertain the idea of getting back to a full-time job: I really don't think I can handle 8/9 hours working, I would feel like a fraud being that I'm mentally able to be productive only 50% of that time.

God forbid working 12+ hours in one of the usual big companies.

Nothing wrong with your work ethic. It seems to be a consistent finding across domains that four or five hours of intellectually demanding work per day is about the limit of what the human brain can handle.

In my case I work in a small company that expects you to work 3h full, then 1 hour lunch, and then 6 hours full. Luckily is only about a week and I can leave and start in a normal company where everything is bit more structured. But now I understand why I was more productive during mornings than evenings.

I would love to get 8 hours of uninterrupted coding time.

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