Poll: How many hours do you work each week?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119984

by solipsist • 16 years ago

10 16 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

bartonfink• 16 years ago

One thing that may very well skew the results higher than you would think is folks who do side work. 60 hours a week on one job paints a far different picture than 40 hours on a day job and 20 hours of contract work on the side.

buro9• 16 years ago

Define "Work".

I'm employed full-time, but I'll be the first to admit that for not all of that I'm working. Outside of that I have projects I'm working on (which I'd be inclined to count as work) and a small business (which is definitely work though I treat that more as pleasure).

I guess if it's vague enough to just be anything not personal or sleeping then > 60 hours... but if it's constrained to that for which I am employed/get paid, then it's variable.

derrida• 16 years ago

I agree. In reality, I have 3 or 4 hours of enthusiastic game-on work time a day. That is ok. I honestly don't believe anyone that says they can keep up concentration for longer than this (unless debugging). Here I am only counting "doing" not "dreaming" or "thinking", but I do that in my sleep.

eelinow• 16 years ago

I agree with you as well. Zone time is usually a 3-4 hour a day deal. Some people are honest about it, others aren't. There are short periods of time in which one can code at their top level for a long period of time but these are infrequent. In general I'd say that one can get a good 4 hours of solid work in on a given day. Once going beyond that time frame, especially on a regular basis just increases the chance of introducing errors into a system. The other time would be better spent thinking about the problems faced by the design and or relaxing to allow for ideas to form and work themselves to clarity.

When I used to work outside of my home this meant playing table tennis or fußball as a clearing ones mind method. Or going for a walk outside of the workplace.

The gung-ho brute forcing of a coding method is a dangerous path to traverse. I'm more for the cyclical clear ones mind, allow the design/ideas/concepts to brew. Commit to code the portion at hand then cool down and repeat the cycle.

Honestly, my best clarity comes at 2am, the shower and/or commutes >20 minutes.

Eric codedevl.blogspot.com

wazoox• 16 years ago

Ditto. I actually spend long hours at home reading programming blogs, tech news, programming stuff or toying around with system administration tools and techniques I may use later in production. What is work? Am I working when I'm reading HN at the office waiting for some test to end ? Am I working when I'm answering support emails from home at 11PM while still reading HN ?

I spend about 35 hours a week at the office or customers premises. I spend 80 to 100 hours a week doing work-related stuff. I may pretend that I'm working even while I'm running in the woods, every morning, because while I run I'm probably rummaging about a couple of work related problems, even if it's on the back burner.

What's work? Frankly, I don't know anymore.

ax0n• 16 years ago

I'm AT WORK 45, sometimes 55 hours per week. Productivity comes in spurts. I'm basically working in a field that's also one of my passionate hobbies, so while part of my work day involves grinding through mundane stuff, I am often inspired and do things I love to do. Off the clock, I often come up with solutions that help me and my peers back at the day job.

kral• 16 years ago

A professionist is always working! :)

I mean, often I find myself thinking about work stuff even if I'm at home playing WoW or reading a book or whatever...

petervandijck• 16 years ago

Interesting, an inverted bell curve :)

jswinghammer• 16 years ago

My wife just gave birth to our second child so I'm working whenever I'm not sleeping.

Jem• 16 years ago

Congratulations to you & your wife. :) Hopefully she's getting some sleep too!

chopsueyar• 16 years ago

For those greater than 60 hours, how is your general level of health/fitness? What is your food diet?

carl_• 16 years ago

Terrible fitness/physical stamina but I eat reasonably well.

Working in `internet infrastructure` (as a founder) my work week varies between 60+ hours per week and ~>80, that doesn't of course include dreaming about problems past or problems imminent or the false-positives in monitoring causing broken sleep.

After doing this for 8+ years and working myself into a position of financial comfort relative to my peers, I'm now questioning why I work so much and what's the point of working so much at the expense of quality of life and potentially how long that life will be if I continue to abuse my body/health.

At the same time after doing what I do for such a long period of time I find it very difficult to NOT work. I get fidgety and easily bored when having conversations (in real life rather than IRC), being able to trust in others to-do as good a job when I have cover and resisting `checking in` to see how things are doing.

I very much used to be someone who looked down on those who worked less hours as lazy and stupid, now I think they're the smartest people I know.

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

I've managed to arrange for one of my New Years' resolutions to be met: I'm working about 20 hours a week now. Let's see if I can keep it up for the year.

wahnfrieden• 16 years ago

If you don't mind me asking, what sort of work do you do where 20 hours is acceptable and sustainable? (It sure sounds great.)

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

There's two parts to this:

> acceptable

I work for http://pikimal.com/ . My official title is "General Technical Counsel," which is sort of what it sounds like: I advise them on technical matters. Right now, I'm helping them migrate a large codebase from a Rails 2.3.4 setup to Rails 3, which has been a pretty large undertaking.

I got the job by doing some consulting work, in which I dropped page load times about 4x on some pages. I also re-did their entire testing setup, taking a suite that spent about 15 minutes running on every iteration to one that took 3 on a normal run, and 10 doing full tests. After the consulting time was up, they asked me to stay, and so I negotiated my current situation.

> sustainable

Sustainability is a simple equation:

Cash in - cash out >= 0

As long as this is true, you're good. So, you can either increase cash in, or decrease cash out.

I was working as a cofounder of a startup before this, and was a student before that. I live in a 3 bedroom house with 4 people, and I don't want to own many things. I have my bicycle, my Macbook, and my Nexus One, and while I still pick up the occasional toy (I bought an eReader on w00t for $100 two weeks ago) I largely just don't spend a lot of money.

eam• 16 years ago

It's beginning to look like a quartic function.

Poll: How many hours do you work each week?

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