One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

https://www.fastcompany.com/90597677/report-one-third-of-tech-workers-admit-to-working-only-3-4-hours-a-day

by kilroy123 • 5 years ago

84 92 5 years ago

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

“How many real hours of work do you put in each day?”

Am I supposed to count meetings I didn't need to be on, or that could've been an email, or that get rescheduled at the last minute for 15 minutes later than originally?

Causality12• 5 years ago

I'd say anything that prevents you from, for instance, browsing the internet for pleasure counts as work. Meeting in a boardroom? Work. Zoom call in which you have to regularly participate? Work. Zoom call you can basically ignore while you read HN? Not work.

Bootvis• 5 years ago

In that zoom call I’m not walking along the beach or napping on the couch or cleaning the house or any other activity I prefer to attending a meeting. So I’d say it’s work as well.

eru2• 5 years ago

That's an interesting definition. I'm not sure it's useful.

Eg when I am oncall out of hours, I could browse HN almost all the time, but it is still low-intensity work, even if nothing breaks and pages on that day.

acdha4• 5 years ago

Zoom call you can basically ignore while you read HN? Not work.

Still work: if it’s preventing you from focusing but not personal time, it’s work. Your employer choosing to waste your time on low productivity meetings is something to try to improve but you shouldn’t feel any obligation to make up for it with your own free time.

grep_name• 5 years ago

Disagree. I may be on HN right now, but if I were not at work I wouldn't be on HN. I wouldn't be on my computer at all, in fact. Right now I am available, which provides value to my employer at my personal expense.

Not using part of my life in the way I see fit because I need to make a living? Work.

levosmetalo• 5 years ago

Work time is office time. If I can't do anything that I want during that time, it's work.

throwaway3699• 5 years ago

3-4 hours of deep work is fairly standard I think. The rest of the time is not necessarily something I wouldn't define as "hard work" (emails, meetings, etc...) - but it's not slacking either.

m463• 5 years ago

I also find my work is sort of a monday through friday bell curve. sort of a coordinate - do - deliver flow.

thefz• 5 years ago

The Brits have a splendid term for it: "faffing".

brigandish• 5 years ago

Some people pfaff, some people skive.

srtjstjsj4• 5 years ago

That's still work. The surveys are talking about goofing off like we are now.

sharadov• 5 years ago

Which companies? I'll start applying :-)

majewsky• 5 years ago

If anything, this demonstrates how ludicrous the idea of "working/not working" as a binary concept is.

Dirlewanger2• 5 years ago

Especially when you WFH, or at least that's how it's been for me.

I get up pretty early, so I like getting a lot of work done before 9am standup. By then I've usually lost motivation/focus and may work an hour or 2 more. I really get mileage out of the "work always fills the time allotted for it" law.

Half of me can't wait to get back to an office where I'm with others which provides motivation/pressure to work, but the other half does not want to deal with the commute.

lordnacho• 5 years ago

This isn't surprising, because devs have a tendency to focus on the hard bits of coding as being their work. Why not, right? It's probably the most satisfying too, so we forget the bits where we document, explain to colleagues, organize, etc. Don't forget that a lot of "not working" such as browsing a certain orange-and-beige website actually IS work as well: you wouldn't be updated on what's going on in the tech world if you didn't read some new things regularly.

However consider that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do. Typically you'll never find one of those people saying they don't do much. In fact, many of them feel compelled to sit in the office - face time - to look busy. If you were to narrowly define their work like I've done with software devs, many people would end up with maybe a couple of hours a day, mainly reading some docs to decide what their business unit should do.

ianai• 5 years ago

Yes, people should be more like lawyers. Bill for that time you spent in the shower thinking about your clients case.

That reads sarcastic, but in today’s workplace you really need to know the legal framework you’re working within or you’ll probably be fleeced or worse. How lawyers charge actually is instructive.

me_me_me• 5 years ago

I am running out of fingers to count how many times i concluded/fixed a design or a problem while showering.

torstenvl2• 5 years ago

Billing time is the absolute worst thing about types of legal practice you're talking about, and absolutely nobody should adopt anything about that system. Economic pressures eventually force granularity of a tenth of an hour. There are no circumstances under which I would ever willingly return to anxiety over whether a bathroom break might take longer than three minutes.

robjan• 5 years ago

I was once forced to do that by a client and the result was having to bill additional time for logging and investigating what everyone on the team was doing. It probably added an additional 10% to the billed hours for engagement management.

Demonsult• 5 years ago

I had a lawyers suggest I drive him to court. This turned out to be a trick so he could "justify" billing me for the commute time. It was like Uber, except the driver pays the passenger $500.

jksmith2• 5 years ago

A buddy of mine just leaned out that whole issue and just charges by the day.

paulcole2• 5 years ago

that there's entire classes of people who never do anything as satisfying as coding during their day. All they do is communicate in some way: making powerpoints, schmoozing with customers over lunch, sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do

As someone who finds coding completely unsatisfying and who instead chose to have a career sitting in meetings to discuss what the business should do, I find this pretty funny.

I can’t imagine anything being as satisfying as communicating well with another person.

torstenvl2• 5 years ago

Meetings with people who have no visibility on the brass tacks actual work constitute "communicating well"?

srtjstjsj4• 5 years ago

When people say they "aren't working" they are talking about chitchat and watching YouTube, not doing the engineering part of software engineering.

waheoo• 5 years ago

This is a very subjective claim to make.

I regularly catch myself thinking and telling my wife I've had a very unproductive day and didn't work much when I spent the majority of it working through internal memos, email, and otherwise just getting caught up on the company happenings.

It isn't really work. It's squarely in the bullshit side of "bullshit jobs".

I don't really miss label other things like documentation, research, testing or project spiking but those too very regularly get forgotten and don't feel significant to bullet point in my daily standup.

arcturus172• 5 years ago

never do anything as satisfying as coding

What a narrow world view.

There are “schmoozers” who are completely satisfied and coders who dread their work lives...

There are also schmoozers who create value beyond anything many single coders could ever dream of: by raising capital, creating multimillion sales, persuading and inspiring others, etc.

And I say this as someone who switched from a management job to designing and coding because I personally find it much more fulfilling.

LockAndLol2• 5 years ago

You're taking one single phrase out of context and getting bent out of shape.

Just assume the people you're writing to aren't all idiots. If you really think OP meant what you thought, ask them.

jansan2• 5 years ago

I am officially working half time. You know what that means :)

yokaze• 5 years ago

Not sure that I do. I think, there is subtext which may not translate across cultural boundaries. The smiley seems to indicate a joke.

In my experience, working part-time means getting paid only the proportional amount for the benefit of only having to be present for that part, while at the same time having to deliver the same output as the full-time.

jansan2• 5 years ago

It means that I am only doing 1-2 hours actual work per day. That's all, no deeper meaning behind it.

itg• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure I put in about 3-4 hours of real work when I was in office too. If you count meetings, answering emails, and operational work, it is hard to put in a standard 8 hours of real work.

Also, the comment that the Amazon employee made is similar to what I hear across other online forums such as Reddit and Twitter. Seems Amazon has created a really toxic environment for everyone involved.

srtjstjsj4• 5 years ago

Meetings, email, and ops are working.

Playing ping pong and taking 3rd lunch and faffing on HN are not working.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 5 years ago

This sounds about right for focused thinking work. Also probably an average. For me if I'm really in deep on a problem, then I work much more than that as I try and figure it out, including evenings and weekends. But... once its done, that might be followed by some "light" work days.

nxpnsv• 5 years ago

I work more than that, but I don't admit it...

austincheney• 5 years ago

There is less incentive to do work when your output is the same as those who work twice (or many times more) as much. When you watch your coworkers fumble through constant framework and trendy tool bullshit instead of actually solving for the business requirements you really want to do the right thing and bypass the stupidity to deliver actual results back to the business. Doing that, however, often results in retribution, so you just sit there not doing work.

secretsatan• 5 years ago

Meetings can really disrupt my day, I think most devs understand the ramp up it can take to get into a problem, and having meetings spaced out all day can really hit that. But also, does anyone count when you're on home time and it you suddenly have an idea on how to solve a work problem that's was bugging you throughout the day and couldn't find a decent approach, and didn't really write much code.

SMAAART• 5 years ago

Most knowledge workers have about the same amount of productive/active work; the rest is fluff/goofing off/socializing.

xwdv• 5 years ago

So the other two thirds are just lying.

bengale• 5 years ago

I've worked at a few large orgs, 100s sometimes 1000+ developers. If the majority of them did more than an hour or two of work a day I'd be shocked.

daebersold2• 5 years ago

1/3 of tech workers admit to working 3 to 4 hours, while 2/3 of tech workers admit to sucking at tech work. Leaving less than 10% who know what they're doing and working full days doing the real tech work. Just ask any company.

abledon2• 5 years ago

i work with a guy who claims like 15 hours of overtime per week... his total output is prbably like 0.1x what a normal developer does... constantly adds bugs, never squashes his commits (to show extra 'work' being done'...). typicial commits for 1 day of work:

- add 3 docstring for 3 setter functions (max 10 lines each). (1 day)

- fix a codesmell, ~15 character syntax change, whose 'fix' is given freely by the analysis plugins' web app. (1 day)

- change a version number in a file (1 day)

In total I'd say he does maybe .5 hours of work a day...

I'm probably around 4-5 hours, but knowing hes claiming overtime ontop just kills me lol.

daebersold2• 5 years ago

LOL That's awesome! I know these people too! And watch, he's IT Manager next year...

tluyben22• 5 years ago

Including overhead I am well over 12 hours/day but pure coding... Really depends on how many times people disturb me with 'stuff'.

I have worked with many freelancers and worked (as tech consultant) in many big and small businesses; a lot of capable tech people, in my experience, vastly understate the time they actually work. When they are in meetings, all day, they feel they didn't work and report hours accordingly. I have to point out to them regularly that even though they reported 3 hours, I was in meetings with them for 6 (and yes, I find that generally quite pointless so I understand the sentiment), so I think it's closer to 8-9 hours.

axlee• 5 years ago

Including overhead I am well over 12 hours/day

Are you trying to reduce that unsustainable amount?

tluyben22• 5 years ago

I have been doing that for about 30 years so unsustainable I wouldn't say. But yeah, it i would like to work a bit less anyway.

PedroBatista• 5 years ago

Is it me or the article reads as "Not everyone works what they should, look at these slackers.."?

Also I don't know exactly how they measure this, but I have a feeling it might be the time people spend pressing buttons..

yread• 5 years ago

Especially compared to all the "look at these founders working 100h/week" articles

necovek2• 5 years ago

"Self-reported"

toyg3• 5 years ago

It's a publication oriented towards business types. Of course any salaried employee is by definition a slacker to be whipped.

Dirlewanger2• 5 years ago

It's Blind, so this is to be taken with a massive grain of salt. Even though they have a strict registration policy, there's plenty of trolls there.

acdha4• 5 years ago

This is a bad survey, both for questions of selection (busy people don’t do surveys like this) and the nebulous question of what constitutes real work (my guess: this is telling you who has lots of meeting, Jira, etc. overhead).

My real question: is this just clickbait or is this fodder for the kinds of companies which market things like monitoring software to toxic managers? I have memories of working at a consulting shop which tried to entertain the idea that the reason they weren’t profitable wasn’t due to two of the partners cutting deals below estimated costs but rather something like people slacking or not tracking their time precisely enough. Tracking at 5 minute intervals didn’t change the big picture but it did dramatically increase the amount of time spent on time tracking.

toyg3• 5 years ago

is this just clickbait

It's ideological reinforcement for their target audience. Most managers and business types have no idea what their underlings actually do, but they have a suspicion that they are not the lean-mean-money-makin'-machine they (ideally) should be. So business-oriented publications like this pander to their fears and strengthen their resolve to whip slackers into shape.

acdha4• 5 years ago

It’s very appealing because it tells people that the reason they’re not making more is not due to anything they could personally improve at but rather their employees taking advantage of their trust and generosity.

scaramanga2• 5 years ago

This appears absolutely to be clickbait posted for entertainment value.

The actual phrasing of the single question appears to be about "real" or "focussed" work which many people seem to have interpreted as being "not meetings" or "other work I do which I feel is pointless busywork" - certainly how I would interpret it.

zascrash• 5 years ago

As many people pointed out it depends what "working" means. If this is focus mode/deep work, than it's quite a lot. If it means 3 to 4 hours of light work (e-mails, waiting on conferences, chatting with co-workers etc) and the rest is social media and things totally not related to the job then it's a different story.

KaiserPro• 5 years ago

Why else do you think I'm commenting here?

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

And isn't that wonderful? "admit" implies they should feel ashamed?

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 5 years ago

A lot of comments here are to the effect that the things they do when "not working" are actually work of some fashion.

For me, I promise you that is not the case. I've always been a lazy motherfucker. I didn't get into automating things with technology because I liked to work, after all. Over the past 10 years I'd say I did honestly work a full work day when I was my most productive, but my median work day was probably around 3 hours/day. As in, I spent the rest of it reading books in a terminal so it looked like I was doing work, or something similarly useless to my employer.

My employer never complained, and in fact I earned a reputation for being the guy who can get to the bottom of hard problems, deliver the simplest and quickest solution to an immediate need, or reason out and mitigate for all the ways something could go wrong. I would say I was actually good at my job despite not actually working that much. Thus, I am constantly annoyed that my employer is so insistent on butts-in-seats, to the extent that during a global pandemic I've only been working from home during the time I was contagious with the goddamned plague (all of my department caught it thanks to this policy).

Due to my rapidly failing mental health, I'd say I put in a median 3 hours/week of work right now. Still, very few people seem to have noticed and no one has said anything.

username903• 5 years ago

Yeah, same. When I work at corporate I work maybe 2-3 hours a day. When I work on my personal projects I work more than 8 a day. All that time sitting around procrastinating isn't necessary to do the actual work, it is just a waste of time (not for me, I got paid the same as when I put in effort, but for the world).

Edit: And just to clarify, I always got stellar performance reviews, quick promotions and large salary bumps. Corporate just doesn't demand much from you so it is hard to motivate yourself to do the job when nobody else performs well either. This includes Google etc, at least the teams I worked at there.

mobjack• 5 years ago

It is not uncommon in the profession that someone working 3 hours can be more productive than another working 8 hours a day especially in slow pace environments.

Occasionally there is an emergency where you work the full 8 hours being the hero, then it is back to slacking off.

snwcrsh• 5 years ago

Your entire post reads like I could have written it. Made a throwaway just to respond.

As in, I spent the rest of it reading books in a terminal so it looked like I was doing work, or something similarly useless to my employer

What are some of your other favourite things like this? Some:

* Using rtv to browse reddit via CLI

* Browsing RSS feeds and news sites, eg with elinks.

* Learning a totally new programming language / tool / paradigm.

* Roguelikes, eg ATOM, Nethack

* Random IRC chat rooms (meh)

* And as you said, reading books

0x008• 5 years ago

Can we change this clickbait title?

- "working" is not defined clearly so it's possible everybody meant a different thing - "admit" implies some sort of guilt on the developer side.

scaramanga2• 5 years ago

This reminds me very much of an EWD quote:

"My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."

tremon• 5 years ago

To contrast that with my anecdata, I regularly work over 12 hours a day. Of course, not all of that is paid.

As others have said, it all depends on what you call "work".

pietroppeter• 5 years ago

the other 6-7 hours is meetings

thenoblesunfish• 5 years ago

I would be proud to get 3-4 hours of "real" work done a day, and I'd be very happy with any employee that did the same. I think most people in jobs that require some degree of problem-solving would agree.

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

I used to say I coded for only 1 month a year. The other 11 I was debugging, documenting, testing, releasing and supporting.

throw1234651234• 5 years ago

I am pretty envious. I have worked 10 for the past 6 years. I am probably an idiot for doing so.

jjk1663• 5 years ago

Large number of posts here about how people do work when they're not really working that were posted on this social media site during standard working hours.

danielrpa• 5 years ago

Why do we care about how many hours people are working? Good looking people make tens of thousands of dollars for showing up at a party for 1-2 hours. Influencers make thousands for recommending a product in a few minutes.

Tech workers have a valuable and, in the grand scheme of things, rare ability that is immensely useful to Humankind. Perhaps some very talented people can do top quality work for a couple of hours a day, but deliver immense value in these two hours. Is this a reason for concern?

One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 to 4 hours a day

Related Stories