I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I’m honest I’m probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.
8 hours of nominal work does equal about 3-4 hours of actual focused work. This is completely normal don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Humans need to eat, go to toilet, socialize with their coworkers, relax the brain, move if constantly in the same position.
Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
I’m not (maybe an hour at most because I just started my job/training as software engineer), but long meetings are way more tiring than sitting there and coding. And coding while needing to listen to a meeting is even more exhausting.
Coding is something you can do for longer stretches as you get better at it. I struggle with 3 or 4 hours straight out of college. Now I run 7 hours no problem.
The dichotomy is that the more proficient you are at coding, the more meetings you need to be in to give engineering input… So the less time you spend coding. As a staff SWE I’m rarely able to get more than 3 or 4 hours straight to sit and code. Rather it’s an hour here or there broken up my meetings.
I relish my no-meeting days to sit and actually get concepts out into code.
I’m spent at the end of 7 hours coding though. I’ve crunched to 14 before… But the code I wrote was shit for 5 of those hours.
My company started prioritizing developer time by heavily discouraging meetings with devs before noon, and one day a week is supposed to be meeting free. We also just don’t respond to pings before noon now unless it’s an absolute emergency. Took managers a bit to catch on, but my efficiency has honestly skyrocketed and I’m loving it.
Yeah we do no-meeting Thursdays.
Problem is when SLT decides they want a demo of progress and see all this “free time” called focus time on our calendars and stick a 30m meeting about 1 hr before lunch.
Mark it as busy in the calendar, that might keep them away. If marking the whole day is suspicious, make 1-2 hour marks with 10-20 minute gaps (or longer as long as it doesn’t allow sticking a meeting in). Then make these “appointments” weekly and set the subjects(focus time) to private.
I’m not even allowed to work more than 10h a day so I’m not even able to crunch 14h except they are personal projects
It’s vanishingly rare that I need to do that but if something breaks or an emergency happens I’m senior enough that I need to step up.
I get time off in recompense. Usually an entire day once the 14hr crisis has passed.
If my time would be better spent coding than being in the meeting I just decline. It depends on the culture of the org though if that kind of approach is ok or not.
Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
This is so important. I know so many people that complain about people being “in meetings all day instead of working” or manager expectations are to be doing a bunch of stuff, but your calendar is absolutely packed with dumb meetings. Meetings are work, so if other work needs to be done then I need to be allowed to take that time.
And no, multitasking isn’t real. If I’m doing other stuff during the meeting then I’m not actually paying full attention to either the meeting or the other work.
8 hours of nominal work does equal about 3-4 hours of actual focused work. This is completely normal don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Fuck you.
Sincerely, Blue collar workers
It fluctuates based on workload, but I find myself working anywhere from 4-5 hours a day to basically nonstop during my workday (9 hrs). I do think most people are really only capable of doing “good” work, meaning being at their most productive, for about 3 hours a day though. The rest of the time is spent slogging through and putting out mediocre work, just to get it done.
The same for me (but 8 hour workday). Honestly, I couldn’t do the job if the working non-stop days were the default. I am wasted after such a high-stress day, so I need it to fluctuate. I also don’t feel bad on days where I do less, because I know I do a 110% on the other days. A workday is simply too long to be productive the whole time and the workload usually varies.
Straight answer up front: sometimes my entire ten hour shift has less than 10 minutes of work in it.
I must confess, my job is a bit of an edge case because not everybody wants to do it.
I work third shift, and usually exclusively the weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights, 11pm to 9am).
4 ten-hour shifts.
and during these shifts… bruh most of the time I’m chilling
I’m reading ebooks, I’m watching anime or youtube, I’m chatting with friends on discord
most of my job is having a pulse while babysitting an empty building.
the part of my job that makes the money, though, is when the phone rings.
I work at a towing company, and I dispatch.
When people are calling me, it’s almost exclusively because shit’s fucked up.
I am in charge of sending some unfuckery their way.Most of the calls are from companies though: Motor freight lines like Ryder, Penske, Fleetnet, UPS, FedEx, and a few other carriers that are even less customer-facing; motor clubs like Swoop, Urgent.ly, AAA, NationSafe; or insurance companies like Allstate or GEICO.
What they want to hear is how soon and how much and knowing how to rapidly generate this information while remaining accurate is where most of the expertise lies.
Then there’s the police calls.
When there has been an accident and a disabled vehicle (and its pieces) must be removed from obstructing the roadway, that’s us.
When some dumb bastard drives drunk and subsequently gets rightly caught, we impound their shit.
When a stolen vehicle is found, we recover it.Whilst my opinion regarding cops (pigs) has evolved (fuck the police) quite a bit (they’re fucking bastards) in recent years (every last one of them), my guys do the NOT Standing On Someone’s Neck bits of it AFTER the dust has settled and the blood is done being spilled (and the bullets have stopped flying…) so generally we’re one of the responders on the make-someone’s-life-LESS-horrible side of the curve. Which feels pretty nice.
There are the rare occasions where a major shitshow evolves and I’m triaging calls and coordinating multiple assets in the field though, and that’s when the pay really feels worth it.
Presently I’m 5 years in and making 20/hr
Literally at this very second, it’s a wednesday night/thursday morning and I’ve already DONE my 40 hours this week - I’m here on overtime covering the other third shift dispatcher while they’re out, and each of these hours is worth $$$THIRTY BUCKS HELL YEAAAA$$$
it’s not enough to afford rent nowadays of course, but eh, i inherited the house from my father…
(and want to transform it into a group home for low income persons and families if I can get it organized right)
(i’ll be taking a page from history and trying to turn my house into something like a multigenerational compound except for people who aren’t strictly related by blood)Multigenerational housing for the win! Also, neat job, congrats!
Doesn’t working overnight have ramifications?
for most people it does. For me, while they may exist outside of my awareness, I am nevertheless unaware of them. What health issues I had been experiencing came about as a result of other major life circumstances, and i’ve seen some pivotal improvements since some of those circumstances have been amended.
I always was a natural night-owl. I’m always more alert at night, and get eepy sweepy after the sun comes up, so it suits my proclivities perfectly.
I’ve been at it for five years already, so, if it’s a chronic issue, guess I’ll find out after another 20 years of it!
Same, as a programmer I would guess 2-3h at most. I mean actual coding with that, meetings and discussions take up the rest of the day.
Meetings and discussions are work
We found a manager.
The dude is right though. The most important part of being a programmer is designing an elegant solution. That requires talking the problem through, solliciting feedback, getting ideas… you meeting with ppl and talking to them.
The second most important part of being a programmer is realizing that you’re not doing this alone. Once again, you talking to colleagues to discuss what they can expect and when, likewise what you need and when.
Meetings are super important. Unless your a code monkey or if it’s office gossip or me having to spend an hour explaining why a job estimated to take 4 weeks will not be done next Friday. And no, “trying a little harder” or “realizing how important this to the client” isn’t going to change that.
They CAN be work. They frequently are an impediment.
For me, 2 hours of meetings, 1 hour of actual work.
Meetings are so draining, we should get rid of them.
I work in an office 40 hours a week 8 hours a day Monday to Friday. Let me clarify, though.
No matter who asks that’s my answer and that’s how I expect to be paid for my time. There are days where I don’t have as many tasks to do and maybe I don’t have something to do here and there but during my scheduled time I’m always available if something comes up. If I’m making myself available that’s still working. If I can’t just leave work or just ignore things on my to do list then I’m working. I think more people need to think of it this way. Just because you’re not actively working on a task every second of working hours doesn’t mean you’re not working.
Edit: just wanted to add that working on your skills especially with something related to your job that doesn’t necessarily complete a task for work also counts as time worked in my eyes as well as my boss. I’m very open about training time and always keeping on top of my craft. Not sure if this is normal but it ought to be.
The other point of view is that we should work like 2 or 3 days in a week, or better, something like 20h, with no overload of work and no lower pay.
Maybe your work requires you to be available, but when some people spend hours on pause or chatting on the phone they are not available.
Developing strategies to avoid boredom and keep your wages because we are enslaved 40h per week should not be something we have to fight for. But I admit the situation may be very different depending on where you live. One fight at a time.
I completely agree. It’s definitely a slow battle. I’m just happy that my situation at work is as good as it is. I still think in general I’m under paid and I would also like to work less days in a week but I think it’ll be a long time before that’s the norm. If it ever happens. The least I and everyone else can do is to set realistic expectations and boundaries.
My last job was very bad at this. They were horrible with working around people’s schedules and getting days off was very difficult. My current job is the complete opposite. To be fair I got really lucky but I also think it shows work life balance is becoming more important to employees and in turn employers have to respect it or people won’t work for them. To give some context my current job allows me to request time off up to 24 hours before my normal schedule WITHOUT any type of approval. I can work around my schedule in almost any way I’d like and I can call off sick without needing to give a reason let alone provide a doctor’s note. This is how it should be for all jobs but I think we’re a long way from that.
I’ve had (no shit) a week or 2 go by where I’ve worked maybe a few hours.
I am on call quite frequently and when things do come in I’m on it immediately, but a lot of the time I am just trying to find things to do. I’ve even asked to be given more work and I’m trying to get into development during my downtime.
I think I’m an outlier though. My role is to maintain a particular service and when nothing is broken, I’m stuck with nothing to do.
After years of hard work, shitty work, long hours, working 2 jobs, graveyard shifts and long commutes… it’s kinda nice to have a break.
Some people actually get tired of being in your situation, which is something I’ll never understand. This timeframe me and a colleague were between projects and only had “on call” tasks left because we simply ended our entire workload way earlier than other required integrations (they were slow, not us who were fast, and we couldn’t move forward with anything beyond what was on spec there) was the best of all time. Three weeks of 4 hours of coding total, and the rest spent on just meetings. I actually left the office after the morning sync a few of the days with my lead’s blessing (so long as didn’t tell others).
I used to make 80k in a career I hated working 55 hours a week (salary). I now make 50-75k (lots of OT available) working about 20 hours a week and watching Kodi/listening to audiobooks the rest of the time. I feel like I definitely upgraded.
Just curious about what your former job was and what your current job is
I was in corporate middle management and now I am a plant operator at a water treatment facility. I also had a crap 401k after 15 years of max contribs at the last job whereas now I’ll retire with a decent pension.
About 7.5 hours out of an 8 hour shift. I work a job where I am physically actually working the entire day except for my breaks. I work in healthcare.
Sometimes I wish I had an office job because I hear things like this and sometimes get a bit jealous. But I am still satisfied with my job and I feel that I am compensated well.
I have an office job and I work 8 hours a day programming. It’s nice to be able to clock out consistently at 5 but I really don’t get much down time. I rarely get my full hour for lunch.
It’s not bad work and I like my job but working 3 hours would get you fired here.
Yeah my brother also has an office job and seems to work for the majority of his shift too. He works in finance. I guess it’s dependent on what sort of office job you have then. I hope you are compensated well.
I’m compensated extremely well. 0 complaints.
It depends on how “efficient” the company is (ie how much work they can squeeze out per person).
If I was paid less I’d definitely work slower.
I have no idea how you can do that consistently for 8 hours straight and not burn out
Idk man. Maybe not many office jobs are that way, but there are many other types of jobs that have always been that you work for the duration of your shift. Factory work, many healthcare jobs, restaurant work, etc.
Those jobs don’t use as much of your brain as software dev. Software development isn’t meant to be a factory worker’s grind, it’s meant to be about thinking of the right way to implement something and then seeing it through.
Look I’ve done both factory work and programming and those same points in your brain that you use for programming are tickled when the very complicated machine your running malfunctions or breaks down and needs to be fixed immediately
I’m not sure you could be more condescending if you tried.
It’s not condescending. Some jobs are about using your brain, some are about using your body. Some are about both. Software dev is not about both.
Yes, it is condescending as you belittle the ‘brain’ role for the aforementioned jobs in retail, hospitality, healthcare, etcetera.
I mean, my healthcare job involves a lot of mental problem solving depending on the caseload I have that day.
Those jobs don’t use as much of your brain as software dev.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, dude
I make good money and just really, really like building things in code.
I’m the son of a programmer who is the son of a programmer…
At the end of the day I’m often tired but not burnt.
Office jobs also vary greatly. I work an office job and yesterday I worked about 12 hours with a 1-hour break to drive from one office to another. I typically work through lunch and still find myself overwhelmed with too much to do.
But the one hour “break” isn’t really a break. It’s traveling time
Yep, and that’s how I log it in my hours, too.
On a personal level, I just find driving very relaxing because it’s one of the few times I feel like I can just be alone, so it always feels good having to drive somewhere for work knowing I’m just running the clock (which…I usually end up exceeding anyways…)
Personally I find driving exhausting. Especially in a car and in a city.
Curious what field exactly, from rotations in residency and previous experience it seems to vary wildly.
The ED is non-stop action, sometimes more work than you should reasonably be doing probably. But in regular wards it seems that I had my work done about 3-4 hours into the shift most days and then I was just sitting around waiting for an admission or some results back.
Similar experience doing nursing in neuro before I got my MD, of the 24h hours I would reasonably work like 1/3 of that and most of the rest was downtime, usually I would sleep through most of the night too.
I’m not a physician. I work in the laboratory grossing surgical specimens. Our work never stops. There are almost always cases to complete, except for some rare days where there is a lull in cases before the end of my shift (typically the night before certain holidays if they stop doing surgeries…or sometimes a bunch of surgeons will take their vacations at the same time lol). This does also mean that I get to have standard holidays off, unlike a field like nursing or any role in the ER.
It varies, though. Some labs are very slow where you actually do get a fair amount of downtime and some are even busier and more bustling than mine. I’d say we are a fairly busy lab, but we don’t generally get ultra complex surgical resections like hospitals even larger than mine do. We still do get large cases, just not things like pieces of people’s faces, etc.
It’s an interesting field.
You mention that you had a lot of down time in nursing, but I’d say I depends on the field and facility with that too. My mom is a nurse and has had nursing jobs similar to how you described. She said she would get a lot more downtime when she worked in large hospital settings and worked overnight. Usually overnights seemed to be the quietest. But then she was worked other types of facilities where she really hardly has time to sit down and take much of a break.
Even at my hospital, some of our pathologists will manage to fly through their cases and head out early (our director manages to make it so he always has a lighter caseload than the rest lol)…while others are always working late into the night working on additional duties like tumor boards.
So ymmv depending on what role and what type of facility you’re at yeah.
Even though I work all day, I think I have a good work-life balance and really enjoy being at work with my coworkers.
lately between 9 and 11. it is often quite miserable, and it is an absolute tragedy that ‘reduced hours’ hasn’t seemed to be a goal of unions in ages.
Theoretically unions are unionized workers who represent all workers. So they should do surveys from time to time about what the current concerns of the workers are.
At least thats how it works in Switzerland.
When I used to work in the office I probably worked about 5 hours a day at most. The rest was spent on personal projects, fucking around, whatever
Now that I work from home it varies between two and four.
My production is exactly the same.
Same, I honestly spend most of my days in my home lab working on personal stuff and then grind out work when I need to. My production is still higher than all my immediate team mates and my boss consistently praises my efforts. I have pretty bad ADHD so this sporadic burst working is what works best for me. That being said i’m on call support so of course if a call comes in that gets responded to immediately as I am never out of earshot of my work PC and phone during work hours even though I may be actually on my personal PC.
Recently I took over a project two people have been working on and have just done it myself, the timeline for completion has also moved up a month with just me doing it. My co workers aren’t lazy, I just find that I know how to batch things together efficently and kill a flock with a boulder so to speak. Frankly my brain inscentivizes me finishing stuff fast.
This is what middle managers and c suite at my company that miss lording over cubicles don’t get, I am literally more efficient at home in my own environment without distractions, but also contrary to their beliefs I am not shut off from collaboration. I always answer calls and constantly run training sessions for our new hires and my co workers on my methods. This is all a bullshit way to get us back under their thumb.
IT in a building with less than 100 computers. If nothing is broken, I have nothing to. I have gone up to a week without anyone having anything to do other than create a few new accounts. 10/10 get paid to show up and know where the stash of new mice are.
Sometimes the job is just to be there, and to be the guy that knows what to do when things go wrong.
It’s not like firefighters are just running from one fire to the next.
A big part of my job is administrating a herd of VMs, license and relay servers, SQL servers, web apps and android devices. If I have nothing to do, then it means Im doing my job properly. I do try to spend at least half my free time developing work-adjacent skills from online resources and bantering with chatgpt, tho.
I do try to spend at least half my free time developing work-adjacent skills
Is Factorio a work related skill?
definitely
the factory must grow
Nice try Mr Manager! I’m not falling for that! Nice effort though, making an account on the threadiverse just to catch me out!
I of course totally work every hour of those 40 hours a week… .
Damn it. I was targeting you specifically because I notice you using Lemmy instead of working. That’s when I decided to make a lemmy account and write hundreds of comments. Of cause they’re all written with ChatGPT. Who in their right mind would write over 500 comments in less than 2 months?
It was all a setup to ask this final question and expose you. You just destroyed months of work within a few minutes
You need to wake up earlier in the morning to catch me! :P
nice try boss
I, too, am 100% productive at all times. Even when I’m not on the clock.
The whole 8 hour shift. Customer service, so the work is never over.
I worked cs for Dish Network and some days the downtime between calls wouldn’t even reach one second. Sometimes the system would glitch and give us two calls at once, that was fun
I take two chats at once most of the time. It’s brutal, all day. There is no space. Having only one chat for a short time is the break.
Mostly less than 30 min per day. Then every few months 10h per day.
Found the sysadmin
