Slashdot Mirror
How Many Hours a Week Can You Program?
An anonymous reader writes "How many hours a week should a full-time programmer program? Trying to program anywhere near 40 wears me out. On a good week, I can do 20. Often, it is around 10 or 15. I'm talking about your programming session at the console, typing — including, of course, stopping and thinking for a minute, but not meetings, reading programming books, notes, specifications, etc., which by comparison feel like lunch breaks. I rarely get called to meetings (which is good) but that means to keep my brain from overheating I spend several hours a week surfing the web (usually reading tech news but also a few stops on Facebook, email, etc.). I should add that I am interrupted a few times per day. Me and another guy maintain an intranet site of a couple dozen web apps for an IT department, so we work on a few different things: phone calls, bug fixes, feature adds, as well as writing new web apps from the ground up, all in a day's work. And I know that wears a person out more than if they had just one project to work on. I wonder if programming is like mental sprinting, not walking, so you can only do it in bursts. Am I normal or stealing?"
That's easy! I can do 169, no problem. Of course, I'll be tired and I may make a mistake here and there.
168 hours per week. 191 if you're onboard Air Code One and circling the globe in DEFCON style.
Eight hours a day, five days a week was good enough for illiterate industrial workers doing manual labor when it was invented 150 years ago. I see no reason it shouldn't be a perfect fit for highly educated software engineers in 2010!!
If I can replace you with a program, can I get your salary?
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
/p>yessir, i have no problem wiht a 40 hour weel of html coding and i >i>never,/i. maek a mistake.,
This ain't rocket surgery.
So what if I am ? I have no problem coding circles around people that , oh wait a minute there goes a bunny.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I'm working, really!
Sorry you to hear you get "interrupted a few times per day" while Facebooking. You poor, poor thing.
Have you any idea how difficult it is to harvest your crops in only 30 hours a week?
This job fulfilling in creative way. Such a load of crap.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I replaced Al Gore with a small script program and nobody noticed. I was going to replace Rush Limbaugh but I haven't yet figured out how to push that much spam through a pipe without exceeding my system resources.
If your job is THAT involved I might have to break out something more advanced than Bash.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
haha. Where I work the customer service phone monkeys in the cube farm next to me use the speakerphone. THE GOD DAMN SPEAKERPHONE.
Do you bold text sometimes too...
I do, but I'm very good: keyboard shortcuts, you see...
Oh, and by the way, I'm on my daily 10 minute break. Back to actual work for me. Have a nice 8 hour day doing.....whatever it is you do.
You sound terribly mismanaged, and understandably a little bit bitter about it.
The other possibility is that he's full of it. So he's chained to a computer all day long with just 10 minutes of break, and he decides to spend those 10 minutes surfing slashdot? Yeah.
Slackers.
I generally code for 172 hours a week. (It helps if you constantly travel West at a slow rate. Yeah, every few weeks, you'll lose 23 hours, but that's your vacation time.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Where I work the customer service phone monkeys in the cube farm next to me use the speakerphone. THE GOD DAMN SPEAKERPHONE.
That's inhuman. Strike back! Learn to yodel. Practice at your desk.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
You get cubes? Lucky.
I work in a "Trendy Open European-Style Office". Only one problem: My office is in America, land of the "I can yell like a dooshbag on my fucking bluetooth headset cuz its free country!"
Sigh...My kingdom for a cube.
Are a workaholic. And you can never get enough workahol.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
"We are NOT fish, you insensitive clod!"
-- the dolphins.
You were lucky. I worked for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. I used to have to get to work at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, work fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when I missed deadlines my boss would thrash me his belt.