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?"

Comments

that's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy! I can do 169, no problem. Of course, I'll be tired and I may make a mistake here and there.

Duh

[xerent_sweden]

168 hours per week. 191 if you're onboard Air Code One and circling the globe in DEFCON style.

The 40 hour work week is God given

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!

Re:Not a programmer but...

[CorporateSuit]

If I can replace you with a program, can I get your salary?

i can code htlm all wekk

[gyrogeerloose]

/p>yessir, i have no problem wiht a 40 hour weel of html coding and i >i>never,/i. maek a mistake.,

Office space

[jimbolauski]

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.

Obligatory XKCD

[Somebody Is Using My]

I'm working, really!

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[JWSmythe]

I've been caught surfing several times, and had to bring the windows that are compiling to the front and simply say "Look. Compiling. Can't do anything else right now.". I was actually asked to compile less and work more. hrm. Now I just work on the spreadsheet analyzing my pay, and start asking questions about inconsistencies in the checks. "Why is there a 10% difference between what I've worked, and what you've paid me for? Should I just go home until you've figured out your mistake?"

    They really shouldn't have made me find more work related items to do, and I wouldn't have found their accounting errors in payroll. A little here and there isn't all that noticeable until you go and do an audit of it. It may be uglier if I go get the rest of the numbers from accounting and compare it to the P&L sheets. Sometimes they forget, sysadmins and programmers can frequently do math better than accountants, because we can write a program to do it for us, and I use floating point numbers, rather than rounding everything. :) Sorry, your rounding doesn't work as accurately as you'd like.

    Too bad I can't cut checks, or I'd have it sending all the $0.00[1-9] to my own check. Whee, I made $50k extra this week. :)

Re:Enjoy your lazy job while it lasts.

[spintriae]

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?

Code Monkey get up. Get coffee....

[Itninja]

....its not fulfilling or at all interesting

This job fulfilling in creative way. Such a load of crap.

Re:Not a programmer but...

[MikeFM]

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.

Re:You're Not Like Me Nor Are You Stealing

[Nadaka]

haha. Where I work the customer service phone monkeys in the cube farm next to me use the speakerphone. THE GOD DAMN SPEAKERPHONE.

Re:Not a programmer but...

[rwade]

Do you bold text sometimes too...

I do, but I'm very good: keyboard shortcuts, you see...

Re:You're Not Like Me Nor Are You Stealing

[flanders123]

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.