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.
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.