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?"
As long as you're interested in what you program, you can easily do it full work days. However it seems like you're doing the usual code monkey job - these effects are what happens when its not fulfilling or at all interesting. Not in your area of interest and not challenging in the needing-to-think-and-solve-problems way, but just to produce code. That's what it basically comes down to.
A friend of mine gets his job done and still plays computer games and codes his own projects at work a lot. Since he gets his work done, it's not a problem (though he hasn't told this). Another programmer I know spends 30-40 minutes breaks playing Civilization or other games he enjoys and his boss knows this and likes it because after those gaming breaks he has unwind, maybe has think some of the problems and gets really good programming done again. But he works at a software house, attends to meetings and is in other ways involved in the business too.
It's no surprise that so many programmers also go as developers later. You get to solve actual problems and do more interesting stuff. When you were a teen, you didn't just program - you developed and spend time thinking what you did. It's no fun if you leave that part out.
To this day I sometimes catch myself working on some interesting problem at home and putting in 30+ hours over three days when I've got some time off from work, because the problem is interesting and there's no one around to make it uninteresting by coming up with changes halfway through, demanding arbitrary things that have no place in the app and similar stupidity.
But when I'm at work building some glorified CRUDified spreadsheet in WEB_LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE and I can't get two hours of coding in before the specs change or some PHB from another department feels like pointing out that the blue background color is a bit too blue for his tastes or whatever, well I sometimes end up taking a lot of little breaks just to clear my head enough to be able to function at all.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
When I was 20, I would program 8-10 hours a day, then go home and code for 4-6 hours into the night.
Now I get distracted before an hour's coding is up. That's why I moved into management.
The cake is a pie
In the right environment on the right projects with the right team....I could easily design, develop, and test for 40+ hours a week and feel energized. Unfortunately that right environment, project and team is very rare.
Thinking is a physical thing, it requires energy, and can tire you out. If your body isn't in good health, you're not going to be able to concentrate for long periods of time without getting exhausted. If you aren't feeding yourself properly, you aren't going to have enough nutrients to keep your brain going.
Now, being in good physical form doesn't mean being skinny: you can have terrible energy levels even if you are skinny, and you can have amazing levels even if you are fat. That said, the easiest way I've found to increase energy levels are first, to get enough nutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, fruits and vegetables) so your body can rebuild itself, and second, running. If you can run far, you will be able to program 60 hours a week without a problem. If you want inspiration (ie, extra motivation beyond just high energy levels), check out this book (I've no relation to the author, just found it inspiring).
Whether you would want to program 60 hours a week is a different question.
Qxe4
but usually I only GET to about 10-15 hours, and spend the rest of my time dealing with meetings, documentation, etc. Coding is the fun part.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
You said you usually work about 10-15 hours per week. So that means that on some weeks, you fuck off on the internet for 30 hours a week!?! Sorry you to hear you get "interrupted a few times per day" while Facebooking. You poor, poor thing.
We need to get away from this paradigm of "You must work 40 hours a week" to the paradigm of "You must do this, this, and this for me and I will pay you X." Sometimes we work the full 40, sometimes we work more, sometimes we work less -- the important part is delivering to your employer what he wants. Clearly, asker is doing that or he wouldn't be employed.
I subscribe to the "As long as you're not illegally gambling or moonlighting from your desk, and as long as you're getting me what I need and not bothering anyone else, screw around on the Web as much as you want."
>>Also, I find that when you're in the "zone" it's not painful at all. Sounds like you may be working on something you don't enjoy so much? :D
When I'm in the zone writing code, I can easily code for 10 hours straight. However, doing this on a day in, day out basis tends to be wearing from all the focus. When I worked for other people, I found that working about four hours a day when my brain was freshest yielded the best results. Since I was being paid hourly, I wasn't even forced to sit around waiting for five o'clock to roll around. I'd bill four hours and bail out. Got a project that had been budgeted for three years and half a million dollars finished in a summer for (unfortunately) much less money.
UML isn't about programming. It's about documentation for large projects that require division of labour. It's about specifying functionality for communication between business experts and the people who get the work done. It's about getting the big picture without having to pour over the whole picture with a magnifying glass (i.e. reading the source code).
Seriously, I might consider contributing to more open source projects with bug fixes if it didn't involve scanning though megabytes of code first to narrow down the source of the problem.
Something that I think Sourceforge or an equivalent repository system really needs is a tool for reverse/round-trip engineering UML diagrams of the projects it contains (i.e. identifying how/where code restructuring affects UML documentation and supporting the update of that documentation). One reason why nobody has actually tackled this may be that Sourceforge projects may contain various combinations of Java, C++, python, C, PHP, perl, etc and UML really works best with object-oriented languages.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Having worked both union and non-union jobs I can tell you that your generalization of unions is incorrect. A Union is merely a collection of workers. Unions collectively bargain with employers. Yes it means that all members of the Union agree to certain standards, but it does not mean that they are necessarily without any control over their own employment. The Union can bargain for non-salary requirements such as insurance benefits, limits on overtime hours, and safe working environments. Unions can bargain to minimum salaries with out making a stipulation on higher pay negotiated by individuals.
Every time you bargain with, or enter into any agreement, with an employer (accept in very rare circumstances), you are bargaining collectively. The problem is, that with out a union (be it formal or informal) you are not the one with the collective backing you up.
Employers naturally collude to keep expenses low, and that includes salaries. Employees have no such natural collusion as it does not batter to us if our coworkers are underpaid. In many cases people would support their coworkers being underpaid if it meant them getting a slightly larger share because of it.
Unions must exist for capitalism to remain viable. In the past 20 years we have seen the weakening of the power of the established unions, and it may just be a coincidence that this coincides with economic collapse, but I personally doubt the two are unrelated.