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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.
Yeah, if you are working on your own projects, it's easy to do a sixteen plus hour stretch. Some cola, pizza, and your imagination.
But, if you are implementing someones broken business logic or accounting rules, I'd guess that three to four hours a week is the norm.
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!!
Look, you aren't stealing. You aren't stealing until you're fired and you keep coming to work and forcibly removing money from your employer without their consent. That doesn't happen very often. Whoever says you're stealing by investing your time as you see fit is full of bullshit. You control your productivity and if your employer don't like it, they'll get someone else. It's that simple.
Now that said, I have no problem doing forty hours of sheer coding in a week. Meetings take up a lot of time but in one of my former positions as a lead developer, I did serious coding to make us look really really good. It involved 50-60 hours a week of being there and 30-40 was actually coding to make sprint deadlines. I mean code overnight into the next day with no sleep. And no interruptions! My god, you would not believe the lines of code (note: bad metric) I can put away with no interruptions. That's what headphones are for. Amen to the large DJ sized headphones I have at work. It's a polite do-not-disturb sign to my coworkers.
Coding involves also searching online so you don't re-invent the wheel. Aside from that, your list is good. And yeah, meetings are important for coding. How else do I get my requirements other than directly meeting the customer? That's part of coding unless you're leaving that up to some other guy to get (which is a horrible idea in my opinion).
Anyway, sounds like you're getting the job done and you're not pulling your hair out like I once was. So what's the problem? You may not realize it but you may produce forty hours of normal developer work in those ten hours. I don't know, maybe your code is less buggy than mine? Either way if the paychecks keep rolling in and your employer isn't hold an axe over your head, what's the problem?
My work here is dung.
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
I think it changes with age. When I was quite young, 10 hour a day for days on end wasn't so hard to pull off. Remembering to sleep and shower and brush my teeth were harder. The catch was that a very high percentage of the code I'd write was either pure crap, or could have been done better in less time by writing another program to write that code. As I've gotten older, I've found that it's easier to spend a large number of hours *contemplating* code -- but hard to work other than in smaller bursts actually writing the code. The difference is that when I do write code, the hours are far less wasted.
I've taken this into account and so now my plan is, that when I reach 90, I'll just wake up in the morning and fart. My heavily customized Emacs will analyze the fart and translate it into C. "Oh, boy, I wrote another new OS kernel this morning!"
Well, ok, one of the two above paragraphs is true and not the other.
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
He means actual coding sir. He said not reading specifications, meetings, etc. You know, the majority of the actual work being done in software development? Simple fact is we do little coding when compared to the other aspects of the job. That's why I tell kids coming out of college with CS degrees - get ready to learn, again. Because if they think it's all coding they'll be sorely mistaken. I spend more time trying to work with customers learning the domain and getting what they need out of them then I do actual coding. Meetings are required but sometimes lengthy. Documentation takes little brain power but is also required. Deployments are not very exciting but again, required. QA processes can be tedious too. Etc. I do spend some days coding non-stop from 9am-6pm but that's not typical, that's a spectacular day when it comes around.
That all being said, I do find myself working in a sprinting fashion as the posted does. I'll always be coding when it's time but sometimes you get a burst of speed and intelligence that you might not have every single day and you sprint ahead and make up for the times when you're not so sharp. This cycle goes on and on and it's hard for me to get around it. For instance, I had a burst of inspiration on Sunday and had more productivity in that off day then the entire week previous.
I defy anyone to focus day in and day out for years and maintain absolute focus at maximum productivity. If you can do that then you're a better developer than me and perhaps a robot.
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?
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.
Let me tell you something. Best managers view programmers as black boxes. Work requests go in, work comes out. If work>=schedule, then you have a good programmer and that's that. Doesn't matter if he plays Tetris 39 hours a week. If the project gets done, done right, on schedule - why would you care about anything else?
The worst managers are micro managing nitwits like the one you work for. Seriously, he has a stopwatch and is timing your one single ten minute break? If you take an extra minute or two do you get written up or talked to? Sounds like kindergarten to me. No thanks.
Look around some. You might just find a job that doesn't make you die of hypertension by your 50th birthday. They do exist, you know. You can work, put in good solid days and make good product - and not be treated like a member of a chain gang.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Is it okay for you to hire a gardener for 20 hours of work and have him actually work 10 hours and take a break for 10 hours?
Some people may feel that that analogy doesn't have any bearing cause its not in an IT field. Say, if you decide to hire a web design consultant, would you be okay with paying him out of your own pocket for a 40 hour week if it includes surfing the web, chatting with friends over the phone, taking long lunches etc?
This doesn't mean you need to chain someone down to their job and certainly taking small breaks throughout the day is needed just to mentally refocus, but if you don't feel comfortable paying someone 40 hours for 20 hours of work, why would an employer be okay about it?
Food for thought.
Yeah, it depends entirely on the environment and what you're used to. It's amazing what people will do when they think it's normal.
I used to work 40-50 hr weeks just writing code. Mostly web applications like the op does. All day, no facebook or web browsing, all billable hours with two project managers behind me that just had to look forward to see what I was doing. I had two 10 minute breaks (one morning, one evening) and 30 minutes (iirc) for lunch. I worked in a converted warehouse with no natural light, no windows (to stare out of and waste time daydreaming). You learn to do it because that's what's expected of you and what the people around you do. Now I work IT and program for a different company, and I can hardly fathom how I used to do that... or why.
Fuck that old job and fuck that employer... it wasn't worth it. When I went to leave they offered me another 15k to stay... that's how bad I was being raped all along. Obviously I told them no. I know it wasn't sweatshop labor or anything, I was able to quit and it wasn't particularly hot in there, but reasonably smart people that study and learn a usable skill shouldn't have to live like that. Not in the US.
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.
If you're actually writing code more than 50% of your time you aren't thinking enough to warrant anything beside grunt programmer work. Good solutions require research and thought and if you aren't thinking and just coding, you're writing sub-standard code. That said if you aren't architecting anything, if you aren't actually designing solutions, there's no reason you can't stay on task for 40 hours, plenty of people do.
Personally, I'm of the mindset that good solutions need to percolate. So I'll keep multiple projects going at any given time, and break up the work an any one of them to minimize true down time, and read slashdot during compile/debug cycles. But that's just me.
-- Adam McCormick
This is one of the things I struggle with working from home for myself. With no meetings and nothing to distract me, getting in the "zone" is awesome, but can be a little hazardous.
When I'm that into it, I stop getting hungry or thirsty, I don't get tired. I got to bed at around 6am, because the bright light hurts my eyes and distracts me long enough to think "you know, its 6am, maybe I should go to sleep" even though I'm not the slightest bit tired.
My dreams are all about the tasks I'm programming, but of course, since they're not grounded in reality, any discoveries there are useless.
3 hours later, I'll wake up. I'll spend maybe an hour waking up, eating breakfast, maybe watch an ep of the dailyshow, and than its back to the project.
I did this for 5 days straight once. It's absolutely fun as hell. Challenge after challenge after challenge. Like the best video game you've ever played. Its crazy productive. 3 to 4 months tasks get done in days. And at the time your mind masks all the downsides from you. You never get exhausted or sick of it. You don't realise how much time or days has passed.
But than you snap out of it. Your bones ache because you've barely moved them. Friends have messaged you and called, and you didn't notice. The fact that you've barely gotten any sleep hits you hard. You'll be fine one second, take a step forward and than all bam, all of it hits you at once.
And thats if you're lucky enough to have finished your task. If you've forced your self out of it because of "health concerns", than your mind makes it painfully clear, that you don't actually have as much choice as you thought you did in this matter. Almost as though you're being held hostage, you won't be able to focus on anything else at all. Your mind will constantly come up with new ideas that make you REALLY want to go back and see if it works. If you want to watch a show or play a game, you'll be lucky if you can notice the title. If you try to hang out with friends you'll be distant and distracted. If you try to do anything that requires even the slightest amount of thought, you'll be utterly useless.
And finally, when you're not in the zone its a stuggle. On the one hand, you know that if you could go into the zone all the work you're wasting time on would be blown away. Why should you do any work in this unproductive state when you know you could do it way better and faster when you're in the zone? But at the same time, there's this fear too. I don't want to lose the next 3 or 4 days of my life. Will this next task be the one that sucks me in? If I start this now, will I be able to make it to my appointment tomorrow? And is this strategy even physically healthy?
I haven't really come to terms with it yet. But hopefully one day I'll find the perfect balance :)