How Many Hours a Week Can You Program? 547
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Duh (Score:5, Funny)
The 40 hour work week is God given (Score:5, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
i can code htlm all wekk (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nope (Score:2, Funny)
Office space (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
I'm working, really! [xkcd.com]
Re:Enjoy your lazy job while it lasts. (Score:5, Funny)
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.... (Score:5, Funny)
This job fulfilling in creative way. Such a load of crap.
Re:Not a programmer but... (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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... (Score:4, Funny)
Do you bold text sometimes too...
I do, but I'm very good: keyboard shortcuts, you see...
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Funny)
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:Wow. Bitter much? (Score:1, Funny)
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.
Re:168 hours (Score:3, Funny)
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.)
Re:You're Not Like Me Nor Are You Stealing (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:You're Not Like Me Nor Are You Stealing (Score:3, Funny)
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.
You Sir... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Programming (Score:3, Funny)
"We are NOT fish, you insensitive clod!"
-- the dolphins.
Re:Age (Score:3, Funny)