I'd be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good/positive?<p>From feedback I've had I'm generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that's off an 8.5 hour day. It's at the point now where it's extremely likely I'll leave software for good.<p>Software to me is extremely mentally demanding and draining, it requires short burts of extreme concentration, but what is more draining is making up the remaining 4-5 hours looking busy. My experience of software work is that it doesn't scale linearly with number of hours. Unless you reach flow which is extremely rare in a business setting (thanks open-office / scrum) you can get the work done very quickly and then have large periods of unproductive time.<p>It's my experience that at most 2-3 hours is productively spent, the rest is wasted.<p>I meet software developers who advocate for, or don't mind, 8, 9, 10 hour days and I simply don't understand it, it's alien to me. Are they being productive all that time?<p>Edit: to clarify (since I've posted on this topic elsewhere today) the 8.5 hours include a 1 hour lunch break and Fridays are slightly shorter.
The interesting thing is that wages have remained stagnant as productivity has increased dramatically. Which means that our labor has been valued less over time. What needs to happen is that the work week shortens while the minimum wage increases in kind. Top execs need to be comfortable making less, as they are the only ones profiting off these productivity increases.
I reduced my time at work to 80% at the beginning of July. Every Friday is my day now. This week I had to switch it up so today is my day off. It's 1pm and I have already worked out, ran some errands that had been bugging me and am now reading this in one of my favorite diners which I for some reason almost never found the time to go to before.<p>If you have the chance and it seems intriguing to you I encourage everyone to try it out. I guess not all workplaces support it in the same way as mine does, but it was possible for me to have a three month trial phase after which I can go back to 100% or decide to continue the 80% for a year. Maybe your workplace would be open for that but you just don't know!<p>Of course it's quite the pay cut, but as a developer with few obligations I can still manage quite well. I feel much more relaxed over all and I enjoy my work more when I'm there. It even subjectively feels like I'm getting more done at work. The weekend feels so much longer and relaxing, because stuff I normally do on the weekend often is already done.<p>One problem for me is that I tend to cram a lot into my Fridays. I feel like I have to use them to their full potential. Then when the weather doesn't work out or something else falls through I'm pretty bummed. But I think that is something that can be improved over time.
I work 60% now. Instead of having two days off each week I've opted to work 4.5h each day. I can only focus intensely for about 4h each day on coding, so this works out well.<p>It's always been this way for me and to get to 8 hours I'd go through the logs each day (important, but not taxing at all and something better left to an intern most of the time) and attend much more meetings (low intensity but 90% of them were completely pointless) as well as take more breaks for stuff like hn.<p>I'd guess that I'm producing about 90% of the value I used to, but putting in way less hours. This isn't a bad deal for my employer, I think.<p>The pay cut kind of sucks, but I'm still making the national median salary because developers are paid so generously.<p>A lot of people opt to take whole days off, when they work less hours, but I find this arrangement works much better for me. It gives me more time for hobbies, friends and family, working out, eating healthy etc in the day-to-day.
Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.<p>The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.<p>Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.<p>-- John Maynard Keynes<p><a href="http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf</a>
Perhaps if we were not handing over most of the productivity gains of society to CEOs, the rest of us would not need to work so many hours. <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/</a>
I think many people would work less if they could afford to. But we're not getting paid for all this extra productivity[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages-have-been-rising-faster-than-productivity-for-decades/#279de59b7342" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages...</a>
Something like 30 hours a week, 4 days a week cant come soon enough.<p>Right now I work 40-45, 5 days a week and it feels like all I do is work and chores.
Cost of living increases almost every year. Value of money decreases somewhat from inflation. Worker salaries have not been increasing on pace with inflation, much less cost of living increases, since oh... the Reagan years.<p>What has increased dramatically since the Reagan years is executive pay and wealth of top 1%. What has also increased is consumer debt, particularly during the Clinton years. At the same time that consumer debt was increasing, interest rates (for consumers, not the prime rate) were climbing quickly to their legal limits. Also, those legal limits were occasionally being increased.<p>Yes consumers are consuming more stuff, and yes most of that extra consumption is rather wasteful and provides decreasing benefit in terms of quality of life or happiness. But the rate of some consumption is going down. Modern computers, TVs, and even mobile phones now can do so much more than most users need that there is less and less reason to upgrade frequently. Buying a new car every couple of years is a great way to waste money. But generally speaking, "the people" aren't living larger than they did 20-30 years ago.<p>There's very little doubt that the vast majority of the value of the increased productivity output has gone to the top 1%. That's factually visible even without exposing the many sources of hidden offshore wealth that is sometimes estimated to be multiple times larger than the known wealth.
People aren’t motivated because work is an endless treadmill. Financial independence a roll of the loaded startup dice.<p>The British model of a financialised economy doesn’t work for the many. Just the rich, like YC VCs.<p>All the questioning “how do you stay motivated “. By retaining your surplus value.
The number of times this topic has come up on HN recently is really surprising. It seems 1 or 2 posts on this topic hit the front page just about every day. I run a newsletter and job board called 30 Hour Jobs [1] – I started the project about 6 months ago and it seems like my timing couldn't have been any better.<p>Usually, I try not to shamelessly plug my own projects too often but I can't help but share it in the comments when the topic is so relevant!<p>[1] <a href="https://30hourjobs.com" rel="nofollow">https://30hourjobs.com</a>
Unfortunately, the mid-noughts vintage of this page is showing. After about 2010, productivity growth has not kept up with the page's 1.7% estimate (<a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=oGgn" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=oGgn</a>).<p>Also, this page neglects the influence of heterogeneous productivity changes. Some fields don't experience the same kind of productivity growth that we've seen in manufacturing (and services aided by technology); for example a doctor now is not seeing four times as many patients as a doctor in 1940. A barber now is not cutting the hair of four people at once.<p>You can't productivity-gain your way out of the costs of dedicated attention from individuals.
> The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week.<p>The logical conclusion from this seems to me to be "productivity doesn't mean anything". If we all have four times as much stuff as in 1950 (rather than working fewer hours) then where is it? Obviously there have been a lot of amazing technological developments since the fifties but most of them aren't that expensive: if you sold your computer/phone/etc. you wouldn't be four times richer.
My work/life balance has changed a lot in the last 5 or so years. I've done all of the above (in chronological order):<p>FTE 100% in the office
FTE 100% remote (same company, living in the same city)
FT Contract on-site plus consulting
FT Contract on-site minus consulting
FTE 100% remote (HQ 4-5 hour drive away, quarterly-ish visits)
FTE 100% on-site
FTE* "wherever" plus 10-15 hours/wk consulting<p>Right now I'm a FTE at one place where I probably _actually_ spend about 35 hours/week working and then I am on monthly retainer for my old employer (through my consulting corp).<p>I wake up before 6 most mornings and either put in a few consulting hours or go do crossfit. Then 9-noonish I try and be productive at my full-time job. I usually a long lunch/run errands after that, and then a couple more hours for the full-time job in the afternoon. I'm usually done working by 4:30 or 5pm and then it's time to either cook or go to the in-laws or order food depending on how I feel (I'm the cook and we're a family of 6).<p>I have found the variety of doing multiple jobs keeps me much more productive in general, because I can basically work on what I want whenever I'm motivated to. The end of the month/sprint can be rough sometimes if I have procrastinated (or just not felt motivated at one job or the other), but every month when I get a check in the mail I feel freshly motivated haha.
Someone wrote here about whether 3 hours or so out of 8 being productive "is not just peculiar to software work.<p>There's an old post from a photographer blogger and funny guy if somewhat controversial [1]:<p>> The Two-Hour Rule is a law of American business which states that "no salaried employee, employed by a business to work in an office, may exceed two hours of actual work in any business day."<p>> The Two-Hour Rule does not apply to government workers (police, fire, military, libraries, public works, etc.), independent contractors, services billed hourly or apply outside the USA. I'll cover these at the end. The Two-Hour Rule applies to people working at government subcontractors because they are businesses.<p>> The Two-Hour Rule was created to ensure that American business thrived on efficiency, not on dumb hard work, so that Americans could enjoy the lives they had earned."<p><a href="https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.kenrockwell.com/business/two-hour-rule.htm</a><p>[1] Naive amateurs with religious feels about photography and its "rules" tend to hate him, for such advice as "just shoot JPEG" (as if shooting RAW, and squeezing that extra quality is not a tradeoff of file size/storage/post processing, but a holy duty of everyone who photographs, even if it's just BS family/travel/pet pics nobody would ever really care about - not even the family/pet).
It's a little odd that the link doesn't mention that average working hours has in fact gone down over time in the United States, from 1989 hours over a year in 1950 to 1,757 hours in 2017[0]. That's a decrease of roughly 12%. Not <i>as</i> much as if all of productivity increases had gone into increasing leisure, but I'm not sure you'd expect that to have happened.<p>This trend seems fairly robust across countries and extending even further back in time. The average work week in the USA was 62 hours in 1870, and was 40.25 hours in 2000, a decline of 29% [1].<p>My suspicion is that this actually understates the increase in leisure time, as many household chores are presumably easier due to modern tech.<p>[0]: <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#the-decline-of-working-hours-per-year-after-the-industrial-revolution" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#the-decline-of-work...</a>
I want to note that there's something that has been rarely mentioned in these threads and I wonder why: longer education time (and earlier retirement).<p>On my parents generation a small percentage of people went to university, and on my grandparents generation most people started working on their early teens (post-war, I'm from Spain). In contrast, today having an undergraduate degree is very common, and a master or even doctorate is no rare. This makes a 10-15 year difference of no-work time to our lives, which is ~1/4th of our work lives. Where before we were expected to work from 16 to 66 years old (~50 years), now we are expected to work from 22 years old to 62 years old (40 years).<p>Only this is a reduction of work by 20%, or a full work day.<p>To add on top of that, our life expectancy has been increasing in all developed countries (except, USA). While this does not take away work time, it does add leisure time to our lives.<p>To be clear, I agree with the article and sentiment here and we should be working shorter weeks. Only wanted to note this since many people seem to ignore it when discussing work week.
Tech actually seems really optimal for this.<p>I get assigned a 8 hour task. I spend 4 hours trying to get it done in 4 hours. The next time I get the same task, it takes 4 hours. I can optimize it even further if it happens a lot, get it done in 10 minutes.<p>I can 'siphon off' time this way, lowering estimates a little, cutting time spent by a lot, then basically reinvesting the saved time into rest or productivity. The other day we had a meeting; I got all the work done before the meeting ended then waited an hour before showing the result.<p>There are lots of tricks, like figuring out keyboard shortcuts, IDE plugins, or simply refactoring staging/production builds into a single button. It's surprising how much mental effort and time a shortcut like CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + F saves.<p>The long term goal is to be so productive that I can probably negotiate a shorter work week or more vacation days instead of a raise, as I already get paid a comfortable amount.
“Productivity” means something very different for assembly line workers than it does for retail workers. As productivity has improved over time, we actually have seen the expected reduction of hours, but it varies by occupation. A much smaller number of people work in manufacturing now, while the ranks of retail and white collar workers have grown. People are moving towards occupations where “productivity” is harder to gauge and not necessarily the most important metric at all times. The increase in productivity in some sectors and the migration of workers to new sectors are broadly related, too, since the former requires technological advance, which is the result of cognitive work and creates more need for white collar and cognitive work.
We should be having official 4 hour workdays. State mandated.<p>We can only do about four hours of solid work. There’s really no tricks to productivity. Just trying to mask fatigue, I suppose.<p>But me? I don’t do any real work until after lunch. Maybe a meeting, to manage my managers, of course.<p>I learned this just in recent years tho. Before that, I was as neurotic as anyone.
Sure, productivity is rising. But how much are healthcare and education costs rising? And how does that compare to this rise in productivity?<p>Until those two pieces get solved, productivity gains don't matter since everyone needs to produce/earn more to just get those basic needs fulfilled.
Do you know why work is so much more productive? Because so much is automated away, and relies on machines. Each and every worker works using lots of machines. Of course, the more machines you can make work the more productivity you have.<p>When a large part of your work can't be delegated to machines, for instance nursing a baby, talking to people face to face, etc (mostly "human relations" things) then your productivity can't augment as much. This is also why "human work" earns less than "things work".<p>Do you know what machines use to work? Energy. In the end, energy availability is the ultimate constraint. Good old thermodynamics. Why can't anything grow forever (and surely not GDP)? because of available energy, and thermodynamics.
I do a three day week with a corresponding pay cut. Incidentally, this puts me in the same position, time-wise, as women returning from maternity leave, so the shorter hours don't mark me out particularly. My co-workers are fine with it, and if a surge is needed, I can work longer weeks and accrue Time Off In Lieu. There is no way that I would go back to a routine five day week.<p>I'm doing this to prep for the more significant transition of fully retiring, so that I don't hit the cliff edge of going from full-time to nothing. Stopping work is still going to be a bit of a shock, but I genuinely feel part-time working is helping me to prepare for inevitable retirement.
Interestingly we did a survey such as this on our massive danish government and it turns out that since the 1950s there has been a 0% productivity increase, the wages have however followed increases in the private sector.
As a good tip, in order to keep my workweek short, I try not to work on Wednesday and Friday, and of course, on the week end.<p>This means I try to work 3 days a week only. I usually can do it pretty much easily.
Let's reduce economics to its barest rudiments: I'm pretty sure a worker could buy a house and support a family in 1950 on a single, average 40 hour a week salary; this was probably also true even as late as 1970. How many workers in the modern economy can buy a house and support a family on 1/4 of a 40 hour a week salary?<p>Those "productivity" numbers are obviously cooking the books bullshit. Either that or they're not measuring the right things. If the bare rudiments; food, housing, family creation cost the same or more, but we claim productivity has increased because ... I dunno we can sit on our fat asses and watch netflix instead of going to a movie theater: that's not measuring the right things.<p>Edit add: even assuming all the productivity gains have only benefitted, say, the top 10%, you'd see more people who could buy a house and make a family working 10 hours a week.