As founder: about 12 hours, I take about 4 hours total breaks in the day to swim and often an hour or two nap in the middle, nap required because two 6 hour chunks is quite strenuous<p>This is not rigorously followed - sometimes 3 hours then an hour break then 3, sometimes 6,<p>I eat when I’m hungry and I sleep when I’m tired, I don’t have fixed meals or fixed schedules<p>First ~6 hours normally admin, emails, proposals, reseller support, mentoring juniors<p>Next ~6 hours is 100% coding<p>Work from home so no commute, nothing else to waste time on<p>Work 6 days a week, Sunday’s reserved for rest, reading and research
I'm semi retired so not that much, certainly nothing like I used to work.<p>When I was a kernel engineer at Sun, there were stretches where I worked around 14 hours per "day". "day" had a different definition for me, I worked on about a 34 hour "day". Which meant that my day time hours were constantly shifting. A coworker put a clock on my door that said "where's larry?" and it showed when I'd be in next. I think it was a joke but some people said they liked it.<p>The reason I did this was I would be working on stuff where it could take ~8 hours just to regain the state I had in my head when I stopped working the previous day. So if I did 8 hour days I'd never make any forward progress. So you do 8 hours to page in the state and then you go as far as you can go to move things forward.<p>I didn't have much of a social life back then but I didn't care, I was getting stuff done at Sun and loved it. It was a super productive time of my life.
I come from a factory background where it wasn't uncommon to spend the entire 8-12 hours working at the fastest safe pace I could. After a year of developing, I still spend almost no time on water-cooler talk and web browsing, the only things that are clearly not work. I don't see anybody else wasting time like that either. I wonder if the 'barely four hours a day' people would not count stuff like editing a wiki, investigtating a log, and so forth.<p>My job isn't 100% programming by any stretch. But when I do have programming, I spend 8 hours straight. It doesn't seem to make me very productive, but I do spend it all hard at work.
Rescue Time puts it at about 2.5 hours/day of programming time.<p>The max I've ever pushed for and recorded was 250 minutes. Even that left me too exhausted to drive back home.
4 hours total of pure undeniable work throughout the whole day (so wake up to sleep). K. Anders Ericsson, a professor on the study of “expertise”, notes that the best violinists in the world top out at 4 hours of practice. So I don’t feel guilty after 4 hours.<p>Another thing Ericcson noticed, the violinist who practice the most and are the best take midday naps.
Contractor, currently with a large ag company, remote. I work 1 or two hours out of 8. The rest spent waiting for their antique tool chain to get stuff done. Read a butt-ton of HN the last month.<p>Previous contracts - I worked an hour for every hour I billed, moving their project forward. Usually 5 or 6 hours a day. The rest spent working on more contracts etc.
As a research scientist:<p>~7 hours (after breaks), of which only 3h are programming.<p>The rest is organizational stuff like meetings, writing research proposals, answering emails, making powerpoints, supervise students, etc...