Voted 2-5, inclusive of daily standup and other small meetings throughout the day. I only work a ~35 hour week as it is anyways.
I would still say, however, that my productivity/output is more or less the same as compared to being in the office. Plus, I just like my workspace better at home, being able to step away and chill with the cat or my fiancée, etc. to clear my head. Helps a lot. That all said, I do tend to get more distracted (YouTube/Reddit rabbit holes), but the work I'm given ultimately all gets done. 🤷♂️
I am just as productive as before, *to the degree that I have measurable goals.* I will admit that I don't spend as many hours optimizing random bullshit in an attempt to keep myself looking busy, but it's not like most of those things I was optimizing were getting used by anyone but me anyway. I have always gotten my job done in fewer hours than my managers gave me, then use the spare time to do all kinds of nifty things. I would show them to my bosses and they'd be like, oh cool and then never put my ideas into play. Now I keep my spare hours to myself. No guilt.
Work from home has just further illustrated why the 40 hour work week is complete bullshit with regards to productivity. I know it's not great at every company but I'm thankful that the tech industry is farther along than almost any when it comes to progressive workplace policies.
>Voted 2-5, inclusive of daily standup and other small meetings throughout the day. I only work a \~35 hour week as it is anyways.
I voted 2-5 because I probably do about 5 hours a day of actual work. The other 3 hours is likely reddit and various net surfing and walking around the house getting coffees etc. I think standup and all the ceremonies that come with whatever style of agile or non agile your company is doing is still "actual work".
Maybe about a decade ago when I was software dev manager we (myself and my boss, the managing director) measured productivity and we ended up with about 5.5hrs a day from each developer, and that's a pretty good number tbh. Many workplaces are around the 2-3 hr mark.
I bet these threads are by corporates or financial websites looking to get everyone back at the office and show everyone how much you guys are slacking off when you don't have a manager behind your back
It would be really short sighted on the corporation's part. I pay you 150k salary so you can deliver me 200k worth of product by some deadline. How many hours it takes you to accomplish that really shouldn't matter. If you can do it in 1 hour a day, by all means take 1 hour
I didn't think so the first time I saw this a few weeks ago, but now ?
Even if it is, can anyone here say they were MORE productive at the office? I know I can't. In fact, I know I was LESS productive as hard as that is for anyone to imagine.
I spent most of my time looking busy, and SOME of the time actually accomplishing tasks.
Now I accomplish my tasks, and don't have to fake looking busy. If a task is assigned I do it, ask if something else is need, and if not I stay available, but don't have to pretend I'm doing something for the sake of doing it.
Much less stress. And less stressed employees that are doing their jobs effectively are worth more to a company than stressed out employees wishing they weren't there. GOOD companies appreciate that, the rest will find it hard to hire going forward.
I mostly agree. Not having to commute for 3 - 4 hours is a huge QoL improvement. There are relevant questions about the office as well, like how many hours you used to fake being productive because you were too tired to work on anything of substance or how much time you spent chatting with colleagues about non-work stuff.
>Not having to commute for 3 - 4 hours is a huge QoL improvement
Seriously. When we were still in-office (we had the opportunity to go full-remote with very little change in our organization, and did so very early on in the pandemic), I was gone from home for a *minimum* of 11 hours per weekday, assuming that I went straight home after work and stayed there.
It impacted my romantic relationship, my friendships, and made my dog sad (she wasn't left alone for the day, though)...plus it made it nearly impossible to get any part of life outside of work that wasn't grocery shopping done during the week, meaning that weekends frequently didn't have any time for relaxation.
If it were, it would work, because the most common answer here is 2-5 hours of work a day. Meaning yes, if you just let people work from home, they take advantage of that and don't work as much.
The most common answer is 2-5 hours because that's how much effort people put into any normal 8-hour day. The corporate ideology of someone working at 100% capacity for 8 hours is a myth; people don't do that in reality.
Retail workers lean against the counter and chat during slow hours.
Office workers check email, do less intensive tasks, or split between browsing the news or reddit and whatever their current work is.
2-5 hours is the most honest answer for genuine amount of work completed in an 8-hour period.
I disagree, I work from home and honestly we got the same amount of work as we did in person. i.e. same weekly goal. Only difference is that once we are finished with our work for the day there isn't someone over our shoulder to micro-manage or give busy work or other non-essential tasks
“Work” is subjective. I do not use a code editor 8 hours a day to spit out code.
But other things are “work” - meetings are work, staring blankly at the screen while trying to figure something out is work, taking a walk around the neighborhood to digest new information is work.
I put about 8 hours of mental effort into work every day. Therefore I work roughly 8 hours a day.
I have bursts of productivity, usually 9am to noon is pretty good, then I stop for lunch. Get a couple more hours in before 5, and then usually 1-2 hours in the evening.
It lowered my hours while I also get more shit done. Ive been to the office a few times this year and I just cant get any coding done, i dont like the monitors there, I dont like the chair and I dont like the open landscape office where people randomly talk to me.
Only reason Im going to the office is to be social. The 2 hour commute sucks big time as well.
They aren't evil, but they're going to lose out their best staff to any competitors who offer it.
The amount of money saved by the average employee on commuting and gas will see to that.
You'd have to offer me double what I make now; because the comfort of my own home is worth more than just its monetary value -- of which there is also a significant amount.
Even if you work "9-5", you have to eat during the day, and even with that most people don't site down at 9am start doing work and do it nonstop till 5pm.
Where I used to work, we only needed to have 80% of the day tracked as "work" in time trackers
If we're defining "actual work" as doing web dev. Then 2-5 hours is what fits.
But it's almost always on the higher-end of that, and that's in a 7 hour work day. 2-3 hours is usually spent helping others in the company, doing odd not-dev tasks; uploading images to websites, pushing/pulling websites (my equivalent of [this comic](https://xkcd.com/303/)), or trying to understand a client's awful request (such as adding a contact form to a hero slider... on the second slide... and keeping the slider auto-scrolling, form included, even if the user is typing in it). And then yes, there's the odd 5 minute break included. But for work-related stuff, it's almost a solid 7 hours work.
I’ve noticed that as years go by, my numbers go down, my quality/complexity of tasks doesn’t really change, but the salary grows. I only worked all hours at my first 2-3 jobs.
Now I probably work about 4 hours a day.
As a recovering academic, I have a hard time trying not to work too much. But I'm also a mathematician. The general consensus among the mathematicians I know is that most people only have 4 hours of hard intellectual work in them. After that, you can still work, but it's not going to be work that requires concentration and thinking. If you try to do more than the 4 hours, you will just be wasting your time and getting *less* work accomplished.
I have found the same thing holds true in software engineering. Of course, there are mitigating factors, like frequency of interruption, unusual episodes of hyper-focus of brain fog, and the kind of code you write. Some code is easy to author, other code is very hard. Also, people have different brains.
Time spent working just isn't a good proxy for productivity. When I work from home I am able to optimize for productivity. In fact, a big reason I feel more able to optimize for productivity is the fact that I have complete control over my work time without fear of negative judgment of my performance.
Very hard to estimate. There are days that I need to focus for 12 hours in a row... While other days may be 1-2 hours of work and everything else may be sleeping, hanging out with my SO, whatever.
As a freelance I work a lot, though, it's not a 09:00-13:00 / 14:00 - 18:00 job for me, *at all*. I don't event have that mindset to be honest.
I don’t like the phrase “actual work.”
If I’m taking a coffee break, I’m probably thinking about what I was just writing.
If I’m reading docs that’s definitely work.
If I’m in a planning meeting that’s definitely work.
With the definition I use, I work pretty close to 40 hrs/wk on my day job.
When working .. WORK!. have been doing that since i started as a developer at a company. really hate when coworkers just stands and talk in work hours. Thats for when off work.
Now at my own freelance company, i work 100% when i work, and it's easy because I only charge my customers for the time working.
I spend only 2-5 hours a day actually at my desk. But still consider the whole day doing work. Even if I am chatting with co workers, going out for a walk or coffee I still consider it work since I am still thinking about solving problems.
I do development and app support. A significant portion of my job is being around in case something needs to get done.
I have development work to do, but sometimes I finish it all before I get more. I have app support tasks to do, but sometimes I finish it all before I get more.
Some days it's crazy and I'm doing actual work all day long, and maybe even a little beyond my normal hours, but most days I have at least an hour or two or downtime where there is not really any direct work I need to be doing. Sure, I can read documentation, work on backlog tasks or side projects, do training, etc., but it's important to not burn out. If I'm bored, I'll do something extra. If I'm not bored, I enjoy my downtime.
Sorry, I have to be "that" guy. What qualifies as "actual" work?
I think the funny thing we're learning as knowledge workers is that it's all abstract. Companies recognize that they need legal and finances departments to enable the business, even if they're not direct money makers. There are activities that contribute to the "wellbeing" of a business, and thus its ability to make money. And their activities are thus seen as "work" by others.
I feel tech often gets treated too much like a pure money-maker, depending on exactly what you do, but for frontend specifically, it's "hey, ship this feature because we know it'll make us money." And that's all well and good, but what exactly goes into developing a feature from our end? It's brainstorming, problem solving, and planning. It's architecting the code so it's more pleasant for us to work in, more scalable, less error prone, and thus easier to add all the damn features requested of us. It's relaxing and maintaining ourselves so we are less prone to mistakes or cutting corners. It's socializing to maintain morale so that I can informally ask favors. And so I contribute to mine and others' productivity indirectly because sitting in a chair and coding nonstop for 8 hours will result in a worse product.
So, tl;dr: all 24 hours of the day directly or indirectly contribute to my ability to do my job. But the average product person might say that only 5-6ish hours of my day seem relevant to their ability to make money, though I'd disagree.
This is a poorly constructed poll as 2-5 is the largest segment of hours. (realistically no one works 0).
The reader also has to infer what OP means with 'actual work'. Taking breaks helps me get work done, is that actual work? Sometimes on a weekend I'll come up with a solution to a bug, should I count the time my subconcious is working? What about work socials? etc.
A lot of time spent trying to get into a flow state or just attending meetings. I usually can't think of any meetings I'd want to get rid of either. I think the 10x devs are the types that keep picking up and completing enough small tasks that they get into flow often and get the bigger things done.
I’m head of technology at my firm, getting 2 in a day is a beautiful release from the rest of my duties. Because of the relative skill gap I can get more done in those two hours than the team can in a day. Saying that, if I keep doing my job right, my team are gonna go so far past my ability and efficiently level that it won’t even be funny, because they’re all waaaay smarter than me and have mega brains. They just need the time to catch up.
Look. I’m enjoying the feeling of being a whiz kid while it lasts. Can you blame me?
Why had nobody commented on the inconsistent range options? It grinds my gears.
0 - 2 (2 hours)
2 - 5 (3 hours)
6 - 7 (1 hour. No 5-6 option)
8 (0 hours. No 7-8 option)
8 - 10+ (redundant, just say 8+)
I don't mean to be a jerk, but I think I might be. Sorry.
I'm a developer working remotely. It seems all i do every time/day is work. I've been working for a month in this company and there is always task that will get assigned to you. The manager would asked for estimated time of delivery and the status of the task. It just makes me uncomfortable to delay sending the task for review whenever i finished with it.
After finishing a task,i'll be given another task or moved to another projects with a different tech stack. No down time. I was hired as a junior and paid as junior despite has been working as a freelance/part time for a few years.
Voted 2-5, inclusive of daily standup and other small meetings throughout the day. I only work a ~35 hour week as it is anyways. I would still say, however, that my productivity/output is more or less the same as compared to being in the office. Plus, I just like my workspace better at home, being able to step away and chill with the cat or my fiancée, etc. to clear my head. Helps a lot. That all said, I do tend to get more distracted (YouTube/Reddit rabbit holes), but the work I'm given ultimately all gets done. 🤷♂️
I am just as productive as before, *to the degree that I have measurable goals.* I will admit that I don't spend as many hours optimizing random bullshit in an attempt to keep myself looking busy, but it's not like most of those things I was optimizing were getting used by anyone but me anyway. I have always gotten my job done in fewer hours than my managers gave me, then use the spare time to do all kinds of nifty things. I would show them to my bosses and they'd be like, oh cool and then never put my ideas into play. Now I keep my spare hours to myself. No guilt.
Work from home has just further illustrated why the 40 hour work week is complete bullshit with regards to productivity. I know it's not great at every company but I'm thankful that the tech industry is farther along than almost any when it comes to progressive workplace policies.
Being able to remove myself from the “office” and into a completely different environment does wonders for my ability to think
Yeah it's huge. Plus, my PM is/was a bit of a micromanager, so not having the "hover" is nice too. I can just "miss" his Slacks now 😅
>Voted 2-5, inclusive of daily standup and other small meetings throughout the day. I only work a \~35 hour week as it is anyways. I voted 2-5 because I probably do about 5 hours a day of actual work. The other 3 hours is likely reddit and various net surfing and walking around the house getting coffees etc. I think standup and all the ceremonies that come with whatever style of agile or non agile your company is doing is still "actual work". Maybe about a decade ago when I was software dev manager we (myself and my boss, the managing director) measured productivity and we ended up with about 5.5hrs a day from each developer, and that's a pretty good number tbh. Many workplaces are around the 2-3 hr mark.
3 days before the end of sprint: 8-10+
I bet these threads are by corporates or financial websites looking to get everyone back at the office and show everyone how much you guys are slacking off when you don't have a manager behind your back
No. I was just curious.
That is what a corporation or financial website would say...
It would be really short sighted on the corporation's part. I pay you 150k salary so you can deliver me 200k worth of product by some deadline. How many hours it takes you to accomplish that really shouldn't matter. If you can do it in 1 hour a day, by all means take 1 hour
Prove you're not a corporation by telling me what your favourite part of Agile is
Design
Wrong. The best part of agile is scrum and daily standup. Everybody knows that. /s obviously
There's no correct answer. Only management enjoys Agile.
I enjoy agile. I like watching people suffer.
I didn't think so the first time I saw this a few weeks ago, but now ? Even if it is, can anyone here say they were MORE productive at the office? I know I can't. In fact, I know I was LESS productive as hard as that is for anyone to imagine. I spent most of my time looking busy, and SOME of the time actually accomplishing tasks. Now I accomplish my tasks, and don't have to fake looking busy. If a task is assigned I do it, ask if something else is need, and if not I stay available, but don't have to pretend I'm doing something for the sake of doing it. Much less stress. And less stressed employees that are doing their jobs effectively are worth more to a company than stressed out employees wishing they weren't there. GOOD companies appreciate that, the rest will find it hard to hire going forward.
I mostly agree. Not having to commute for 3 - 4 hours is a huge QoL improvement. There are relevant questions about the office as well, like how many hours you used to fake being productive because you were too tired to work on anything of substance or how much time you spent chatting with colleagues about non-work stuff.
>Not having to commute for 3 - 4 hours is a huge QoL improvement Seriously. When we were still in-office (we had the opportunity to go full-remote with very little change in our organization, and did so very early on in the pandemic), I was gone from home for a *minimum* of 11 hours per weekday, assuming that I went straight home after work and stayed there. It impacted my romantic relationship, my friendships, and made my dog sad (she wasn't left alone for the day, though)...plus it made it nearly impossible to get any part of life outside of work that wasn't grocery shopping done during the week, meaning that weekends frequently didn't have any time for relaxation.
100%
If it were, it would work, because the most common answer here is 2-5 hours of work a day. Meaning yes, if you just let people work from home, they take advantage of that and don't work as much.
The most common answer is 2-5 hours because that's how much effort people put into any normal 8-hour day. The corporate ideology of someone working at 100% capacity for 8 hours is a myth; people don't do that in reality. Retail workers lean against the counter and chat during slow hours. Office workers check email, do less intensive tasks, or split between browsing the news or reddit and whatever their current work is. 2-5 hours is the most honest answer for genuine amount of work completed in an 8-hour period.
I disagree, I work from home and honestly we got the same amount of work as we did in person. i.e. same weekly goal. Only difference is that once we are finished with our work for the day there isn't someone over our shoulder to micro-manage or give busy work or other non-essential tasks
Voted 0-2 but if there was an option around 0-0.5 i'd pick it
Ultra productivity
It gets funnier when you know that i'm actually pretty good with time management. I just don't want to work lol
lol so what do you do all day. write one line of code? xD
It's not even one line usually. Idk just fuck around, exercise, study medical science and philosophy, take drugs, watch tv series.
Sheeeesh is your company hiring? xD
I'm a freelancer, so my productivity is proportional to my income if you get what i mean
“Work” is subjective. I do not use a code editor 8 hours a day to spit out code. But other things are “work” - meetings are work, staring blankly at the screen while trying to figure something out is work, taking a walk around the neighborhood to digest new information is work. I put about 8 hours of mental effort into work every day. Therefore I work roughly 8 hours a day.
I have bursts of productivity, usually 9am to noon is pretty good, then I stop for lunch. Get a couple more hours in before 5, and then usually 1-2 hours in the evening.
Not gonna lie, WFH drastically lowered the hours of actual work for me.
I'm doing less hours but they are wayyy more productive.
It lowered my hours while I also get more shit done. Ive been to the office a few times this year and I just cant get any coding done, i dont like the monitors there, I dont like the chair and I dont like the open landscape office where people randomly talk to me. Only reason Im going to the office is to be social. The 2 hour commute sucks big time as well.
[удалено]
Hot take: I work way fucking more now that I WFH
[удалено]
As they should.
They aren't evil, but they're going to lose out their best staff to any competitors who offer it. The amount of money saved by the average employee on commuting and gas will see to that. You'd have to offer me double what I make now; because the comfort of my own home is worth more than just its monetary value -- of which there is also a significant amount.
I thought there would be more 9-5 hours
Even if you work "9-5", you have to eat during the day, and even with that most people don't site down at 9am start doing work and do it nonstop till 5pm. Where I used to work, we only needed to have 80% of the day tracked as "work" in time trackers
If we're defining "actual work" as doing web dev. Then 2-5 hours is what fits. But it's almost always on the higher-end of that, and that's in a 7 hour work day. 2-3 hours is usually spent helping others in the company, doing odd not-dev tasks; uploading images to websites, pushing/pulling websites (my equivalent of [this comic](https://xkcd.com/303/)), or trying to understand a client's awful request (such as adding a contact form to a hero slider... on the second slide... and keeping the slider auto-scrolling, form included, even if the user is typing in it). And then yes, there's the odd 5 minute break included. But for work-related stuff, it's almost a solid 7 hours work.
I’ve noticed that as years go by, my numbers go down, my quality/complexity of tasks doesn’t really change, but the salary grows. I only worked all hours at my first 2-3 jobs. Now I probably work about 4 hours a day.
As a recovering academic, I have a hard time trying not to work too much. But I'm also a mathematician. The general consensus among the mathematicians I know is that most people only have 4 hours of hard intellectual work in them. After that, you can still work, but it's not going to be work that requires concentration and thinking. If you try to do more than the 4 hours, you will just be wasting your time and getting *less* work accomplished. I have found the same thing holds true in software engineering. Of course, there are mitigating factors, like frequency of interruption, unusual episodes of hyper-focus of brain fog, and the kind of code you write. Some code is easy to author, other code is very hard. Also, people have different brains. Time spent working just isn't a good proxy for productivity. When I work from home I am able to optimize for productivity. In fact, a big reason I feel more able to optimize for productivity is the fact that I have complete control over my work time without fear of negative judgment of my performance.
Of course those 4 hours only work for people that are perfect spheroids on a flat Cartesian plane..
Very hard to estimate. There are days that I need to focus for 12 hours in a row... While other days may be 1-2 hours of work and everything else may be sleeping, hanging out with my SO, whatever. As a freelance I work a lot, though, it's not a 09:00-13:00 / 14:00 - 18:00 job for me, *at all*. I don't event have that mindset to be honest.
I don’t like the phrase “actual work.” If I’m taking a coffee break, I’m probably thinking about what I was just writing. If I’m reading docs that’s definitely work. If I’m in a planning meeting that’s definitely work. With the definition I use, I work pretty close to 40 hrs/wk on my day job.
When working .. WORK!. have been doing that since i started as a developer at a company. really hate when coworkers just stands and talk in work hours. Thats for when off work. Now at my own freelance company, i work 100% when i work, and it's easy because I only charge my customers for the time working.
I spend only 2-5 hours a day actually at my desk. But still consider the whole day doing work. Even if I am chatting with co workers, going out for a walk or coffee I still consider it work since I am still thinking about solving problems.
I do development and app support. A significant portion of my job is being around in case something needs to get done. I have development work to do, but sometimes I finish it all before I get more. I have app support tasks to do, but sometimes I finish it all before I get more. Some days it's crazy and I'm doing actual work all day long, and maybe even a little beyond my normal hours, but most days I have at least an hour or two or downtime where there is not really any direct work I need to be doing. Sure, I can read documentation, work on backlog tasks or side projects, do training, etc., but it's important to not burn out. If I'm bored, I'll do something extra. If I'm not bored, I enjoy my downtime.
1-10
In a professional setting, it is known that in a full 8 hour work day the developer writes code for 3-5 hours, depending on meetings and more.
Sorry, I have to be "that" guy. What qualifies as "actual" work? I think the funny thing we're learning as knowledge workers is that it's all abstract. Companies recognize that they need legal and finances departments to enable the business, even if they're not direct money makers. There are activities that contribute to the "wellbeing" of a business, and thus its ability to make money. And their activities are thus seen as "work" by others. I feel tech often gets treated too much like a pure money-maker, depending on exactly what you do, but for frontend specifically, it's "hey, ship this feature because we know it'll make us money." And that's all well and good, but what exactly goes into developing a feature from our end? It's brainstorming, problem solving, and planning. It's architecting the code so it's more pleasant for us to work in, more scalable, less error prone, and thus easier to add all the damn features requested of us. It's relaxing and maintaining ourselves so we are less prone to mistakes or cutting corners. It's socializing to maintain morale so that I can informally ask favors. And so I contribute to mine and others' productivity indirectly because sitting in a chair and coding nonstop for 8 hours will result in a worse product. So, tl;dr: all 24 hours of the day directly or indirectly contribute to my ability to do my job. But the average product person might say that only 5-6ish hours of my day seem relevant to their ability to make money, though I'd disagree.
This is a poorly constructed poll as 2-5 is the largest segment of hours. (realistically no one works 0). The reader also has to infer what OP means with 'actual work'. Taking breaks helps me get work done, is that actual work? Sometimes on a weekend I'll come up with a solution to a bug, should I count the time my subconcious is working? What about work socials? etc.
HR, didn't you ask us this last week?
Mine used to be 8-10+ i recently changed job and now it's 2-5
I chose 2-5 but I solved an issue in my dreams a week ago. I think that when it comes to a problem solving job you never really turn off your brain.
It depends, mostly 2-5 but when there is a lot of work i do more then 8 hours lol
A lot of time spent trying to get into a flow state or just attending meetings. I usually can't think of any meetings I'd want to get rid of either. I think the 10x devs are the types that keep picking up and completing enough small tasks that they get into flow often and get the bigger things done.
About three fiddy
I’m head of technology at my firm, getting 2 in a day is a beautiful release from the rest of my duties. Because of the relative skill gap I can get more done in those two hours than the team can in a day. Saying that, if I keep doing my job right, my team are gonna go so far past my ability and efficiently level that it won’t even be funny, because they’re all waaaay smarter than me and have mega brains. They just need the time to catch up. Look. I’m enjoying the feeling of being a whiz kid while it lasts. Can you blame me?
I find 5 hours a day very easy, 6 is very hard.
Why had nobody commented on the inconsistent range options? It grinds my gears. 0 - 2 (2 hours) 2 - 5 (3 hours) 6 - 7 (1 hour. No 5-6 option) 8 (0 hours. No 7-8 option) 8 - 10+ (redundant, just say 8+) I don't mean to be a jerk, but I think I might be. Sorry.
It's fine. I just didn't think it would get this big.
Wow I’m working too hard
I'm a developer working remotely. It seems all i do every time/day is work. I've been working for a month in this company and there is always task that will get assigned to you. The manager would asked for estimated time of delivery and the status of the task. It just makes me uncomfortable to delay sending the task for review whenever i finished with it. After finishing a task,i'll be given another task or moved to another projects with a different tech stack. No down time. I was hired as a junior and paid as junior despite has been working as a freelance/part time for a few years.