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How many hours do you work?

Dustin King on October 13, 2018

How many hours do you normally work per day? How many days do you work per week?

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Chris James

Most people here are working too long

In the office 8ish hours a day.

Dont do overtime, it's done when it's done. In pretty much everyone's experience and study working long hours is not honourable or good, it just produces bad work and sets unrealistic expectations of project work

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Ben Halpern

I work about 8 hour days during the week, occasionally stretching to 12 in some situations.

Then I do some weekend work pretty much every weekend. The extra time is mostly "startup founder" duties. It is what it is. On some days I'll cut it early at 5-6 hours which helps refresh from the longer weeks.

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Shaiju T

😄 Nice, But do you work all 8 hours ? Or this 8 hours include break, lunch, idle time etc. How much hours are you actually productive like before the computer window coding etc ?

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Hudson Burgess

I'm at work for 35-40 hours / week; I'm getting stuff done for 20-25 hours / week. Critical distinction.

I can write high quality (read: test-driven) code for 5-6 hours / day, occasionally 8 if I'm having a good day. Anything beyond that and the quality of my work takes a nosedive.

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Nick Karnik

I’ve worked very long hours in the past between 12-20 hours when employers took advantage of the fact that I was on a work visa. Things got much better after I joined Microsoft. Lately, I’ve found a better balance with consulting. When clients have to pay you hourly, they try to limit the hours and are cognizant of your time overall. I’m doing between 2-6 hours a day these days working from home and I get to spend a lot of time with my kids and then on side projects. In addition, I’ve moonlighted on several projects at any given time for the past 20 years.

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Luděk Novotný • Edited

8 hours per day. If I need to finish something, then 9 hours. Some days, I need to leave sooner so it depends. But I'm paid for 40 hours per week. I can't really complain because our work schedule is flexible and we had only 3-4 crunch days during 2 years.

In general, I'm trying to put a big boundary between my work and free time. This is my first job and I don't want to burn out so soon. I also work on my pet projects during the weekend. It still requires coding but they are so different that I see them as fun, not as work. I guess this is how pet project should feel.

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TVT

~18 hours a day and 7 days per week. :D

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Dustin King

👆 I found the robot. 😅

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TVT

lmao 😅

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Vinicius Brasil

It really depends on the week, but ~10-11 hours per day, 5 days per week. Where I work we set our milestones by quarter, so in the end of the quarter we normally work more, ~14-15 hours per day, 5 days per week.

For personal projects I try to find time on weekends, ~3 hours per day.

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Brian Greig

I set expectations with my staff that they work 40 hour weeks. If a manager is expecting you to work more than that (with the exception of maybe when you are in crunch mode before a release) then they either:

  • aren’t properly staffed. They should bring in some contractors or hire more staff
  • don’t understand the amount of effort that goes into deliverables.
  • Are generally mid-managing their projects.

If you find yourself in this situation I strongly encourage you to break this cycle. It is bad for your health, sets a poor precedence within the industry, and leads to burnout.

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Jared Meakin

Standard 9-5 at work, and a couple hours afterward for my side business/projects. It varies widely though.

I get the “hustle” mentality, but I have a family and I’m working for them. So, some weeks I’ll put more time in. While other weeks I put no time in. Just have to remember to find balance in your life—that means different things to different people.

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Quentin Sonrel

Professionally, I'm at work 7 hours a day, 35 a week. I actually can't do more, as consultant, that's what the client paid my employer for.

I talk about "being at work" because 7h at my desk doesn't mean 7h of actually working (meaning: "producing something useful"), obviously. I'd say I'm productive for about 4-5 hours a day.

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Ido Shamun • Edited

During the week approx. 9-11 from the office and weekend is usually a few more hours as Ben said, "startup founder" duties.
I have a side project as well that adds up to the work, 10 hours a week sometimes can get even to 15-17.

Sleep is a luxury, just kiddin' :P

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George

Always depends really, on days that I'm at university on something I'm being paid for 4-5 hours a day. Whereas when I'm not at uni I'll prioritise course work and labsheets to be done, those days I can usually do up to 9 hours a day.

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buphmin

I have the luxury of being in a very flexible job. I leave work when I get to a good stopping point. Typically this means 7-9 hours a day ending the week at 40-42. Occasionally I will have a day when I have an appointment or slept bad and leave early then come in and make up time on the weekend or just work extra on a day.

For side stuff it depends if I have anything interesting to work on. So some weeks zero hours and others many.

Honestly most people should aim to work about 40 hours per week and do whatever you can to make those 40 hours as productive as possible. Burnout is real and ideally we want not only to have long careers as developers but to also not dread going to work. Here is an excellent talk on the topic I attended awhile back: recallact.com/presentation/how-i-c...

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Dustin King

That was a good talk.

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Motlib

Officially I have a 40 hour week, but usually work ca. 50 hours. Overwork is registered, so sometimes I can take a day or half a day off. Private projects get time on weekends early in the morning, ca, 2 to 3 hours (until my wife wakes up).

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Jacob Colborn

I put in a lot of extra hours since I am still in the learning phase of becoming a developer. I work my normal 9-5 (but it is still in IT Systems so sometimes it's 9-9 or more) and then probably 8-12 or 8-1 on learning and projects for my portfolio. On Saturday, I take a break and Sunday I get back into the rhythm. That probably won't be my story for forever, but we'll see.

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Kasey Speakman • Edited

I average 8ish hrs a day, Mon-Fri. Generally I finish the week with 40-41 hrs. My schedule is actually pretty variable from day to day. I work 7 hrs some days and 10 hrs others. The whole office leaves early on Fri (everybody works an extra half hr the other days of the week to be off 2 hrs early on Fri). I guess my schedule is a bit chaotic.

Sometimes I need to work after hours when we have outage. We have a primary admin, but I am the backup/escalation. If I work extra hours, I usually get to take them off another day.

In all, it's a pretty good work life balance with the number of hours.

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Michael Salaverry

At work by 10:00 and leaving at the natural end of a task after 18:00, up to about 19:30 in bad cases. During those hours, I cycle between breaks and coding so that I get better work done when I do focus.

I also try to get an hour of learning time in per day, not directly project related, during the work day or right afterwards on my own time.

The weekends are for fun, side projects, or learning, I try not to touch production code unless it's on fire. Life is too short to not take breaks along the way too smell the roses.

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Dian Fay • Edited

8-9 hours a day five days a week on the clock, of course including time it takes things to percolate. Occasional evening or weekend time given that I'm partly in operations, but then I can also run errands or what have you in the middle of the day if nothing's going on.

For reference, in 1965 a Senate committee predicted the American work week would comprise fourteen hours by the year 2000.

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Dustin King

Can't wait for the year 2000 to usher in this glorious future.

Conan O'Brien, lit by green light, with a futuristic collar with regularly spaced hemispheres protruding from it

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Christopher Payne

I used to work five 12 hour days (8 in office, 4 at home) and was consistent in putting in 8 hours over the weekend. It was destroying me slowly. I've reduced my hours to only 45 hours a week and yet, I feel more stressed now but no one at work has commented on a difference of quantity or quality of work. I get the important stuff done in the 40-hour week and all the hours on top of that may impact sales but don't seem to me expected or noticed by my employer.

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Ashutosh Mimani

8-10 hours per day is quite normal during the week. And another 5-6 hours per weekend sometimes. So between 50-55 hours per week. While it may be more than the "regular" 40 hour work week, if you like what you're doing its not bad at all...

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Dustin King

Thanks for your answers, everyone. I made this post because I saw a couple people posting about working 10 hours every day, and wanted to reassure myself that it wasn't the norm for it to be required.

I'm currently on sabbatical, so I've been working between zero and negative hours except when I get excited about a project for a little while. In which case it's probably a max of 12 hours a day, but only for one or two days at a time.

My last job was for a government contractor, and we were required to bill 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (or the equivalent of 8 per day times the number of days in the pay period, but you could vary it from day to day). Lunches were unpaid (but mandatory 30 minutes at least) and I also liked to take an (unpaid) walk in the afternoon, so my work day was usually 9am to 6 or 6:30pm. The good part was that overtime was pretty rare (and eventually not allowed without approval).

A lot of people did what they called RDO ("Recurring Day Off" or something like that), where they would work 9 hours most days but get a day off each pay period (of which there were two per month).

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Lindsey Kopacz

I spend 40 hours a week on my day job unless there is an emergency. If you count blogging/promoting my content/social media though...gosh I don't know. Probably 10-15 hours a week for that

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James Turner

8 hours a day during the week for my main job with an additional 2-3 hours each of those days for my business. On the weekend, I probably do 4-8 hours a day (depending how I feel) on my business.

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Txai

Normally 8h per day and 5 days a week. But when we get closer to the deadlines, that can increase to 10h day. Sometimes 13h in a day

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Lauren Days

72 work hours, not including travel time. Nor does it include coding or children's sports. Whew I'm tired 😩

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Fran González

The usual 40 hours per week, though of course that includes the multiple coffees per day, some time losing on the internet... I’d say what’s really really work around 25-30 hours per week.

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Ju 🔗

7h à day. Never one minute more

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Peter Davidsen

About 6-7 hours, 5 days a week. And then I spend some time time for personal projects, reading articles and trying to keep myself up-to-date on a few things - on company time.

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Jon Randy 🎖️

Around 35 hours per week is normal

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philippe Marc MEYER

About 10 hours a day and I'm getting tired !

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tux0r

Professionally or for private projects?

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Dustin King

Professionally, though I'm curious about the latter as well if you consider it part of your professional development.

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tux0r

I actually do more development in my free time than professionally - on good days, from leaving the bed until going to it. :-)

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Dustin King

I'm mostly asking about how much time is spent at work, not how productive it is.

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Adrián Morente Gabaldón

8 hours per day, 40 hours per week; but I have no problem adding some extra hours if the company needs it on a special ocassion.