One-Third of Tech Workers Admit To Working Only 3 To 4 Hours a Day, Report Finds (fastcompany.com) 180
According to a survey by Blind, 31% of professionals from 42 tech companies said they're only putting in between three and four hours a day. Fast Company reports: Additionally, the survey found, 27% of tech professionals said they work five to six hours a day, and 11% reported only working one to two hours per day. In contrast, 30% said they work between seven and 10 hours per day. The survey did not ask the workers to self-report productivity, which we know is very different for everyone.
Although the responses within the companies surveyed were anecdotal, one Amazon employee commented, "Amazon requires at least 10 hours a day, with exceptions and maybe less work on Fridays or more work on weekends. I'm working way more during COVID-19, calendar's full back to back, leadership is asking for more." Meanwhile, a professional at Facebook reported, "If meetings count then 9-10. If they do not... [less than] 1," bearing out the fact that the pandemic has not impacted everyone equally.
Although the responses within the companies surveyed were anecdotal, one Amazon employee commented, "Amazon requires at least 10 hours a day, with exceptions and maybe less work on Fridays or more work on weekends. I'm working way more during COVID-19, calendar's full back to back, leadership is asking for more." Meanwhile, a professional at Facebook reported, "If meetings count then 9-10. If they do not... [less than] 1," bearing out the fact that the pandemic has not impacted everyone equally.
The rest of the time (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The rest of the time (Score:5, Funny)
Three to four hours a day? Overachievers!
Slowdown, bro, this ain't piecework. You're making the rest of us look bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Slowdown, bro
It's "Slow down, cowboy!" if you type with more than two fingers.
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Slowdown, bro
It's "Slow down, cowboy!" if you type with more than two fingers.
My father programmed COBOL from the early '60s until the late '00s. To this day, he's still a hunt and peck typist.
Didn't stop the company he worked for from hiring him back on a part time basis after he retired. His work was as quick or quicker than the FNGs and outsourced employees they hired in his stead because he could see the code and know where the problem was right away.
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Have also been a hunt-and-peck (or rather three fingers and a thumb for the space bar) typist since the early 80s. When they tried to correct it in my typing class in high school they eventually gave up when I demonstrated that I could type faster than the a-level requirement (think it was 50 or 60 wpm) to pass the class.
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Re:The rest of the time (Score:5, Insightful)
they're posting on Slashdot
Really, aren't there really just about two or three hundred of us, at most, remaining at this point?
I mean, scroll through any comment thread and peep the usernames. It's the same motherfuckers in every thread. That barefoot dude, rsilvergun, ShanghaiBill, rightwingnutjob, my dumbass, and I am definitely not renowned by any stretch of the imagination. I guess my question is, are tech people really scrolling through slashdot anymore? Comment threads, once upon a time, were 500 posts or better. These days, it is quite common for a story to not to break 50 comments. Here is the comment count on the front page stories as of this post. Sad, really.
2, 36, 34, 4, 85, 63, 15, 37, 112, 67, 45, 14, 39, 34, and 2.
As you might guess, that 112 is something Trumpish or otherwise politically charged.
I spent too much time on this post now that I realize only like 8 people will read it. Some poor bastard might moderate it, but most likely, it will go largely ignored.
Most don't post (Score:5, Funny)
I've asked a number of people I meet in real life whether they read or post on Slashdot. Several have been regular or occasional readers. None have ever said they post here. So apparently there are significantly more readers than those of us who post.
On one occasion, I found out my grand-boss is a regular reader. ... "Oh damn".
I mentioned this to a co-worker, and mentioned I had made comments about my workplace and work habits here. My co-worker replied "lol probably good he won't know it's you. What's your username?"
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I definitely lurk more than I post. So I'm sure you're right, given the scientific anecdotal sample size 1 evidence. I specifically watch for posts by you, and have friend set to +5.
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> I specifically watch for posts by you, and have friend set to +5
Well that's flattering, thank you.
I've noticed your posts tend to be good.
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I remember way back when IPv6 was new I did I good one.
The IPv6 protocol was officially approved in 1998, so this must have been April Fool's 1999.
At the time I was the technical expert on a forum of a few hundred web site owners. I posted an announcement that the backbone and root DNS servers would be updated to IPv6 over night, so the internet would be down for a few hours. They believed me and repeated the announcement elsewhere.
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So apparently there are significantly more readers than those of us who post.
That is likely true, but unless the ratio of readers to posters has changed, there has still been a huge decline since Slashdot's glory days.
I remember the olden days when "getting Slashdotted" would bring a website to its knees.
Re: Most don't post (Score:2)
While yes, it's definitely smaller than the glory days, AWS/wordpress and much faster processors and network links in web servers make it much harder to DDoS one through ordinary user traffic.
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While yes, it's definitely smaller than the glory days, AWS/wordpress and much faster processors and network links in web servers make it much harder to DDoS one through ordinary user traffic.
Also, many of the interesting posts of yesteryear were clearly hosted on a private server, likely under a personal network connection. I don't remember the last time I RTFA and it wasn't from some website I was previously aware of.
The fact that I've heard the term DDoS explained (in simpleton detail, but still) in a news broadcast in recent memory proves to me that it's closer to common knowledge today than the days of slashdotting websites.
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I remember the olden days when "getting Slashdotted" would bring a website to its knees.
Ha! Good times!
But now a service in an autoscaling group, behind a CDN, or served by a lambda function would probably scale up to massive load at no notice pretty well.
Re: Most don't post (Score:5, Insightful)
We share a common issue with username selection -_-
Close to 15 years ago I made a few opinionated comments in posts about the industry I was working for a large vendor in, at least person at the very well known and very enormous company who ruled that industry actually saw the post and it made it back to 3rd hand via a field engineer who was asked "what's your guys middle initial?", FAE was quick and said oh no that's not our guy, his middle starts with a T...
Re:Most don't post (Score:4, Informative)
Yep, I have been reading Slashdot (daily) since maybe 2000 ish (not sure when it started), but only made a first posting a year or so ago.
Have to say when Cmdtaco (or whatever his name was) was running things the quality of the postings and discussion was extremely good but went downhill fast when the corporate guys took over. I reduced my reading at that point (not found a good replacement though).
Re:Most don't post (Score:5, Funny)
I've asked a number of people I meet in real life whether they read or post on Slashdot. Several have been regular or occasional readers. None have ever said they post here.
That's unusual... from the comments, it seems most people post without reading.
Lol (Score:2)
That's funny!
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I hate to pile on the negativity here- but if I had to guess the reason more people don't post is because the commenting system on this site is archaic. I've been reading Slashdot since at least 2000 and the system has barely changed at all in that time.
- There's no in-context help of seeing how to do fancy things in your post, like add quotes, links, italics, bold.
- There's no live preview of what your post will look like.
- Trying to navigate heavily threaded conversations is a nightmare. That's why nearly
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Heck, even Tweets are considered too long to read by some people :D
"People today have attention spans that can only be measured in nanoseconds!"
Ted Denslow (Baseketball, so Matt Stone and Trey Parker).
Re:The rest of the time (Score:5, Informative)
It is official. Slashdot readers confirm: /. is dying. You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict /.'s future.
Oh wait, wrong meme [everything2.com] and wrong decade. /s
Seriously though, yeah, the amount of consistent posters definitely seems to have fallen by the wayside. Personally I find myself reading /. less and less, sometimes going days or weeks long and "binge reading" to catch up since 95% of the stories are fluff, marketing crap, clickbait, or uninteresting.
You are absolutely right that /. in its heyday could easily garner 500+ posts PER thread. TONS of great advice, tips, stories, informative, and insightful comments over the years. Today, politics seems to be the only thing that gets the masses riled up into posting.
IMHO the problems include:
* Wanna-be-editors. I've been reading /. for ~20 years and I don't remember a time when the joke about editors You had ONE job! while they allows tons of dupes to NOT be true. The "editors" are basically a fucking joke. If THEY can't even give a fuck about the site why would readers? /. had a LOT of technical people here such as programmers. You can't even post code without consecutive whitespace being completely fucked up. /. great was that it focused on Tech. These days there is so much NON-TECH stories that this again drives readers away. /. COULD have pioneered and didn't. Allow one edit within an hour and show WHAT changed.
* Stupid click-bait topics. The amount of SPAM, I mean, "articles" such as Bitcoin drives people away. I don't need THREE fucking articles A WEEK about Bitcoin.
* Stories are closed WAY too soon. I've gone back in about a week to leave a comment only to find out that the story is already archived. WTF?
* No ability to moderate stories. More and more stories are about some personal bullshit blog.
* No Unicode support. Seriously what fucking decade is this??
* Broken code and ecode. Initially
* Tech has gotten boring as hell. I also don't want to read about privacy disasters in the making such as Google, Amazon, Facebook software or hardware.
* Stupid political stories. What originally made
* No ability to edit posts. This is something that
* No markdown. This is something Reddit does extremely well with basic markdown support. It is TRIVIAL to create headings and tables.
No doubt I've probably missed a ton of causes, obvious ones too, but that's just a quick list off the top of my head.
How do you "fix" /. ? That's probably a discussion for another day ...
--
First Contact is (tentatively) scheduled for 2030.
By 2050 it will be a known fact that man is not alone in the universe, and that FTL is indeed possible.
Re:The rest of the time (Score:5, Informative)
You can moderate stories, you just have to do it in the firehose.
Politics has always been popular. Look at the top 10 most commented stories of all time:
5687 Kerry Concedes Election To Bush by timothy
4183 Strike on Iraq by CmdrTaco
3709 Barack Obama Wins US Presidency by CmdrTaco
3468 Six Bomb Blasts Around Central London by Zonk
3451 Equal Time For Creationism by Zonk
3360 Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
3315 The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design by Hemos
3314 Saddam Hussein Arrested by CmdrTaco
3265 Fahrenheit 9/11 Discussion by CmdrTaco
3212 What's Keeping You On Windows? by Cliff
All but the very last one are political, and many date back to the early 2000s.
Unicode and editing are not options because they are used to troll.
It would be nice to see some more technical posts where we can have detailed discussions. Part of the problem is the "linear feed" nature of the site means stories from yesterday don't get much action, you have to be quick to really join in with the debate. It's exacerbated by differences in timezones - in the morning (UTC) everyone in the US is asleep, and in the evening (US timezones) people in Europe are going to sleep as new stories get posted and the comment frenzy starts.
Also it would be nice to have the mobile site fixed, or better still just fix the desktop version so it displays on mobile properly like Srad has done. Srad is the new name for Slashdot Japan, BTW.
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Politics has always been popular. Look at the top 10 most commented stories of all time:
The fact the there are so many politics stories among the top 10 most commented stories does not mean, by any stretch, that stories about politics were commonplace back then. Probably the contrary is true: the few stories about politics were the big chance to talk about politics.
-- [2]
4183 Strike on Iraq by CmdrTaco
3468 Six Bomb Blasts Around Central London by Zonk
3314 Saddam Hussein Arrested by CmdrTaco
Those are more general/international news than politics. Sure you can spin the politics behind those events, but those are just news and the titles reflect that.
-- [3]
Having stories like "Kerry Concedes Election T
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Politics has always been popular. Look at the top 10 most commented stories of all time:
There have always been political moves that impact tech and which therefore get discussed here. That's not the same as today's constant political wanking for the sake of politics.
We are also seeing an increasing amount of moderation motivated by nothing but political tribalism. Now that we can see moderation history again I'm seeing comments that get batted up and down by roaming groups of tribalists.
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Stupid political stories. What originally made /. great was that it focused on Tech. These days there is so much NON-TECH stories that this again drives readers away.
The same goes for tech stories that are about goddamn lawsuits, not the tech itself.
Re: The rest of the time (Score:3)
The and buggy mobile implementation of the website is rather off-putting. The UTF-8 iPhone issue is just a more obvious example of the poor quality. I spend most of my /. time reading anonymously on my phone outside work. Iâ(TM)ve lost so many comments after hitting âoeLog in to Postâ due to bugs that Iâ(TM)ve been put off. I wish theyâ(TM)d put a reminder by that button to copy the text Iâ(TM)ve written to the clipboard, although navigating back to the comment Iâ(TM)m
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I am pretty sure that one of my daily news outlets, omni.se, watches slashdot. Their tech headlines very often match those seen here the same day. It could be coincidence since tech news is tech news, but I have observed the match over a long time and am pretty convinced.
More than 3 hours of work. (Score:3)
they're posting on Slashdot
Really, aren't there really just about two or three hundred of us, at most, remaining at this point?
Well, some of us are working in bioinformatics research and are currently busy fighting a pandemic /. steps out of the basement often enough to actually have noticed it, but I assure you this pandemic exists).
(yup I know none of us on
So sadly we don't have enough time left to pertify Natalie Portman nor cover her in hot grits.
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Sad I did not make the list. I will redouble my efforts.
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Well, there are people like me who are rare posters as I only post when I care enough about a topic to want to stick my nose into it. Though I do read a lot and moderate on occasion. The problem is a lot of the older people have moved on (in one way or another) and since this isn't linked to Facebook or WhatsApp, most of the next generation isn't going to view it and the generation after that doesn't care enough about the topics here.
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I read your comment. I agree. I don't see much future in any forum with open membership anymore. There are too many trolls, bots, astroturfers, and no-value contributors these days. The internet used to be a great place for discussions, but once the advertisers turned up it started on a long slow path towards a mass-scale deception network.
Re: The rest of the time (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ve been here so long that while looking at Natalie Portman naked and petrified, the hot grits I poured down my pants have also petrified.
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As you might guess, that 112 is something Trumpish or otherwise politically charged.
Tech is never independent from politics, and there's always been a lot of it on slashdot. 09 f9... that was all politics. Politics bought and paid for by the MPAA, but politics nonetheless. It's always had an effect, since those in power want to guide it, but have no understanding of how it works, and no ability to predict where it might go. Of course, having a complete free-for-all isn't good either.
And honestly? It matter
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I am a longtime reader here, occasional commenter, and rare submitter.
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I'd guess there's more like a few thousand people who post occasionally, and 100-200 frequent posters. Not forgetting the ACs ...
There's a lot more places to post now than there was 20 years ago. The term "social media" hadn't even been coined yet. Slashdot didn't have much competion way back when.
It's still one of the best comments sections on the internet. How many other sites/forums have survived over 20 years, in much the same form? We all like to moan about Slashdot, but its combination of longevity, s
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There is no comment reply notification so will you even see this?
WTF?
User Name (top right corner of your screen) - Account - Messages
Then in the drop down box next to 'comment reply' choose the method by which you'd like to be notified.
I thought I was rare amongst us in my increasing technological luddism, but this statement really takes the biscuit.
aint got no place else to go (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or, don't do more hours a day because you're bored. At least go off clock and work on your own projects. If everyone expects to work 4 hours a day and make more money, then we all do. Why kill yourself setting a stupidly high bar you're going to get in trouble for not keeping up post-pandemic (and your colleagues are being asked to match) when you can do literally anything else. Spend 2 hours making dinner. Watch a MCU movie every day. Contribute to OSS or start a project. Do something, anything, els
Re:aint got no place else to go (Score:5, Interesting)
Why kill yourself setting a stupidly high bar you're going to get in trouble for not keeping up post-pandemic
Because if my boss can see me getting more done when I am working-from-home, she is more likely to let me continue to WFH post-pandemic.
I'd rather write code than sit in traffic.
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Yeah, that's how things work /s. There's going to be a department-wide ruling. And anyway, post-pandemic, you're not going to want to work 10-hours a day. Better to put in 8 hours, since 8 hours in the office is less productive anyway.
I saw that documentary (Score:5, Funny)
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Clip here:
https://youtu.be/zBfTrjPSShs?t... [youtu.be]
Re:I saw that documentary (Score:4, Interesting)
I know a management professor who actually had a graduate class watch Office Space during class time. Like in grade school for PE on rainy days, but with Ron Livingston. She said it would a) prepare them for the real world better than any lecture and b) they'd immediately get references dropped by any pointy haired boss.
Probably the smartest prof there....
Re: (Score:2)
Call the Bobs. These tech workers need to be promoted.
And they wonder (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: And they wonder (Score:4, Informative)
Eh, I did that blue collar manual labor for a few years. Depending on the job I did less work in a given day than I do now at my office job.
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They could always get the skills / education necessary to join them.
Ogden Nash said it and it's still true: People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
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Dang, and I just convinced management to install standing desks in the office...
Re:And they wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
And then they wonder why the blue collar manual labor 12 hour day sector of society freaking hates them.
Just like with the tech jobs, how much (and how hard) those guys work really just depends on the job and the individual. You should consider nuances before spouting off generalizations that pit one social class against another. Reductive thinking can be extremely useful when figuring out an engineering problem, but it does not work well when making social arguments.
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Almost 20 years ago the company I worked for moved its internal data center (which is kind of an exaggeration, we only had about 6 racks of equipment plus a large digital PBX for ~500 users).
Between the buildout and other long-running tasks, I worked a ton with our contracted electricians.
I got kind of jealous of their schedules. They were on site working at like 6:30 or 7, which I wasn't jealous of, though the 3 pm quitting time I was. They seemed to be always on break, which I found out wasn't "always"
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I've done both kinds of work. I'm from an immigrant family, so I worked a lot of manual labor jobs growing up. Today, I work work in tech.
Most people just don't work a full 8 hours doing some measurable productive task. At some level, you accept that.
I worked in warehouses and stacked skids for the most part.
While you could argue, I was 'working' the whole time. The reality was that I walked slow. I'd chat with my fellow workers when we passed each other. Yeah, things like clocking in and official breaks we
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I feel like there's a lot of generalizing also going on in your post. While I, too, have problems with some trends in academia, it sounds like you're falling into the Jordan Peterson fallacy of seeing Marxists at every turn. Sure, there are academics who are really into Marx and stretch his teachings into places they don't belong, but it's not as "damn persistent" as you make it out to be. You'll hear more about Marx in humanities departments than anywhere else, and they're shrinking and have very little in
Healthy Organizations (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Healthy Organizations (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. I don’t see a problem here, it comes down to the mythical man-day. A good friend is stuck in a job that he has to pretend to work from 8-5, but he cannot do his actual job until the distractions stop after hours.
I would take a nap under my desk for an hour a day. Ok, I was the boss, and I threw my back out, but encouraging people to work their way is important. As long as everything gets done at crunch time who really cares how many hours a day it takes you to do your job?
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I actually do take naps at work sometimes. It started because I have a medical issue (chronic fatigue syndrome) which sometimes requires me to take a little break or just write off the rest of the day, but I found that sometimes even if I wasn't too tired but had an intractable problem or knew I needed to be fresh for some meeting or debug session in the afternoon a short nap really helped.
If the weather wasn't so bad I'd go for more short walks as well. Pacing really helps improve my productivity and the q
High Performance Organizations need Slack (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. That's why the first book in a reading list related to High Performance Organizations I put together is about "slack": https://github.com/pdfernhout/... [github.com]
"Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco: There is a tradeoff between efficiency (meeting previous well-defined needs with minimal effort) versus effectiveness (meeting newly emerging needs with flexibility and responsiveness through organizational learning). If you optimize only for efficiency in meeting previous needs from past opportunities, you will by necessity eliminate your organization's capacity to respond effectively to future needs from newly emerging opportunities. This ability to learn and grow as an organization requires "slack" time. Middle management has a vital role to play in organizational adaptability -- but only if they are not over-scheduled."
That said, if workers are not motivated or are not engaged with their work (mostly), one can ask why. And other resources there address that issue (especially stuff by Dan Pink).
One-Third? (Score:5, Funny)
One-third of tech workers admit to working only 3 To 4 hours a day
...and apparently the other two thirds are liars.
The other 2/3rds (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The rest of them do one or two hours, tops.
Real, actual, work ... (Score:5, Informative)
From Office Space [wikipedia.org]:
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
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.
Yeah, well, duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you think we are? Robots?
You make it sound loke some kind of secret stealing with your "admit" headline.
If you've ever been self-employed, you know that is the maximum for and job that requires a fit brain and a good amount of concentration. At least if you actually want quality.
For some harder jobs, it's even less. The rest is bikeshedding, simple busywork that comes with the main task, like answering mails, chatting with the boss, getting a coffee, and most importantly of all... clearing your head*!
If you want, I can switch to 8 hours of bad busywork and no high-brain-powered activity a day. I mean if you want to look successful while driving towards bankruptcy, instead of actually being the best damn business on the planet that I'm working here for.
Re:Yeah, well, duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
"If you've ever been self-employed, you know that is the maximum for and job that requires a fit brain and a good amount of concentration. At least if you actually want quality."
I just started a company two years ago, the biggest lesson so far has been that Quality work requires (1) a happy, relaxed and creative person, and (2) lots of time that isn't spent on stupid little shit.
And that's not from experience, I did the literature review, it's repeatedly shown if you want 'deep work' you need to have space to work in. For this company, I think the 5-day, 40 hour week is as relevant as an inkjet printer. if 'hours worked' is a metric, then you end up with Soviet Union style hours worked. The only metric should be (1) and (2) and of course, the actual produce of the company.
Let people work when and how much they want, as long as they get their job done.
And the rest... (Score:4, Interesting)
One-Third of Tech Workers Admit To Working Only 3 To 4 Hours a Day, Report Finds
The rest report working less.
In a typical office environment it's too easy to fritter away your day talking about, planning for, and writing reports about the work you have no time to actually do.
I bet they are actually more productive at hone than they ever were in the office.
"Lines of Calls", as supposed to "Lines of Code" (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, with every corporate non-productive Stooge scheduling a required WebEx for a total of four hours a day . . . just to justify their existence, I am personally amazed that IT professionals get time to concentrate on their real job at all.
I'm gonna say horse poo (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm gonna say horse poo (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. I type a lot faster than I think. Most of my time is spent thinking, so when I sit down to code, I know exactly what I'm writing. It rarely takes more than an hour to write out the code, but I might think about/sketch it out for the other 7 hours.
What I don't do is sit down and type a bunch of gibberish, then spend the next 7 weeks wondering why it doesn't do what I expected. Magical thinking, random changes, coding without a plan: these are all signs of someone who doesn't actually understand what they're doing.
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Sounds about right....even when I was in office (Score:5, Insightful)
Task based jobs (which is what most tech based jobs are) aren't a matter of "if you work harder & longer you'll produce more" like in manufacturing. If you work harder and smarter you get the tasks done faster and are usually left with nothing else to do.
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left with nothing else to do.
Certainly not that, there is always an infinite amount of features yet to be developed, an unending list of bugs to be fixed, optimizations to be made etc. Fuck it though, tomorrow is also a day.
Not really surprising (Score:3)
When you look at white collar workers you typically find that they do about 3 hours of productive work a day. Less if you don't count meetings.
I wonder what they get paid for so little work? (Score:2)
At the places I've worked we get paid well but we have long hours.
Meetings are the 10th level of hell. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the problem with WFH (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're working at an office, there's a lot of BS that really helps pad out the day. Everything from wandering around the office, to casual socializing, to sitting at your desk doing nothing useful. But because you are at the office, you psychologically count all of this as "work time."
When you're working from home, all of the sudden this evaporates. Its harder to think of household chore BS as part of your work day. So if you're in the zone and focused on something, you are probably more productive. But if you're in-between real work and just trying to fill out your day, it gets a lot harder to do so with a straight face.
Re:This is the problem with WFH (Score:5, Insightful)
And then you go through cycle of chastising yourself because you can't seem to put in a full day of work, until someone from outside comments on how fantastically productive you are.
Meetings count double (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Only during REM sleep.
Define work? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Real hours" (Score:4)
It's a loaded question, as you can see by the question about whether meetings count. IT professional are working long hours doing what their employer asks them to do, it's just that a lot of it is wasted time in meetings or some other busy work.
Six is more than enough (Score:3)
6 hours per day is more than enough.
10 hours per day is ridiculous. There's no way California labor laws allow you put someone on salary, then force them to work 10 hours per day. I'm guessing there's something weird going on here.
I don't like lazy workers (Score:2)
tech workers are overachievers. (Score:2)
with tech workers doing 3-4 hours we are overachievers and deserve raises.
https://www.inc.com/melanie-cu... [inc.com]
If my company would dangle a carrot (Score:2)
I might exert a bit more effort. I have no hard deadlines and I finish my projects months ahead of schedule. I know this would also hold for my team also. If they would dangle even a 2% bonus I'll bet they could get our team to work 30% harder, but a bonus is only for executives.
Seems like others dictate this for me? (Score:2)
At my current job, I typically find our day starts with a short meeting - but after that, I have no clue how much work I'll get done. I have plenty of things thrown at me that they want to get accomplished, but so often I'm stuck waiting on someone else before I can proceed. Today, there was a request to please get 5 networked printers set up on our print server because they were just "stragglers" people put out there in remote offices but we didn't have documented. (This place used to use outsourced I.T. b
secret's out (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe small numbers of people can manage it. The super-performers. However, that 30% that claim they "work" 7-10 hours per day? I bet a lot of it is grunt work, staring at email or just into space, drinking coffee, chatting with coworkers, etc. etc. How many people can sustain non-repetitive, sophisticated thinking for 10 hours per day? I bet that it's 1 in 1000. Cat's out of the bag.
The 40 hour work week was designed for assembly-line and clerical-type work where most actions are near-autopilot.
Re:secret's out (Score:4, Interesting)
After dealing with an anxiety attack one year when trying to mix creative work in with only 8 hour work loads, I told my team I've only got about 2-3 hours/day of creative in me. I've even had a few times where after about 1 hour of intense thinking, the world was literally spinning for me. I felt drunk. I was bumping into thing, slow to reaction, no concentration. I almost called my wife to pick me up. I drove myself home, but accidentally blasted through a red light. I was too busy trying to keep track of the other vehicles.
Few years later they promoted me to a senior position because my work is too important. I almost never get my assigned work done every sprint, but I make those around me much more efficient. I have brought up with my team lead that it is a source of anxiety when I see others responding to emails and slack well after hours to completing requests, and I clocked out around 3:30p after a 2 hour lunch. But they remind me that keeping my mind fresh is very important to them.
To my team, and many in my company, I'm that guy where I'll pop off an idea that works after 30 secs of listening to a problem they've been stumped on for days. But then I have no concentration for the next 10-20 minutes. For me, my biggest moment of this was when we hired a renown contractor for some specialist work. Our new production server was coming up. Something like a $250,000 server with two $150,000 each storage arrays. We had the specialist and several manufacture server engineers working on a problem for nearly two weeks and even flew in some additional senior technicians to help. All I knew is "there was a performance problem". I asked them for the model numbers of the servers so I could look them up. I googled them, read the sales brochures and noticed a feature that could explain the situation. So I brought it up to the group, explaining how some complex interactions between the IO patterns could show great benchmark performance, but poor load performance. Sure enough, they had it fixed by the end of the day. I spent the rest of the day just answering easy emails. Got no work done that day. Have a bunch of these kinds of stories.
Ponder time vs. bean counters (Score:4, Interesting)
I do both programming and analysis. Often I have to ponder things to come up with decent solution candidates. Even if I'm goofing off, per outward appearances, my head is still bouncing around ideas. This is also true when at home: my head is still kicking around ideas about work. I often wake up with new ideas or new questions to ask. My subconscious "chip" is relatively independent of my conscience chip. And I do have a reputation for presenting creative angles on problems and designs. (My Asperger people skills are my real bottleneck.)
If my work wants to subtract the time I'm visibly goofing off, then they should also add back the time my subconscious mind is processing work issues at home. This kind mental work can't be compared to say brick laying. It's something hard for bean-counters to grasp.
Everyone counts hours differently (Score:2)
For some people, hours mean productive time. For others, it means being "on the clock." So, lunch and break time count. Occasional recreation counts. Water cooler conversations covering a combination of work and personal topics count. Except for those days when I was doing a lot of busy work, like meetings and reports, my "on the clock" time is usually 2 to 3 times more than my productive time.
I make up for it (Score:3)
I *wish* I worked 8 hours a day. My current job not only requires my full attention from 7am to 4pm, but I often find myself studying the latest tech and articles until late into the evening. By the time Friday rolls around, I'm exhausted. And COVID has only made it worse.
I probably work less than that . . but . . . (Score:3)
I probably work from home 3-4 hours some days.
But that is AFTER working 11-13 hours at the office.
It kinda sucks.
And needless to say I am not truly productive most of that time.
My employer would be way better off if I could work 8-10 focused hours, then go home. I'd get a lot more work done, and make a lot fewer costly mistakes.
But try telling that to management. :(
Does anyone suffer from a lack of consistency? (Score:2)
Some of you maybe work with the same systems, especially programmers who maybe stick with the same language or even on the same site/applications.
But what about those who work on a ton of random problems in varying systems? I feel like the actual work I do is way less efficient because I'm constantly getting tasked to work in novel environments and on systems I am not a long-term expert in. Sometimes the actual task only takes less than an hour, sometimes only minutes. What eats up time are hours spent g
the rest of the time (Score:2)
The rest of the time is meetings....
Re: (Score:2)
Self-reporting (Score:2)
I sorta space out for hours a day. (Score:2)
I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working.
I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Re: wtf (Score:3)
The trick is to properly define "work". :P
amazon needs unions now! (Score:2)
amazon needs unions now!
Re: (Score:2)