Devs can get by working few hours a day, some barely do any work at all
Not sure how others here feel, but I have to say that when I've found myself in situations where there isn't much work to be done I find it utterly soul destroying.
Always feel guilty doing anything else in down-time when I'm billing a client and so sometimes end up sitting in a weird stand by mode, feeling like I'm somehow being lazy.
It's not lazy. If I go for a walk I'm actively thinking about projects. I have solved many problem by just clearing my mind and taking breaks.
Building software should not be paid by the hour. It's a weird thing.
If I can build a piece of software in 10 hours, and another dev needs 40 hours....it seems kind of odd to pay the slower less resourceful dev MORE for a slower delivery?
So I consider taking a walk to clear your mind part of work for sure. I also consider reading HN or other engineering news/continued education sites to be part of work. And taking a coffee break to chat with co-workers about whatever (back when we worked in an office), including big-picture stuff and non-work related stuff, sure, that too.
That's all part of work when you do this kind of work. You can not just write code 8 hours a day, indeed, it's impossible, and if an employer tries to make you work that kind of sweat-shop environment (sometimes it seems like that's the actual goal of some Scrum implementations), it won't actually get them your best or even most productive work.
But there are people on HN who say that they literally spend the majority of their day the majority of days just doing things that are not work at all. I dunno, watching TV, running errands, riding their bike, mindlessly social media'ing, playing video games. Like they only spend a few hours a week on anything related to work at all.
I agree with GP that for me that's utterly soul-destroying, I end up feeling useless and unmoored. (The other day on the radio I heard someone reference a study that busy-ness to life satisfaction graphed as an upside down U, if you have too little free/leisure time you are unhappy, but people with too much are unhappy too, there's a sweet spot in the middle. Perhaps that's what we're talking about here).
But maybe different people are different.
Or maybe in new remote world, if you spend that time on projects you find rewarding (writing poetry, I dunno) instead of just goofing off, then it's not really "leisure" anymore, and you won't have that problem. If also you don't have any ethical problems with it (maybe your employer is awful and deserves to be drained of money), or just worry about getting caught.
Yep. Same here, at my level of experience can deliver work in high-quality at a fraction of time required for a junior. Instead of burn-out, use the extra time to enjoy other things and keep learning/improving.
Dev work is not digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screw driver, but it is forcing your brain to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.
You might be surprised to learn that for every dev working “few hours a day” or barely doing anything at all, there is another engineer doing all their work for them - usually in a constant state of fending off burnout due to having to do other peoples’ work in addition to their own.
That other engineer is actually a problem. He is accomplishing nothing by grinding 8+ hours a day and will burn out, most deadlines are bullshit.
Nobody can sustain that much work for a long period of time.
I would much rather be a good well rounded reasonable dev than someone doing others work. That is a huge red flag. Every dev should be responsible for THEIR work, not their team mates. Unless of course they are doing code reviews.
Arbitrary deadlines are bullshit but I never mentioned deadlines. At the end of the day, people get paid to do a job and businesses earn revenues by doing things. Someone needs to do those things, and if these hypothetical developers "barely doing any work at all" aren't doing it, someone has to at the end of the day or everyone is going home.
Is it? In my career, over 20 years by now, I've not seen that one often. When it happens, management has to be on vacation too, as it's not that hard to see that someone is doing all the work. I have seen this continue just once. It had to do with the place having very poor pay. Management wasn't firing the slackers because that's all they could hire at their rates. The hard working engineers just weren't wise enough to realize that they could often do a bit less work for a lot more pay somewhere else.
What is more common is that effort levels are similar within the same department, but wildly different across companies. I've worked at places where people considered themselves slackers when they were doing 60 hours plus on call time. I've also worked at others where entire teams did about 2 hours of actual work a day, and the rest was spent on long lunches, ping pong and retro consoles.
I think the trick is to give and take. And maintain teams that give and take.
Sometimes I need to take my foot of the gas. But I also appreciate that, when I do, someone else has to pick up the slack.
When I encounter teammates who only take, take, take, and never give, either they leave or I do (depending how much influence I have over their employment)
The trick is that everyone is both in my experience. I had weeks where i worked barely 10 hours (well, a week actually, but in my defense, the onboarding was shit), including meetings and mails. Most of the time once i understand what i have to do (and that can take some time), i'm around 20 to 30 hours. But i know i can whip myself and work 45 full hours (legal duration in my country is 35), as i did during august when the team was on vacation and we had a lot of fires to tend to, for two weeks.
I'm a long time paramedic who has seen more people die than I care to remember.
some days I'd rather be an order picker at Amazon. It's a lot easier to clock out and not bring work home with you. I might actually make more money at Amazon, to be honest.
Devs can get by working few hours a day, some barely do any work at all.
I refuse to stare at a screen 8+ hours a day. I take healthy breaks and create boundaries.
I rarely have to solve puzzles at work. The grunt of the work is almost the same thing over and over.