The headline doesn't reflect the reality - I think what is really going on here is that 3 hours are spent doing what is considered 'work' by the outside world (sitting in front of the machine and writing the code that people believe is what the job is).
However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else - your brain is still whirring on the problem whilst you are out walking, exercising, cooking etc.
If you add on the time spent working through problems, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have that I spend 24 hours a day thinking about the problems i'm tackling. I often come up with great solutions whilst i'm asleep, and bad nights sleep is often correlated with a gnarly problem i've still not worked out.
I personally don't get hung up on how much time I spend actually coding. Some days it's full on, other days I seem to achieve next to nothing, or if anything go backwards. I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.
> I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.
And how many unproductive hours of work do you spend per day? I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day. When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.
> I tend to fix my working hours (productive or not) to around 4 per day.
And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on.
One day, there are threads here saying $120k is considered underpaid for an entry level dev out of a bootcamp. The next day, we talk about how all the RTO companies are only doing it because managers want to feel productive. The day after that, there are threads of remote devs boasting they don't even consistently work 4 hours a day. And the day after a thread about how we're all going to unionize to protect our rights.
This is truly an interesting phenomenon. Either these anecdotes are just that, anecdotes and not representative of most people, or there's a huge misalignment between employer and employee expectations.
Edit: to be clear, I fully support the author of this blog post because he works 3 hours per day working for himself. More power to him. If you truly think you’re underpaid and overworked, do what the guy in this article is doing! Stop making excuses and become an entrepreneur. Work for yourself, set your own hours, no managers, and you’ll leverage the full earning potential of your skillset. No employment contracts to comply with!
> And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on.
Yes, because one can't work 4h tops while being in office...
Truth is, they can't tell how much working hours this individual is putting. And maybe it's not that important.
> And we wonder why employers want us back in the office. I mean come on.
I worked less than anyone else on my team at my last job. I was probably doing "active" work for 3-4 hours a day -- plus meetings. I was also a senior engineer with good performance reviews, and contributed more to the codebases of my team's major projects than anyone else on the team.
It's important to note that I was also often thinking about work when taking my dog for 45-minute middway walks, cooking lunch for myself and my wife, etc.
The devs "boasting" (that is your perspective, not the reality) are probably the ones generating more revenue for those companies wanting "us" back in the office (are you a SWE?). There's a reason the biggest tech companies hire the best (and others who might not be considered the best) for significant sums - they are worth it.
Yes, we are underpaid. Just look at the bank balances of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Software engineers aren't illiterate construction workers. We have the means to build and destroy tech companies that think they can do whatever they want.
> No. The amount they pay is a function of supply and demand of workers and the necessity of filling the position within the company.
And juniors are getting paid above 100k usd. Deal with it.
> Construction workers have the ability to build and destroy buildings probably more easily than SWEs can build or destroy companies.
Sure but they would go to jail. The programmers that destroyed companies by creating better open source alternatives not only didn't go to jail but managed to build multi-million dollar businesses. Which then becomes too big at some point and ready to be disrupted again.
> The programmers that destroyed companies by creating better open source alternatives not only didn't go to jail but managed to build multi-million dollar businesses. Which then becomes too big at some point and ready to be disrupted again.
I’m not sure what your point is.
Isn’t this a good thing? Lots of opportunity for you to leverage the full value of your skillset to maximize your earning potential by starting a company, being your own boss, set your own work schedule, etc.
(Re: junior devs, $120k is fine for junior, I was recollecting a thread with people saying $160k is more appropriate for juniors which IMO is absurd.)
$120k USD is triple the median and double the average wage of the highest paying countries in the world. It's not "fine", it's absolutely absurd and puts a junior into the top 20% of earners _globally_. It's grossly overpaid, and people need to appreciate that more.
That, to me, says more about how other professions are underpaid, or perhaps just that software creates a lot of value. The work my team is directly responsible for generates tens of millions of dollars for my company - 120k feels appropriate.
I think the latter more than the former. People forget that software and the internet in whole are a relatively new industry and area.
Throughout most of the world (including most of the US), $120k a year is enough to buy and fully pay off a mortgage on a house in a city in < 10 years - even after tax.
A software engineer can create but can they sell? Can something you create be worth a billion dollars without selling it? Even the highest selling piece of art tops out at a few dozen million dollars...
I fear you may have a very skewed sense of a software engineer's place in the world.
Why do you believe that software engineers can't sell? Many programmers have created billion-dollar companies, more than any other profession.
The world's largest companies today were founded by software engineers. There's no inherent need for a designated "business" person within a tech company.
And we didn't even talk about FOSS and indie development which are both as big as big tech and driven exclusively by programmers.
The original comment seemed to imply that every software engineer is deserving of more by virtue of being a software engineer in a trillion dollar company. That seems very questionable to me which is what I was calling out.
I’m sure there are a handful of Zuckerberg type people (let’s be extravagant and say there at 10k such developer/entrepreneurs who have built unicorns by dint of their software skills) but the software engineering discipline is orders of magnitude bigger than 10k.
Edit - Since the original comment was focused on dollar value created by software engineers, we can discount much of FOSS where value has been captured by the likes of AWS and RedHat, not the FOSS community.
> Edit: to be clear, I fully support the author of this blog post because he works 3 hours per day working for himself. More power to him. If you truly think you’re underpaid and overworked, do what the guy in this article is doing! Stop making excuses and become an entrepreneur. Work for yourself, set your own hours, no managers, and you’ll leverage the full earning potential of your skillset. No employment contracts to comply with!
Your edit makes more sense than the original post, which sounds like you are resentful because many SWEs know their worth.
When i've employed people, I tend to be focussed on their ability to get stuff done, and being responsive to requests, especially external users of the system. Hours spent at the desk is just a proxy for the above, and there are better ways of measuring it these days, so i'd think that your bosses will be cool with this unless that have a rather different mentality.
I've worked with people with very strict working hours who will never respond to an email outside of those hours, and other people who would be late into the office most days, but would respond to a support problem at 11pm at the weekend. We're not all the same, and there is strength in depth.
Exactly this. When I've had employees, the only thing I've cared about is: are they producing acceptable work within the needed time frame? If so, it doesn't matter if they're working one hour a day or eight. It also doesn't matter if they are in the office or not (in practice, about half preferred to be in the office, about half not).
> When I tell fellow engineers about it, they think it’s unethical because my contract specifies 40h/week (I’m an employee). I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.
Honest question, do you unilaterally ignore any other parts of the contract?
Arguably these contracts are a legacy of factory shifts in industrial revolution times.
What (most) managers want is your output, irrespective of how long it will take, may be 12h or 3h.
One could argue, that while working 3h or 4h one should still be available to support, help, communicate, meet with, your team and stakeholders for the remaining hours of that contract.
I would not have an issue with less hours provided you don't ghost for the remaining hours, if one of your colleagues hits a block, or your manager gets hit with a shitstorm, then you need to have a communication line open (which should also not be 24 hours but for the hours in your contract).
This I agree with. But I would say being available to help and support and whatever is part of the job. If you say you work for 4 hours, but still have to be available for all of the above for 8 hours, you are working for 8 hours, not 4.
In "agile" or "scrum" or whatever story pointing is, the "level of effort" is often touted and rightfully so. The mind can quickly become exhausted after grueling mental labor. Personally, I often get some 5 hours of solid work in one day and consider that enough. Other times, I'll work 10+ hours in a day on less mentally grueling work but I rarely bill over 8 hours in one day even if it's more. I always want my employer to see the cost of me as well worth it.
Not exactly, no. But how far can you stretch that? Working 4 hours a day is half of what is agreed in the contract. Would you be fine with the employer ignoring the agreed salary with the excuse of no one following contracts exactly?
What do you mean? As far as I know, I've always worked according to the contract.
Some of my employers had flexible timekeeping, and then I would often work a bit over 40h/week so that I could take extra days off for extended weekend trips when I felt like it.
You've always done things like observed the precise lunch hours (and not taken a single minute more)? This stuff is usually defined in contracts but at least for a professional job in a good workplace is subservient simply to getting the work done rather than literally doing your 7.3 hours of work and 0.7 hours of lunch to the letter. Even doing duties for your job that aren't listed as part of your contract is common. How common is working more than the contract specifies by just a few minutes? And so on. There's a reason Work to Rule strikes [1] are a thing.
> I couldn’t care less what the contract says about working hours.
But you don't tell your management and trust your fellow engineers not to rat you out (or they are not your colleagues, just people on HN?)? Because this sounds more like quiet quitting. Or you over-perform even though you work 50%?
sounds like it's 3 hours of coding / day + 5-10 hours a day preparing for and thinking about the problem.
that's 7-12 hours / day if you add in an hour's worth of breaks.
sounds billable to me!
I find I need at least 2 hours of continuous focus to get any real work done and 3 hours to be really productive. If I start at 9:00 am and have no meetings in the morning that means I can get a meaningful piece of work done by the time I eat lunch. Then if I have no meetings in the afternoon I can get another meaningful chunk of work done. Oftentimes though, days are wasted because of meetings thrown in haphazardly.
Sounds like you are working on deep complex systems - i totally get the experience of needing a couple of hours to stare at how the system behaves before the lightbulb moment when you realise how a simple change will achieve what you want (ideally!).
There are other times when it's a bit more greenfield and just fiddling around gets your ideas straight and you can be productive even with interruptions.
We tend to work with a backlog of simpler and harder problems, and part of the skill of prioritisation is deciding what mood you are in, and being realistic about how much time you have to focus on a problem, and hence what sort of problem or feature is worth tackling that day.
I do agree with the general notion that working 8 productive hours everyday does not work long-term. But assuming that you could work three hours completely productively every day, that does not imply that the remaining five hours would be completely worthless. In a normal work week, I am sure you could get more out of the remaining 5x5 = 25 hours than the six hours at the weekend.
Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.
I think the appeal of "3 hours a day" is that the number is so extremely low compared to the number 8. But I don't think that it will work. Flexible time models also give you a pretty good work-life balance, and they're more realistic. I mean, for one, you won't find an employer who will follow this 3-hour model, so we're only talking about self-employed workers. But even then, it has to be a pure coding or other desk job - if it involved e.g. any meetings at all, how are you going to fit that into your small time budget of three hours only per day?
Yeah, like I said, I don't think that this model is going to work in most situations and for most people.
> Q: I was wondering how work other than coding fits that profile. e.g. work with designer to prepare logo or any kind of promoting – that must be a part of your work as well, right?
> Yes, I have to do everything, including UI&UX design, marketing, supporting and so on, since I’m a solo person. The coding might be around 50% of the work time.
Pretty much. Near-everything aside from "one man project hacking" will have some amount of "office hours" just used to coordinate with co-workers, plan, code review, or frankly just doing stuff like reading the docs or specs.
Even assuming "you can only do 3 productive hours a day" (which is a lie with appeal to authority mixed in. "Look that guy that made shitty web framework did it, it must be good!"), that does apply only to coding, there is more to being developer than just programming
> Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.
I'd even call that advice outright idiotic. You wasted time to get in the zone only to throw it away
I feel like any recommendation of "do X hours of this" is a delusion. We're not robots, we have better or worse days and more or less engaging tasks. If task is "here are API docs, make a bunch of code and tests for it" I can do it whole day without much slowdown.
The longest lasting and easiest to extend software I’ve cobbled together (and some still running in production after 20yrs) were me designing for 18+hrs straight, share general idea w/team, then furiously writing for 36hrs. Those spurts were always the most productive and setup future work to be easy to add on.
I have been struggling with organising my time as well, and I found that fewer hours every day means I only focus on what's important, and I can achieve a state of flow, with a good routine, every day. I do 4 hours of 95% effort, no distraction deep work, and then I need to recharge the batteries.
It all depends if you're doing creative programming work, or menial one. I'm building a business, and the software underneath it. It's not too dissimilar to sculpting or painting: bursts of intense work, with tons of space necessary to digest, plan the next step or just daydream and think out of the box around hard problems. Some people thrive in a brute force approach to creativity (work until the problem is solved), for others intuition is the driving force (think until the problem is solved)
The issue is that as a society and the corporate machine is tuned for the brute force approach. We celebrate the 100 hours/wk Musks and Carmacks, and forget that their physiology, and more importantly, environment is much different than most of us.
How many hours do you think Musk spends thinking about paying rent, cost of living, standups with a boring boss, endless Zoom calls that cut into his focus? How many hours does John Carmack spend, bored to tears, plugging yet another Slack library into their CRUD app for a boss than makes 500x his salary?
How many hours of "brainstorming", daydreaming and reading up on exciting tech do they count as work? How many hours of daydreaming and "digesting" can you do sat in an open space cubicle?
(Sorry, started talking about creative force, and went on a societal critique.)
Working less seems like reasonable advice all around.
To be honest I rarely have more than 3-4 productive hours in a day, where I actually get hard stuff done. Sure on special days I can be productive 8+ hours; but those are rare.
For me the open question is if you decided up-front to only work 3–4 hours, would you be as productive as you are in those 3–4 hours out of an 8 hour day?
I suspect that if you can habituate yourself to a sustainable number of daily hours (eg., 3-4) where you always work, barring illness etc. Then I believe you'd have a net positive output for most professions, and most software engineering domains.
J. Blow has much to say against this, but i've never really heard him engage with this integral of productivity given habituation. I guess his reply to my argument above would be, "sure, but are you actually working these hours? if no, it's just rationalisation for lazyness"
I would have to try it but my feeling is I would be just as productive.
Of course this is related to creative work, like coding, writing, design etc.
Less creative work like kitchen work, or manual labour in general I can do until my body gives up (16h shifts used to be no problem but I'm getting older...)
Sometimes I can do weeks worth of work in just 30 minutes. Some people can cut a lot of labour time perhaps years worth for multiple people. Productivity can get hard to measure.
Whatever works for the author, he is self employed. For most companies I have worked for I would get to the office very early in order to have at least 90 minutes of total concentration before other people came to work. I would usually leave work around 3PM, a few hours before other people left work. That always worked really well for me. During the day, I would routinely shut my door for a while and relax.
re: author of article: I wonder if he does technology learning activities outside his 3 hour work window?
I recently read the book deep work by Cal Newport.
He introduces the concept of deep and shallow work.
Deep work is the part the needs focus, concentration and complex thoughts. He argues that there is a limit of about 3-4 hours that one can spend in the state of deep work. That doesn’t mean in can’t do more shallow work in addition to the deep work.
But the brain also needs rest, therefore working long hours consistently diminishes the ability to work deep. Also some problems are better solved unconsciously while the brain is resting.
I can really recommend that book, I haven’t adopted to many of the practices that he recommends but I am working on it and it already had a profound impact on the quality of my work but also my general mental health.
The merits of the idea aside, I find it quite interesting that this was written 7 years ago (2016), and that the author had been doing it for 2 years already.
At present the idea of working 3 focused hours per day doesn't seem outrageous, but back in 2014 this would have been quite progressive.
Congratulations to the author for building a successful product from which they can make a living! Even bigger congratulations that the product can be maintained / extended by working few hours per day.
For example 4 hours x 31 days = 124 hours per month.
Now compare this to a corporate job where it feels like you are setup to fail.
Every day 3-6 hours of meetings / conference calls. Constant flood of emails that are often irrelevant or unclear, but you need to stay focused reading them because something can be relevant to what you are doing (often the part important to you is written in an ambigious way, since they dont know what to do with your case - so you have to ask for clarifications - more meetings).
Constant context switching due to having to drop what you are doing to do something else. Trying to do you your actual work.. often after hours, when they still call you. Or you cant even do your job, because someone who is supposed to provide something for you didnt do it on time, so you are waiting. (They update that it will be there the next day, on next day -> they again say next day and so on).
10 hours per day x 21 days = 210 hours
Of course corporate work is safer. Somehow the corporation exists and moves forward.
That's why it is so impressive that the author can be their own boss. Could even make some contracting work from time to time.
This completelly ignores the inner and outer world that are somewhat or completelly out of your control in given context. For example, you might be immonologically or psychologically compromised, there might be a lot of noise in environment for some period of month, you got a baby etc. If you are alone, it might be a lot easier, but with family, any schedule that is not dynamic is failure.
> First, the most productive time for me is after I wake up, so I need to sleep well, and start working right after I wake up. I don’t read any news or SNS because even if I only read them a little bit, it could affect my productivity because it distracts my mind.
> I even disable all notifications on my iPhone before I go to bed, so I don’t see them before I start working next day.
Work is a mixture of thinking through problems, writing down the answer, debugging systems, talking to stakeholders, writing prose for engineers or management.
An idea from the creative artist world is to consciously divide the tasks into creative and other. Game plan goes:
Wake up. Do not read email. Or slack. Breakfast then walk, thinking about things.
Write down the ideas you want to come back to. Then lunch.
Then take a look at email, slack. Do the traditional fire fighting while trying to write code simultaneously game until the evening.
Spend the evening socialising, reading, generally taking in new information, probably in the hope that it gets sorted while you sleep and takes your mind off the fires of the afternoon.
That's not a path to three hours a day of work. But it probably is a way to make progress on hard problems despite a software dev day job that applies pressure against that, via cultural firefighting.
I am going to try this. I found that boxing my self is far more productive than anything else, and it leaves me time to do whatever other thing I want.
It's the opposite for me. I work productively only when the duration is open-ended. That is, at night, when I can stay up as long as I feel comfortable or over the weekend when none bothers me.
A slightest deadline in sight or an upcoming meeting break the flow.
Most meetings are not coding but they are all work. No chance I would be attending without getting paid and by the same token I'd likely get sacked if I failed to attend.
I can't imagine a solo indie dev has those meetings though. So their definition of work is somewhat different.
Also I guess the three hours is a consequence of them having a successful product, which is somewhat akin to winning the lottery. I can't imagine if they were struggling to make rent they'd down tools at 11am for an afternoon of reading and walking.
Meetings require some base level of focus on the meeting, so it is still work. Some people might get away with playing games or reading Twitter or whatever during meetings, but it isn't actually a restful break.
Saying that OP's point doesn't/wouldn't/shouldn't apply to an extremely exceptional case is a tautology (and this is even assuming that Mozart didn't already follow OP's advice in the first place, which you haven't exactly established).
Here's a more interesting example, which at least shows that it doesn't apply to a much larger category of jobs than genius composer: If Amazon warehouse workers'd follow such advice, much fewer packages would get shipped.
However, creative stuff like programming doesn't tend to fix in such a neat box, and the preparation, or creative thinking which leads to elegant solutions to problems tends to benefit from spending time doing something else - your brain is still whirring on the problem whilst you are out walking, exercising, cooking etc.
If you add on the time spent working through problems, you'll probably come to the same conclusion that I have that I spend 24 hours a day thinking about the problems i'm tackling. I often come up with great solutions whilst i'm asleep, and bad nights sleep is often correlated with a gnarly problem i've still not worked out.
I personally don't get hung up on how much time I spend actually coding. Some days it's full on, other days I seem to achieve next to nothing, or if anything go backwards. I've never tried to average it out, but 2-4 hours of actual productive coding per day sounds about right.