this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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8 hours of nominal work does equal about 3-4 hours of actual focused work. This is completely normal don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Humans need to eat, go to toilet, socialize with their coworkers, relax the brain, move if constantly in the same position.
Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
I'm not (maybe an hour at most because I just started my job/training as software engineer), but long meetings are way more tiring than sitting there and coding. And coding while needing to listen to a meeting is even more exhausting.
Coding is something you can do for longer stretches as you get better at it. I struggle with 3 or 4 hours straight out of college. Now I run 7 hours no problem.
The dichotomy is that the more proficient you are at coding, the more meetings you need to be in to give engineering input... So the less time you spend coding. As a staff SWE I'm rarely able to get more than 3 or 4 hours straight to sit and code. Rather it's an hour here or there broken up my meetings.
I relish my no-meeting days to sit and actually get concepts out into code.
I'm spent at the end of 7 hours coding though. I've crunched to 14 before... But the code I wrote was shit for 5 of those hours.
My company started prioritizing developer time by heavily discouraging meetings with devs before noon, and one day a week is supposed to be meeting free. We also just don't respond to pings before noon now unless it's an absolute emergency. Took managers a bit to catch on, but my efficiency has honestly skyrocketed and I'm loving it.
Yeah we do no-meeting Thursdays.
Problem is when SLT decides they want a demo of progress and see all this "free time" called focus time on our calendars and stick a 30m meeting about 1 hr before lunch.
Mark it as busy in the calendar, that might keep them away. If marking the whole day is suspicious, make 1-2 hour marks with 10-20 minute gaps (or longer as long as it doesn't allow sticking a meeting in). Then make these "appointments" weekly and set the subjects(focus time) to private.
I'm not even allowed to work more than 10h a day so I'm not even able to crunch 14h except they are personal projects
It's vanishingly rare that I need to do that but if something breaks or an emergency happens I'm senior enough that I need to step up.
I get time off in recompense. Usually an entire day once the 14hr crisis has passed.
If my time would be better spent coding than being in the meeting I just decline. It depends on the culture of the org though if that kind of approach is ok or not.
This is so important. I know so many people that complain about people being "in meetings all day instead of working" or manager expectations are to be doing a bunch of stuff, but your calendar is absolutely packed with dumb meetings. Meetings are work, so if other work needs to be done then I need to be allowed to take that time.
And no, multitasking isn't real. If I'm doing other stuff during the meeting then I'm not actually paying full attention to either the meeting or the other work.
Fuck you.
Sincerely, Blue collar workers