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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.
It fluctuates based on workload, but I find myself working anywhere from 4-5 hours a day to basically nonstop during my workday (9 hrs). I do think most people are really only capable of doing "good" work, meaning being at their most productive, for about 3 hours a day though. The rest of the time is spent slogging through and putting out mediocre work, just to get it done.
The same for me (but 8 hour workday). Honestly, I couldn't do the job if the working non-stop days were the default. I am wasted after such a high-stress day, so I need it to fluctuate. I also don't feel bad on days where I do less, because I know I do a 110% on the other days. A workday is simply too long to be productive the whole time and the workload usually varies.
Straight answer up front: sometimes my entire ten hour shift has less than 10 minutes of work in it.
I must confess, my job is a bit of an edge case because not everybody wants to do it.
I work third shift, and usually exclusively the weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights, 11pm to 9am).
4 ten-hour shifts.
and during these shifts... bruh most of the time I'm chilling
I'm reading ebooks, I'm watching anime or youtube, I'm chatting with friends on discord
most of my job is having a pulse while babysitting an empty building.
the part of my job that makes the money, though, is when the phone rings.
I work at a towing company, and I dispatch.
When people are calling me, it's almost exclusively because shit's fucked up.
I am in charge of sending some unfuckery their way.
Most of the calls are from companies though: Motor freight lines like Ryder, Penske, Fleetnet, UPS, FedEx, and a few other carriers that are even less customer-facing; motor clubs like Swoop, Urgent.ly, AAA, NationSafe; or insurance companies like Allstate or GEICO.
What they want to hear is how soon and how much and knowing how to rapidly generate this information while remaining accurate is where most of the expertise lies.
Then there's the police calls.
When there has been an accident and a disabled vehicle (and its pieces) must be removed from obstructing the roadway, that's us.
When some dumb bastard drives drunk and subsequently gets rightly caught, we impound their shit.
When a stolen vehicle is found, we recover it.
Whilst my opinion regarding cops (pigs) has evolved (fuck the police) quite a bit (they're fucking bastards) in recent years (every last one of them), my guys do the NOT Standing On Someone's Neck bits of it AFTER the dust has settled and the blood is done being spilled (and the bullets have stopped flying...) so generally we're one of the responders on the make-someone's-life-LESS-horrible side of the curve. Which feels pretty nice.
There are the rare occasions where a major shitshow evolves and I'm triaging calls and coordinating multiple assets in the field though, and that's when the pay really feels worth it.
Presently I'm 5 years in and making 20/hr
Literally at this very second, it's a wednesday night/thursday morning and I've already DONE my 40 hours this week - I'm here on overtime covering the other third shift dispatcher while they're out, and each of these hours is worth $$$THIRTY BUCKS HELL YEAAAA$$$
it's not enough to afford rent nowadays of course, but eh, i inherited the house from my father...
(and want to transform it into a group home for low income persons and families if I can get it organized right)
(i'll be taking a page from history and trying to turn my house into something like a multigenerational compound except for people who aren't strictly related by blood)
Multigenerational housing for the win! Also, neat job, congrats!
Same, as a programmer I would guess 2-3h at most. I mean actual coding with that, meetings and discussions take up the rest of the day.
I work in an office 40 hours a week 8 hours a day Monday to Friday. Let me clarify, though.
No matter who asks that's my answer and that's how I expect to be paid for my time. There are days where I don't have as many tasks to do and maybe I don't have something to do here and there but during my scheduled time I'm always available if something comes up. If I'm making myself available that's still working. If I can't just leave work or just ignore things on my to do list then I'm working. I think more people need to think of it this way. Just because you're not actively working on a task every second of working hours doesn't mean you're not working.
Edit: just wanted to add that working on your skills especially with something related to your job that doesn't necessarily complete a task for work also counts as time worked in my eyes as well as my boss. I'm very open about training time and always keeping on top of my craft. Not sure if this is normal but it ought to be.
I've had (no shit) a week or 2 go by where I've worked maybe a few hours.
I am on call quite frequently and when things do come in I'm on it immediately, but a lot of the time I am just trying to find things to do. I've even asked to be given more work and I'm trying to get into development during my downtime.
I think I'm an outlier though. My role is to maintain a particular service and when nothing is broken, I'm stuck with nothing to do.
After years of hard work, shitty work, long hours, working 2 jobs, graveyard shifts and long commutes.. it's kinda nice to have a break.
I used to make 80k in a career I hated working 55 hours a week (salary). I now make 50-75k (lots of OT available) working about 20 hours a week and watching Kodi/listening to audiobooks the rest of the time. I feel like I definitely upgraded.
About 7.5 hours out of an 8 hour shift. I work a job where I am physically actually working the entire day except for my breaks. I work in healthcare.
Sometimes I wish I had an office job because I hear things like this and sometimes get a bit jealous. But I am still satisfied with my job and I feel that I am compensated well.
I have an office job and I work 8 hours a day programming. It's nice to be able to clock out consistently at 5 but I really don't get much down time. I rarely get my full hour for lunch.
It's not bad work and I like my job but working 3 hours would get you fired here.
lately between 9 and 11. it is often quite miserable, and it is an absolute tragedy that 'reduced hours' hasn't seemed to be a goal of unions in ages.
Theoretically unions are unionized workers who represent all workers. So they should do surveys from time to time about what the current concerns of the workers are.
At least thats how it works in Switzerland.
When I used to work in the office I probably worked about 5 hours a day at most. The rest was spent on personal projects, fucking around, whatever
Now that I work from home it varies between two and four.
My production is exactly the same.
IT in a building with less than 100 computers. If nothing is broken, I have nothing to. I have gone up to a week without anyone having anything to do other than create a few new accounts. 10/10 get paid to show up and know where the stash of new mice are.
Sometimes the job is just to be there, and to be the guy that knows what to do when things go wrong.
It's not like firefighters are just running from one fire to the next.
A big part of my job is administrating a herd of VMs, license and relay servers, SQL servers, web apps and android devices. If I have nothing to do, then it means Im doing my job properly. I do try to spend at least half my free time developing work-adjacent skills from online resources and bantering with chatgpt, tho.
I do try to spend at least half my free time developing work-adjacent skills
Is Factorio a work related skill?
Nice try Mr Manager! I'm not falling for that! Nice effort though, making an account on the threadiverse just to catch me out!
I of course totally work every hour of those 40 hours a week.. .
Damn it. I was targeting you specifically because I notice you using Lemmy instead of working. That's when I decided to make a lemmy account and write hundreds of comments. Of cause they're all written with ChatGPT. Who in their right mind would write over 500 comments in less than 2 months?
It was all a setup to ask this final question and expose you. You just destroyed months of work within a few minutes
You need to wake up earlier in the morning to catch me! :P
nice try boss
I, too, am 100% productive at all times. Even when I'm not on the clock.
Where is everyone getting these jobs? Even if it's slow I am still doing my job every few minutes unless systems are down.
As a software developer I do not count sitting in meetings as productive work. Maybe 2-3h a day on average I'm left alone, in a state of flow and am really getting stuff done.
I work 12 hour shifts doing 911 calltaking overnight. Call volume fluctuates wildly, as do the length of my calls. I've had nights where our supervisors get nervous that the phones aren't ringing and start doing test calls to make sure everything is working right, and I've had nights where the phone never seems to stop. On average I probably handle in the ballpark of 100 calls a night to make it a nice round number.
In a perfect world, I could handle each of those calls in probably about 2 minutes or less if every caller is calm and cooperative, prepared to answer all of my questions, and the situation isn't actively evolving while I'm on the phone, but that's not always the case, I've had some extreme outliers I've been on with for over an hour, I have some that are less than a minute, and everything in between, so with no real data to back it up I'm going to say it averages to about 5 minutes a call to keep the math easy.
So about 500 minutes of actually being on the phone, or 8β hours.
That actually sounds a bit high to me, I probably went a little high on both of my guestimates, but that's probably pretty close when I figure in the other little stuff I have to do besides actually taking calls, re-listening to calls, adding additional notes once the call has ended, email, going over my QA reviews, training stuff, etc.
But except for the outliers when we get really busy, that's mostly broken up pretty well. I usually get at least a couple minutes between calls, I get a few minutes to mess around on my cell phone, do some reading, and when things die down later at night I can even bust out my switch and game a little between calls. My agency doesn't really care what we do between calls as long as we're not being disruptive and can put it down when the phone rings.
It actually helped me from learning the 5 Ws in kindergarten.
Where? What? How many ("Wie viele" in German)? What? Wait.
I don't have to make a call often, but all the more important is that I have that in the back of my head. I go through the first four points and then I shut up to for further questions, instructions or just a "okay, got that, sending someone".
I think that is something that everybody should learn early everywhere. Everyone can only benefit from people making short, focused emergency calls.
I refuse to begin any new tasks in the final 2 hours of my day.
In the first 6, I work anywhere from 0 - 100% of that time. Rarely more than 50.
Depends on a given week. Some weeks itβs 8 hour days morning to evening and some weeks itβs finish all my work for the week on Wednesday before noon.
IT is fun, I do anywhere from 2 hours to 16 hours in my 8hr shift depending on what the day brings me. 16 hours is the extreme rare, of course, and either outage or project based.
Id bet this month's mortgage payment that there's an inverse relationship between how much time people spend actually working in an 8 hour day and how much they get paid.
Officially, it should be 7 hours a day. But normally I work 5-6 hours. The rest are wasted on distractions and context switching. But deep work (i.e. actually getting things done) is normally 2-3 hours.
I also count meetings and chatting with colleagues are actual work. Those sessions might seem superficial but the way we collaborate with others is also important.
I'm in healthcare so 8 hour day probably has 9 hours of work in it. Lunch break if I'm lucky.
Ugh this thread makes me upset. I have a contract for 18 hrs per week and you bet your ass I'm really working 99% of the time that I'm clocked in. And then people ask me why I don't work more hours, but looking at these comments it seems I'm actually right on par with other people who get paid for 30-40 hours per week, when it comes to productive time spent.
I have some admittedly unusual work habits.
I spend all of my day working, but the catch is that maybe only 3-5hrs a day is doing work for my clients. A lot of that 3-5 hrs is spent automating client work, so I can spend less time on it tomorrow.
The rest I work on or study whatever feels important or interesting at the moment. I'd say I spend an additional 3-6 hours a day on that. This is the secret behind always being able to say "Oh, I have a thing that works a little like that (but not very like that -- so I'll need a budget)" whenever a client wants to do something new.
Often it's little sequential puzzles I invent and then solve in my head. For example today, my goal was to find the way to take the rolling average of a certain number of bytes, with the minimum number of CPU cycles (and no 'divide' instruction). If this and 2 or 3 other puzzles have decent solutions, I'll be able to do realtime audio analysis on a cheaper and smaller chip than "should" be possible -- although I have no practical implementation in mind at this time. If it comes up one day I'll look like a real hero though, surely :D
In principle, I work 7 days a week, because I have a hard time remembering what day of the week it is. I just track the day of the month. This is much less stressful because there's always tomorrow to get something done. When I don't have "work", I just solve puzzles mentally all day or try to build random things.
I also allocate about an hour a day to answer questions on Lemmy / Reddit, mainly about engineering (I classify this as a from of "work"). That exposes me to new problems that I might not encounter in my formal workplace. Also it helps me learn to be patient with people that want to do something technical, but have varying levels of ability.
Back when I did labor work I found I maxed out on efficient work at 6 hours. I couldn't physically do more without increasing my injury risk or doing less quality work.
Then I started doing more office work and desk work. I found I typically would be able to commit 6 hours of honest work before I'd start losing focus and become prone to distractions.
As a neurosurgeon I work more than 90 percent of the time I spend in the hospital.. I work about 50-60 hours per week.
Nice try, Boss Man!
I spend maybe 30 minutes doing actual work on average. Then once a blue moon I get off my ass and finish my assigned projects in like 3 hours and continue to do nothing.
So I work 12 but because I'm a night nurse a lot of the time it's just being there and monitoring, then occasionally doing something if the monitoring indicates the need. And particularly in psychiatry, a lot of the monitoring is passive. Sure I'll go personally check on people every few hours (the techs do 15 minute checks) but a lot of my monitoring is poking my head out of the nursing station to whisper-yell "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT NOISE" or jumping up when the floorstaff move too fast (some of our security who know me well will actually frantically gesture at me to sit the fuck back down they're just showing their buddy a meme they got excited about).