HACKER Q&A
📣 no-dr-onboard

Let's be honest, how many hours do you work in a day?


No companies, no names. Just your role and the amount of time you actually work in a given 'workday'.

What do you do when you're not working on a workday?

IME, I've surveyed 2-3 colleagues over 5y across 3 different companies. We average about 3-4 hours of video games followed by web browsing, video watching, and maybe 3 hours of work total. I'm in security.

  👤 IceMetalPunk Accepted Answer ✓
I'm a financial tech senior web app dev. Some days I work 8-10 hours, others I spend a lot of time (even when not waiting for builds!) on things like Gizmodo... or Hacker News... If I had to estimate an average, I'd say.... 6-ish hours a day on average?
👤 fsflover
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581125

Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

1665 points by ConfessionTime 76 days ago | 1069 comments

👤 olvy0
On average, I'd say about 7 hours.

It depends on how you view "work" though. I'm a senior developer so most of my time is not spent coding.

Some of my time is spent doing support via emails, chats, remote desktop, or phone calls. I also write detailed status emails.

At least a hour a day or more is spent on the product's bug database, opening new bugs, going over new bugs users have opened, closing old ones, or updating the status of existing ones.

Some of my time is spent helping my team with tough deadlock debugging problems, or looking together on a dump from a customer machine, trying to find the fix, or helping them find the correct function for what they want to do. Or helping them with git, or with weird issues on their machine in general. Just yesterday an update by the IT dept broke our app and I helped hunt down the cause and helped with finding the solution (TBH another guy did most of the hard work, I just advised him).

Some of it is spent in meetings with meetings with internal users and/or their managers.

Some of it is spent with our QA team, trying to reproduce issues on their machines, or triaging new bugs and trying to reproduce them to assess their severity.

Some of it is spent on strategic discussions with my team lead about future directions or course changes.

Some of it is spent updating user manuals, or advising other people in the team who update them.

I also work from home, trying out new approaches in our code, some of them actually make it into our product.

So... when I'm not working I'll usually be reading HN... Or watching random music vids on youtube. Or reading news websites. I wish I had time left for video games, but I feel too tired after a typical day of work to invest in them.

👤 muzani
This is probably a biased question, because whenever I procrastinate, it will usually be here. There are days when I work 8 hours or more straight and I don't even think about visiting here.

But let's say about 4 hours/day. Days with a lot of meetings make it impossible to do maker work so I end up on here a lot more.

👤 throw_this_one
3 hours prob -- 30 min scrum, 30 mins support, 2 hours coding/analyzing jiras/thinking about what should/needs to be done.

Would never want to be a manager, they're in stupid meetings all day.

👤 schwartzworld
COVID has changed it. I used to spend the whole day at work to seem busy, now I am home and my kids are often home with me. Since Xmas break ended, they've had 2 weeks of mandatory quarantine, one of vacation and a few snow days. Now I spend a lot of my day planning what I'm going to build and maybe carving out 4 hours to actually write code.
👤 KYhu
About 7 hours, I'm quite satisfied with it.