Productivity and the Workweek (2000)
I&#x27;d be interested to know if other software developers feel their current working hours are good&#x2F;positive?<p>From feedback I&#x27;ve had I&#x27;m generally regarded as pretty good at my job and highly productive but my current working hours leave me completely drained, to the point I go home and collapse on the sofa, make dinner and go to bed. And that&#x27;s off an 8.5 hour day. It&#x27;s at the point now where it&#x27;s extremely likely I&#x27;ll leave software for good.<p>Software to me is extremely mentally demanding and draining, it requires short burts of extreme concentration, but what is more draining is making up the remaining 4-5 hours looking busy. My experience of software work is that it doesn&#x27;t scale linearly with number of hours. Unless you reach flow which is extremely rare in a business setting (thanks open-office &#x2F; scrum) you can get the work done very quickly and then have large periods of unproductive time.<p>It&#x27;s my experience that at most 2-3 hours is productively spent, the rest is wasted.<p>I meet software developers who advocate for, or don&#x27;t mind, 8, 9, 10 hour days and I simply don&#x27;t understand it, it&#x27;s alien to me. Are they being productive all that time?<p>Edit: to clarify (since I&#x27;ve posted on this topic elsewhere today) the 8.5 hours include a 1 hour lunch break and Fridays are slightly shorter.