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does anyone actually have a straight no-bullshit answer to what a 40-hour work week for a remote white-collar job is supposed to actually look like concretely? i don't believe most people can do e.g. serious technical research 8 hours a day, maybe 4 max. what's the other 4?
@QiaochuYuan Most white collar jobs arenāt 8 hours of paradigmatic-letter-of-the-job-scope production. Thereās lots of collaboration, lots of scope fuzziness, lots of opportunities to do different things, just like there would be in any project. Maybe this is just your point.
@QiaochuYuan Emails, mtgs, phone calls, texts, slack, contributing to or reading collab docsāwhere these have diverse forms and purposes, just like normal human conversationsājumping in and helping with something tangential, etc.
@QiaochuYuan I mean, when processing cases for govt benefits you take calls and fill out forms- with occasional meetings in between it all. We get PIPs if we're not processing cases fast enough and that affects bonuses or in severe cases can be fodder for building up a case to fire you
Sure. My cousin starts work at 8:30 after taking the kids to school. At noon he stops for lunch. At 3 he picks up the kids and starts the afternoon Ubers to various events. He gets back to work at night after dinner and parenting. He works at least one full day most weekends. About 5-6 hrs of actual work a day at best.
@QiaochuYuan discussing planned trips to the barber and such on slack: 'out for a half hour picking up X' 'oops doorbell, probably am***n package, brb!' 'got the plumber here, won't make 15:00 catch-up sorry' 'shattered for today, will do some coding after dinner, see u tmrw at standup!'
@QiaochuYuan Lot of context sharing and bullshitting with coworkers to turn the relationships non transactional, simmering thinking time for the job itself, and in more senior roles sense making and connecting people in the org.
@QiaochuYuan they don't. you have made two errors here, first by painting too broad of a brush with "white-collar jobs", and second by not seeing the economic incentives at play. anybody who is actually trying to max out ROI per hour like that is not working as a 40 hour FTE.
I think itās more āassigning 40 hoursā to the task at hand thatās important. I know that in-office 2-3 hours a day was always wasted by bosses and coworkers chatting with us or doing stupid āworkplace bonding.ā At home I do more in 4 hours than I would most days in office, but those are going to not necessarily align with the team that may rely on me so ābeing availableā is what Iād assign the other time too. If someone had a problem with me not being productive or clicking and clacking the whole 40 they can go to hell and Iāll get money elsewhere.
@QiaochuYuan IME: Meetings: 20-60% of the 8hrs Recovering between meetings: 15m per Whatever is left: actual work I'm an analyst, though, so a more technical role might have less meetings and more time to focus on productive work.
@QiaochuYuan I think 4 hours daily of serious technical research is much higher than the average. I would say 2-3 hours daily for administrative tasks (meetings, emails, maintenance stuff) with remainder allocated to whatever is urgent is typical
@QiaochuYuan My job offers the option of working remotely, and while most people are largely in the office, most of the work is data entry, engineering drawings and emails/messages and other technical work. But even in an office nobody is actually working 8 hours flat out every day
@QiaochuYuan Those types of jobs are more task / output oriented than your framing kinda suggests (ie, if not each hour of work creates x amount of output). Your job is to create a document or follow up with a bunch of people to make sure theyāre on track. Being remote meansā¦
@QiaochuYuan I'll have 1-3 hours of calls, and then there's always little low-intensity tasks like checking in on things, writing reports, getting back to people, etc. About half is high-intensity tasks like research, design, or coding, depending on the current workload. Can vary widely tho.
@QiaochuYuan There's an old Dilbert cartoon where he's asked to account for his time, and he does so, something like this "Timesheet includes four hours sitting at my desk staring out of the window, but I have not included the time I spent in the shower thinking about circuit design"
@QiaochuYuan Meetings take up most of the time for our company. I actually have worked pretty hard to get them down to only like 25% of my time (bless my manager for being my "meeting shield") and the rest of the time I'm responding to a queue of alerts or tuning our systems.
@QiaochuYuan You can work 60 hrs/ week creatively and efficiently. Just 1) plan ahead and block off time. 2) stick to it no matter what, only adjust as *necessary*. 3) don't do anything "fun" during those blocks (no twitter breaks). 4) when it's time to do nothing, do nothing (actually chill)
@QiaochuYuan I typically put up 4-6 actual billable hours per day. The rest tends to be admin, learning, meetings, service, doomscrolling, etc. There's enough work to do 8 billable hours per day, but a lot of it's intense, and I can't sustain it every week.
@QiaochuYuan Meetings. If you're lucky you get 2 hours of meetings, 2-3 hours of technical work, an hour of answering ad hoc requests. If you're not you get 6 hours of meetings with the expectation you will also do 6 hours of technical work-which no one actually does, cutting corners instead
@QiaochuYuan For me it varies. Crunch time itās min 8 hours per day doing serious work. Can be like 14. But that burns me out. Most days itās 2-4 hours of serious work then a few hours of meetings and such. So, exactly the same as in the office but I have an extra 1-2 hours.
@QiaochuYuan this varies so much. one thing about high performing companies is that they really do select for people who are doing hard work for 10 hours a day. it isn't fair. you get yelled at for saying it's possible. but I've been at the 2h of real work a day places and the 10h places
I worked a 60 - 70+ week while overseeing both Tech and Product for a worldwide team. Worked M - F plus Sat night and Sun am. Some research but mostly working with ICs on code and user interfaces (zoom calls all day.) Sample daily schedule: Get up 7am, team calls started 7:30, oversee daily sprints and project calls until 11:30. Afternoon: 1:1s and PM/Design calls to work on new features, put out fires as needed, do vendor calls, interview potential new hires. Day slows down towards 7:30pm. Twice weekly record a company branded podcast. If needed, from 11:30pm - 1:30am do team calls with Pakistani teams.
@QiaochuYuan Meetings take up some time. When youāre out of energy / donāt feel like working you might look at internet, chat with people (In person or online), read email, read a relevant book, go on a walk, work at a slower pace.
@QiaochuYuan If big Corp, learning about what the Corp plans are via automated email lists and 100+ person meetings, complaining about work to build comradery with subordinates peers and superiors, documenting what work you have done for performance review and other internal metrics
@QiaochuYuan Reading and writing code, customer req docs, prospects, tools improvement, etc. There's always stuff to do and one is always behind. One negative of WFH: Tend to lose track of time and working longer hours. š
@QiaochuYuan I think i get 6-8 hours serious brainpower hours per day that I can allocate to anything w 100% efficiency, then about 6-8 hours just reading things I find interesting (which often does supplement serious work)
@QiaochuYuan I find it very easy to work 12 hours a day of uninterrupted work. My wife gets pissed, but I find that Iām juggling 10 different components that all have an order of operations and dependencies that I find really enjoyable. Itās like legos for adults.
@QiaochuYuan This is the problem for remote consultants, because we only bill for real hours worked. So while the employee sits there for eight hours (meetings, chit chat, surfing the web), we get it done in four (higher hourly rate, but in total can end up being less, plus no benefits).
It's just like a regular office job in that sometimes you are slammed and there is not enough time in the day and sometimes things slow down and you bullshit around. The bullshitting around tends to be getting stuff done around your house instead of trying to find the one or two people in your office you actually want to hang with.
@QiaochuYuan 10am drop a gm in chat 10am - 12pm drink my coffee, catch up on slack / email, quick chats 12pm - 1pm lunch & a walk 1pm - 4pm heads down coding 4-5:30pm gym, shower 5:30pm - 2am coding, takeout at desk thatās the schedule 4d/wk. 2d/wk ends at 7, sunday rest
For me it looks like 30-70 hours in front of my PC.. - Engineering (applying tech to solve new problems) - Operations (infra migrations/simple code migrations to support infra changes/etc) - Dev team meetings - Staff meetings - Joint client mgmt/engineering meetings - Coding - DBA - Sys Admin generalist stuff - Lots of chat w/ other devs to hammer out interface details, requirements, constraints, etc, etc.
@QiaochuYuan 'Humans max-out at around five hours of creative work in one day' according to Deep Work, by Cal Newport. I agree. The rest is admin: which should be slashed or automated as much as possible because it's a waste of human effort.