I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I’m honest I’m probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.
Usually about 10-11 hours 5 days a week (9to5ish + 2-3 hours during the evening), and 2 or 3 hours a day during the weekend. I actually like my jobs and this allows me to take longer vacations during summer and winter.
That’s a lot mate, how many weeks off can you get with this per year?
I get around 7-8 weeks off overall. Also, I will usually work 50-60 hours a week for a few weeks then take a few days off. I kind of enjoy working on stuff during the evening so once the kid is asleep I usually work for a few hours while listening to albums or videos.
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?
definitely
the factory must grow
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.
Btw, meetings are work. If you spend a lot of time in meetings that does count as actual work.
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.
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.
Fuck you.
Sincerely, Blue collar workers
I work in the LTL freight industry in the US so I’m supposed to be working about 8 hours but lately it’s been about 10 and change
Good news is I get time and a half whenever I pass 8 hours on a shift
Bad news is my sleep quality has gone to shit
As an aside the reason for all the OT is because of YRC going under, suddenly all the freight they were hauling is getting off loaded onto other companies.
The boss today said that the mandatory OT is, “Only going to last for the foreseeable future.” He has such a way with words, the moment he speaks he just kills the vibe.
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
Mostly 2-3 hours of an 8 hour day. Once a week I have to go in guns blazing for 5 straight hours of work in a 10 hour shift.
I get squeezed for every minute. If I work faster - then good - do more.
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)Doesn’t working overnight have ramifications?
for most people it does. For me, while they may exist outside of my awareness, I am nevertheless unaware of them. What health issues I had been experiencing came about as a result of other major life circumstances, and i’ve seen some pivotal improvements since some of those circumstances have been amended.
I always was a natural night-owl. I’m always more alert at night, and get eepy sweepy after the sun comes up, so it suits my proclivities perfectly.
I’ve been at it for five years already, so, if it’s a chronic issue, guess I’ll find out after another 20 years of it!
On average, about 5hrs a day. 2hrs on a slow day and 7hrs on a fast day.
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.
The biggest lesson I learned is to take control of my time and decide how to spend it. An 8-hour workday in a vacuum mostly gets filled with questionable tasks, it’s almost like a theater filled with actors going through the motions of work, without really doing any. Life isn’t too short by itself, but activities like that make it too short.
It’s not something I can do for another person. You’ll have to adopt yourself.
Well, there was the harrowing part in the middle where I was bankrupt in the developing world and nearly died of cholera. That wasn’t a super fun few years.
…and if we’re being honest, my level of obsession with engineering stuff would be considered a mental disorder, if it wasn’t so productive. Like, if I had the same level of interest in 90s sitcoms instead of machine learning or assembly language, I’d surely be considered mentally ill – but it’s just one subject instead of another.
It’s weird where we draw the line, isn’t it?
Depends on how you define work. I do my dayjob for maybe 2 hours a day at most and then freelance with the rest of my working day. so I’d average 5 hours of work a day betwen the two jobs.
It really depends. I do catering so some days there just isn’t a job. When I have a gig it’s usually 8-10 hours, but only maybe 2-6 of those are actually cooking and serving, the rest is logistics, prep and cleaning.
In an 8 hour day, I’d say probably 7 hours
The other hour probably bathroom trips, coffee/water breaks, occasional quick chats with coworkers throughout the day
I can’t hit a full 8 hours actual work unless I do a 9 hour day.
Sometimes I have a shorter lunch break or try not to poop until I get home lol, so I can hit 8 hours quicker
In German it’s illegal to work more than 6 hours without a break of at least 30 minutes. As an employee at least
I get 20 minutes break per day, but it’s not enough.
I set a timer for everything I do. I drink about 3 instant coffee per day and it’s roughly 3 minutes to make each coffee from leaving my desk, going to kitchen and returning. So that’s 10min already
Toilet time also counts as break time, and I usually need longer than 10min throughout the day.
Chatting to co-workers about personal life also break time and throughout the day with small conversations that’s easily 20min
The boss has never spoken to be about some days I record 1 hour break time… But I used to record toilet time separately and they said that’s too personal for time logging, and I should be recording toilet time as break time.
So they are watching, and I try reduce things that count as break time. Or work an extra 15min if I spent too long in toilet etc
Oh also didn’t mention lunch break because it’s not “on the clock” anyway. So you are physically present at work 8.5 hours but with 30min lunch. I assume that’s standard set up (lunch is unpaid time)
Yes sorry I was just counting paid work time. We have half an hour lunch break but it’s not included in the work hours. I assume that’s normal. E.g you are physically at work 8.5 hours with 30min unpaid lunch break in the middle, so total 8 “work hours”
