My personal experience has been that it’s almost impossible to consistently put in more than about 2 hours/day of highly focused ‘flow’ coding. I was previously worried that there was something wrong, but at this pace I’m able to complete big projects on a regular basis. Could this be normal even for productive programmers?
I have heard a lot of people say that around 3-4 hours is typical. (That is also the average for professional writers, so it makes sense for that to generalize to other kinds of creative work.)
2 hours a day seems low, but you might be unusually effective. My experience is that the duty cycle is closer to 50⁄50, and lower with overtime, the latter being common, especially in startups.
The only way I can get actual 8 hours of focused programming work is if it’s the sort of tweaker monkey work where I just try a whole bunch of combinations trying to achieve the thing I’ve already figured I want to do. Examples of this are long debugging sessions, writing FFI bindings and writing an assembly subroutine. If I actually need to keep figuring stuff out, 2 to 4 hours is generally the amount I can manage.
0 votes
Overall karma indicates overall quality.
0 votes
Agreement karma indicates agreement, separate from overall quality.
From both my experience and what little research I’ve done on this topic, programmers do not program 8+ hours per day.
1 vote
Overall karma indicates overall quality.
0 votes
Agreement karma indicates agreement, separate from overall quality.
Do you have any more information on this?
My personal experience has been that it’s almost impossible to consistently put in more than about 2 hours/day of highly focused ‘flow’ coding. I was previously worried that there was something wrong, but at this pace I’m able to complete big projects on a regular basis. Could this be normal even for productive programmers?
1 vote
Overall karma indicates overall quality.
0 votes
Agreement karma indicates agreement, separate from overall quality.
I have heard a lot of people say that around 3-4 hours is typical. (That is also the average for professional writers, so it makes sense for that to generalize to other kinds of creative work.)
1 vote
Overall karma indicates overall quality.
0 votes
Agreement karma indicates agreement, separate from overall quality.
2 hours a day seems low, but you might be unusually effective. My experience is that the duty cycle is closer to 50⁄50, and lower with overtime, the latter being common, especially in startups.
0 votes
Overall karma indicates overall quality.
0 votes
Agreement karma indicates agreement, separate from overall quality.
The only way I can get actual 8 hours of focused programming work is if it’s the sort of tweaker monkey work where I just try a whole bunch of combinations trying to achieve the thing I’ve already figured I want to do. Examples of this are long debugging sessions, writing FFI bindings and writing an assembly subroutine. If I actually need to keep figuring stuff out, 2 to 4 hours is generally the amount I can manage.