Comment by _Donny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Donny | Hacker News Reader

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I really enjoyed the story, but it really scares me that I might end up the same way.

I am a CS student, but I have had a lot of student jobs related to my studies. At most workplaces, they appreciated my skills and abilities, but being able to only work 1 day a week, the tasks I get assigned are not of any real value to the company, and I suspect my managers never really cared if I finished them. Since nobody cared about what I did, I quickly got demotivated, and I usually ended up browsing Hot Questions on SO, IRC, and HN. These sites look somewhat relevant, and did not cause any suspicion, like Facebook or Twitter.

Now I am soon to finish my degree, and get a full-time job. However, I am really anxious whether I am actually able to work for 8 hours in succession every day, 5 days a week. University is a lot of work, but it is scattered throughout the day. I am not sure if I have ever programmed for more than 2 hours in succession. Programming 8 hours a day seems like an incredibly burden, and mentally unbearable...

Nobody has to program for more than 2 hours at a time (unless you want to). In practice, actually, your time is half coding (or less) and half meetings, design, testing, writing documentation... as you gain experience and motivation, you may actually come to desire opportunities where you can write code for 2 hours without interruption.

I spent half of my first 6 months working as a full time dev fretting that someone would find me out - as I couldn't do more than an hour or two of proper dev in one day, I couldn't make my brain do more and a lot of time was wasted.

But over time I spoke to my colleagues and _nobody_ does more than that really. We end up spending the other time doing less intensive, administrational stuff where possible, or just slacking off. It's fine, if the work output we were doing wasn't enough they would have fired us forever ago.

In a broad sense, 40-hour weeks can be pretty draining, but welcome to modern work in the US. ;) (We meet at the pub at 6:00.) But more specifically, it’s not eight solid hours of coding. Sometimes it’s meetings, sometimes it’s code/PR review, sometimes it’s design, sometimes it’s documentation, and sometimes it really is coding. But it all depends on your role, your team, and your company. And even if you get a good mix, it’s not necessarily evenly distributed. Sometimes I have days where I pretty much do just code, and other rather painful (but not unnecessary and not unwelcome!) days that are all meetings and emails.

I hope that’s somewhat reassuring. And if it doesn’t work out, hopping fairly frequently isn’t that big of a deal. But do try to limit that because outside of the Bay Area, a few year-long stints starts to not look good.

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