Is it unreasonable to expect someone being paid 300K a year to work more than an average of eight hours a day every once in a while?
It's hilarious how when there is a general article about developer productivity, the comments section is full of people claiming how programming is not like manual labor that you can do for eight hours straight, and that most work in bursts of a few hours of intense intellectual activity surrounded by taking time off.
How many software engineers can, hand to heart, claim honestly that they put in 8 full productive working hours day after day the way a cashier or warehouse worker does?
Very few, and I don't think it's a reasonable parallel.
I don't think 8 hours of cognitively demanding, yet physically sedentary work, is part of our human nature.
If you frame it in the sense that we are just monkeys in shoes, it wouldn't be at all reasonable to expect someone to crouch in the grass and be highly alert for hours at a time.
The corollary would be a job that's physically engaging (read, not demanding) but cognitively basic, e.g. moving boxes in a warehouse, gardening.
The difference is one form of labor has leveraged output (writing code), vs linear output (moving boxes).
You are completely right but that is precisely my point.
Counting hours for a job like programming is pointless. If you also agree that it's not reasonable to expect 8 continuous hours of intellectual labor, it should also not be reasonable on part of employees to be wedded to their 8-hour-workday. No one seems to have a problem chit-chatting at work, or engaging in other forms of recreation, but everyone seems to love counting hours when it comes to reasonable work expected from them.
I notice this in my job working with a team in Europe that my company has acqui-hired (this is relevant because until then they were a purely European company in terms of composition and culture). We are a pretty standard SV startup in terms of culture, we are in the office for ~9 hours a day (that includes lunch etc.) but we trust our employees to manage their work, which includes the self-awareness of knowing when you have not done enough during the day and compensating by working a bit more whenever you see fit.
In contrast, the European team does strict 8 hours a day (including lunch), does NOT have better average productivity than ours, but gets very upset at the occasional expectation that they meet deadlines with similar 'vigor' as their SV counterparts. I'm sure the same people would complain about pay disparity between the bay area and Europe and find it unfair.
>> How many software engineers can, hand to heart, claim honestly that they put in 8 full productive working hours day after day the way a cashier or warehouse worker does?
Every dev that I have ever worked with that was worth a professional recommendation meets the criteria that you are laying out.
That's over more than 30 years in the industry so I talking about at least a 150-200 devs over the years that I have had the pleasure of working with.
Are you actually in software? I am serious in that question because your skepticism strikes me as out-of-touch in some way.
I am very well in software, and given your seniority it makes sense that people you have encountered have been the more serious type who treat programming as like any other job. I'd just welcome you to look at the next HN thread about dev productivity pr to find several people proudly claiming the opposite of your experience.
It's hilarious how when there is a general article about developer productivity, the comments section is full of people claiming how programming is not like manual labor that you can do for eight hours straight, and that most work in bursts of a few hours of intense intellectual activity surrounded by taking time off.
How many software engineers can, hand to heart, claim honestly that they put in 8 full productive working hours day after day the way a cashier or warehouse worker does?