If You are one; how do you keep up with the immense workload you get? When doing a project or something how early do you get up and how long sleep do you get??
Simple question just to know what it's like.
Move outside the Valley. My workload isn't any greater than any other profession's. I've worked places that demand 60, 70, 80 hour weeks in the past. Don't work for those companies. Outside the Valley, they're the minority. Be sure to ask in job interviews how many hours the team typically works, and save enough to quit if they start demanding it. To answer your question directly, I don't get an immense workload, I work 8–5, and if I don't get enough sleep it's because I'm stupid, not compelled by my job. Deadlines happen where I end up working 'til 8 for a week, but not more than once a year or so. If you insist on working in the Valley, there are companies with sane working hours, and you can find them. It'll just make job searching twice as hard, and mean you have to be that much better a candidate to get those jobs. The standard definitely rises with your skills. If you suck at your job, it's easier to demand more hours of you. But that's probably true of any profession. Just don't get caught in the Dunning–Kruger Effect and know your worth, and you'll be fine.
This is a great answer. I feel like people in SV live in this bubble where they think they are creating these great tools that "change the world" which can drive this idea that they need to stay up late and work all the time. Outside, while still plagued by this in some areas, you get to work with great technologies, work on cool stuff, and also play frisbee with your dog at the end of the day without your phone ringing off the hook.
Interesting will keep that in mind, have to go into that valley btw because I spend most my time on the Net, I don't use phones only as an alarm to wake up early and refine myself in Web Programming and to prepare for Varsity. I hope
Programming since 1982. Programming is a blue-collar job. If you have the IQ, do not waste it in this industry, [Note: fast forward to 1h25m15s - @mk link is time stamped but here jumps to start] The entire interview is worth the view. He is such a sweetie. RIP.
I go back and forth on whether I think programming is a good career. Programming as a craft is a lot of fun. You can take pride in your craft, and that's always good. Computer science is fascinating and vast, so are are always exciting things happening and most of them you can recreate and play with on your desktop if you're so inclined. On the other, most of the things you can get paid to do are uninteresting at best, and things the world would be better off without at worst. But we get much more leniency from our employers than most workers, programmers having a reputation for being eccentrics and all (last month I got a good review and a very good raise from a man I'd told to get out of the way, shut the fuck up, and claim credit like a good little suit the week before. He did as I asked too.) , and almost all jobs are uninteresting at best and things the world would be better off without as worst.
What if the fun stuff you do in your free time is exactly what Mr BFV is talking about? nah I just personally feel pressured into doing just that for lack of social standards..
What if the fun stuff you do in your free time is exactly what Mr BFV is talking about? nah I just personally feel pressured into doing just that for lack of social standards..
Workload varies most places. You hear stories about the allnighters, but you're not doing that all the time, and unless you're at a startup or in games it's not even very common. We talk about them because we all do them occasionally so it's a shared experience, but most of the time we work a humane schedule like everyone else, and during slow periods we get to play on the clock. Sometimes I have to work business hours, so I wake up at 9, stop working at 5 because the only reason for me to be awake in the daytime is to talk to people who are frustrating to talk to and by 5 I'm done. Otherwise, I wake up around 6 pm, pick a task or two to do, and stop whenever I finish them, usually around 1 or 2 am. I go to sleep noonish.
I go thru cycles. If I have a fuck ton of work I need less sleep. If I don't have a ton of work, I can't seem to get motivated to work. It's annoying as fuck. Currently I'm sleeping about 1am-7am or 8am. I don't get out of bed until I need something on the computer. Before I met my fiance, I was sleeping maybe 3am to 7am. Maybe 8pm to midnight. Maybe both. It was a mess. I work 6 days a week but don't start til noon on Saturdays and sometimes take an afternoon off during the week. It all depends. Sundays are fun dys only. I use Trello for managing all the shit I have to get done. Everything in my life has a card. If it's not on there, it doesn't get done.
I live in Finland. 37.5 hours work week, and nobody expects you to work longer than that. You can be asked to do overtime, and, only if you agree, you're doing overtime and getting paid for it -- more than normal salary, it some cases 2 times (or 2.5?) more. Also: 5 weeks of paid vacations every year, and you are expected to take them. And paid sick leaves. This all helps a lot in managing workload, and, I believe, improves the productivity in the long run. Doing hobby projects is more of a challenge, though :) P.S. I have experience (over 15 years) in both being a programmer and in leading teams of programmers.
Hey Wolfmountain3. I am not a programmer but I am (was until I quit ha!) a system administrator and have been in the industry for 8 years. I can tell you that if you are getting a workload that is too much for you to handle, you need to TELL someone. I don't know if you use Agile+Scrums or any other sort of organizing tools in your team, but those meetings are opportunities to say "Hey you know I've been working on xyz for a while, does anyone have a second to help me jiggle my brain a little bit?" I appreciated it so much when other admins would step back and do that rather than just try to plow through on problems and turn them into perpetual fixes that never complete. You also need to make sure you are taking care of yourself. A lot of times people get into programming, computing, engineering, because they have FUN solving problems. So it can easily consume you to know there is something unfinished/that there is a deadline approaching. The truth is, there will always be something unfinished and there will always be a deadline approaching. Not that you shouldn't strive to finish before the deadline or finish that last bit of code. But make sure you are taking time AWAY from the problem (incidentally this helps SOLVE problems by freeing up your brain for a bit in my experience). Mostly my days consisted of finding any problems that needed triaging, assigning an order to those problems ************* Around 2 hours, including talking to those involved, reproducing results and updating bug Then fixing those problems if they were deemed immediate enough, OR putting them in the queue for the next sprint Around 3 hours depending on width and breadth (sometimes this would take an entire day) Then going through various user stories and finding out what I'd be working on to finish a project Around 1 hour The rest of the day would be spent working on projects and researching anything I needed for further information. Around 2 hours ******************* In addition to this I was scheduled to be on call for outages and emergencies. Sometimes this would mean weeks without a night of uninterrupted sleep (which created a strain on relationships). But this doesn't really apply to programmers as they mostly can deal with their issues by smartly creating a development/testing/production environment so that production doesn't have to be their problem (although in some places it can be!)
Thank you Everyone for sharing their experiences, needed an outline.
A pretty normal amount, honestly. 5-7 hours a night unless I'm having unrelated issues and I usually get to work around 7 AM. Occasionally things kick up when there's a project or production deadline approaching and I have to work overtime, and I have to be willing to pull what overtime is necessary if it gets that bad, especially if work hasn't gone as smoothly as planned, but I don't live life fueled by Red Bull and pixie stix most of the time... it's mainly pretty reasonable and regular. I could probably be a more dedicated worker but I don't get many complaints either. I work for an outsourcing company and they'd push me to the brink to get the most out of me if they had to, lol, but the company I'm contracted out to is big on emphasizing work-life balance and my immediate supervisors are great people. I just took short-notice PTO this week to take my dog to herding lessons, of all things (granted, it was a really good lesson).