996

All the engineers that I’ve worked with that were doing 12 hour x 6 days ended up being drags on the rest of the team. Their 2am fever dream garbage would hit prod, and then it’d take a full time support person to apologize to customers while two full time engineers wasted a week refactoring production into something that worked.

Anyway, I’ve noticed I can only work 6 hours if I write code myself, but can easily hit 10 hours vibe coding / reviewing / writing the tricky bits.

Has anyone tried 10-4 these days? It’s still 40 hours per week, but feels more sustainable.

10-4 is great because it removes fragmentation. It gives you one full, non-fragmented fresh day of life, rather than low-energy little bits in the evenings. It's way easier to do something meaningful with the day than with the bits.

To me this fragmentation removal also privided a surprising converse effect: for the 4 days I could think about work uninterrupted and guilt-free which put me in a state of sustained multi-day focus that provided tangible boost to the quality of my results.

For sure it's impossible to do concentrated work for 10 hours straight, but a typical job isn't only concentrated work. Onve you learn what your energy levels are through the day, and manage your workload accordingly and have discipline , it is perfectly possible to have sudtainable full-output 10 hour workdays.

Not for everyone, but definitely beneficial for those who know how to use it.

I tried 10-4 for 6 months at a company that had a mix of people working 4 and 5 days, it made me less productive and more burnt out as a senior engineer.

I have ~5 hours of productive creative energy per sleep, others may be different but that's me. Ideally I give 4 hours to the job, spend 4 hours reviewing/meeting/etc. and have 1 for myself. If I push myself beyond that, I start doing substandard work, so 10-4 meant I either did fewer hours of productive work per week, stole my personal creative hours, or delivered substandard work. I did all three depending on the week, but in any case my productivity overall suffered, that appeared in my peer reviews, and the stress slowly built up until I went back to working 5 days.

I’ve been the same way for most of my career. If I’m using a coding assistant, I end up doing 2-3 hours of hard thinking and 7-8 of babysitting. Unlike meetings, I don’t have to use any emotional/social energy with the coding assistant.

10-4 is great, but that’s only 30 hours a week. Where did you get 40?

10h 4 days / week

Pfffft.

Exactly what I thought. 10am-4pm is sane, 10 hours a day is still crazy, but I guess to employees talking about 996, in comparison it seems a good deal.

I have been self employed for 12+ years, for 9am-1pm is a very productive day, and anyone that claim they can do much more actual knowledge work than that either is pushing papers or has a lot of down time and faffing about.

Also I’d rather work fewer hours 6 days a week, than pushing way past my productivity cramming everything in 4 days.