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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.

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.