Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?

I’ll answer straight to the questions

37 hrs/week, of which 3/day might be solid work, the rest is eye rolling and facepalming about things like salesforce, oracle and similar horror straight from hell.

Not affected by layoffs, working for a company that is a moat, that virtually prints money.

AI saves me time as a context-heavy stackoverflow at hand, with high signal to noise ratio. It won’t replace me any time soon. Excited for AGI though, I could use intelligent colleagues.

Throwaway, for obvious reasons:

I work in a totally chaotic, mismanaged department of a major university. The total work time is about 3-4 hours per week of a 40 hours paid job.

I did not want the job initially due to my work ethics, my need of challenges, and low learning curve.

Now I am happy I took it. Life can be good. One can be good to oneself. Turns out I am in a happy spot.

The job allowed me to start a therapy and work on myself.

And it allowed me to fight for my daughter in front of court, and stop an evil attempt of child alienation from the side of the ex wife. Super dad mode = ON.

And it will allow me to restart my life from a safe position after a brutal couple of years.

If I knew that this job would be forever … hell … I’d take it.

About 3/4 of my day is meetings, so I have about 1-2 hours per day to actually get work done. Generally this means we all work through our meetings and both the work and our attention to the meetings suffers.

A good day is when there is a 2-3 hour uninterrupted slot and I can get about that much deep work done. But that only happens a few days of the month.

As an entrepreneur who mostly works independently, my work-life balance isn’t the typical 9-to-5 setup. Instead, it’s more like a “vertical” balance on a calendar, where I work intensely for 3-6 months (roughly 12 hours a day, no weekends, and minimal social life) and then take an equal amount of time off to relax and recharge.

I often think of it as a sailor’s lifestyle – you head out to sea for a while, where the work is tough but life is straightforward, and then you return home to enjoy a well-deserved break.

This kind of schedule works well for solo projects, but it can be challenging when collaborating with others. That’s why I’m now focusing on building larger projects that utilize AI – it won’t mind if I step away from work for an extended period.

Also, since I frequently switch between tech stacks, AI is incredibly helpful for catching up with new frameworks and programming languages. For example, if I were to write in JavaScript again, I’d need to refresh my memory on basic tasks like checking array length. While I can do this on Stack Overflow, using an AI-powered coding assistant like Copilot is much more efficient and convenient.

Would you mind expanding more on your experience? Which type of projects do you work on? What do you do during your time off? How are you doing financially?

I work a regular 9to5 and want to switch to a similar schedule (basically work during the winter and then take every summer off). Sounds nice in theory but I wonder what it actually feels like.

I will start with a biggest downside – it can get lonely at times. With this schedule you can build saas tools, or do client work, but you cannot build a stable business and work relationships with other people really. Your biggest support group is a broad startup community – but not the people you work with on a daily basis.

There is that saying – “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together” – and it’s very much true in terms of this work/lifestyle.

As for types of projects – over the last ~15 years, I’ve built probably 15 projects 😉 Some freelance work at the beginning, then mobile apps around 2012, then I built AppCodes (which was covered by TC, and landed a few times on the HN top page), and I got into crypto very early on, building a few projects in that space (Eveem.org being the most successful and impactful – the page looks like crap, but it did serious waves in the Ethereum community 🙂 ).

Financially – since 32 years old, extremely well, I could retire if I wanted to. But that’s mostly because I got into Bitcoin, and then Ethereum very early on.

If not for crypto, AppCodes – a saas for iPhone devs – kept earning me a stable income that I could live off, for 8 years straight (right now the site is still up, but I don’t charge people, and it’s not working any more really). I think I could earn more off it, and for many more years, if I wanted to. Besides AppCodes, I could monetize Eveem.org extremely easy – it just isn’t a priority now.

And besides AppCodes and Eveem, since I did so much stuff with various techs and business, I can charge easily for workshops, or trainings. I do paid gigs once a year, but more for fun than for money 🙂

I also keep rejecting job offers all the time – the amounts people offer me keep getting higher every year, so I guess that’s an objective value of my competencies – more than winning the bet on crypto 😀

Yes, definitely. I had undiagnosed adhd until the age of 34yo, so the only way I could focus on a project was with an immense amount of caffeine, sugar and short deadlines.

When I took up a project, I knew I had a limited amount of time before my body says it needs a serious break, and before I lose interest in a subject.

Since I got meds, 6 years ago, I can finally focus whenever I want to, and I experiment more with 9 to 5 kind of work. But I still find it less appealing – very difficult to do seriously deep work this way. If I find something I’m passionate about, I tend to focus all my attention on it.

The biggest challenge is that it’s almost impossible to build a real startup this way. And with age, it’s more difficult to find people to work with. When both me and my peers were students, it was ok for all of us to just skip school or live off savings for a while and build cool stuff. Now, most people my age have regular jobs and families, so they won’t take 3-6 months off to build something cool.

I am in compiler development, and aim to do 1-2 hours of intellectually stimulating work everyday.

If I have other busywork I do as much as necessary, if not doomscrolling or read literature.

doomscrolling is a competitive environment; HN is a decent start so you are already at a good starting point, although you might want to level-up to FB, or even TikTok for more advanced skills.

The real trick is to have multiple devices handy so you can keep switching without being bored of a form factor!

Contribute to any of the open source compilers.

Most projects have bug trackers with tags for beginner friendly bugs.

Not laid off and not at risk.

I do not use or worry about AI.

I used to work a normal amount and spend a lot of time on programming hobby projects. I have since reversed that by working more and spending almost no time on hobby projects. The more time I spend at work entertaining the desires of junior developers (code style, framework nonsense) the more my desire for programming turns into a toxic loathing.

4-6 hours deep work a day, trending towards 4

3ish hours of buisness work a day.

Probably 2-4 hours of work related stuff and thinking about work

Meant to be doing 1+ hours of learning and reading each day.

Trying to take weekends more seriously but that depends on $ for the week. Daily consistency is a big challenge for me. Some days I can just fall off a cliff. Others it will be 10-11 logged hours.

Copilot and Chat every day while programming. Little tasks and boiler plate are taken care of. When getting very deep into developing a system, the chat needs more and more context so becomes less useful.

I work according to need. My business makes enough to sustain me, and more money wouldn’t make me happier. I’d love to make my product better because that would benefit a lot of people. However I must accept that the work is never done, and that there is no need to rush it.

Realistically, I work from 0 to 12 hours a day according to the weather, and how passionate I am about the task at hand. I’d estimate that I work 3 hours a day on average, but it’s a wild guess.

Time spent on ‘work’ is 8-10 hours most days. I try to mostly keep to a 9/80 schedule and take every other Friday off. But it depends, if something is particularly troubling me, then I won’t stop and will go longer and I will do a shorter day another day to make up for it.

AI (Copilot) hasn’t particularly saved me time for actual work yet, but was working on a side project and it saved me hours of tedious repetitive stuff. It wasn’t that complex but it was a lot of similar functions, and the first one it didn’t help much with. The second it was able to get more of, and from then on it was hitting tab ~3 times to write the entire function, then go back and fix a word or two that needed tweaking. Probably would have been a lot of copy pasting, but it was able to change the naming and even some structure for me so it was still beneficial.

I’m a cofounder of a Series A start-up, so work hours are hard to define. You are sort of always working or thinking about work and it is hard to put away.

But within the company, we’ve found lots of uses for LLMs to save time. One or two of the developers are fans of Github Copilot, but that is a relatively minor impact so far. The bigger impacts are around data cleaning and content. A lot of jobs that used to be “hire someone on Upwork for $20/hr to do a lot of boring clean-up work on thousands of records or write repetitive text about something” are now “write a 10 line python script with the OpenAI api to generate the result for $8 and then QA”. There are also plenty of uses of boring old home-grown ML models and stuff like that to clean up data in cases where the problem is more specific and predictable.

So far AI just makes our best developers faster and our best product people make a larger impact more quickly and at a lower cost. It hasn’t resulted in less internal hiring or anything like that. But it has resulted in less Upwork-style one-off contracting, especially around data cleaning and content clean-up.

I’m battling a chronic illness at the same time as I’m running my own company with a couple of employees.

The positive side is that my health issues forces me to delegate and not get involved in day-to-day operations too much (which I previously did). Now I can easily work 1-2 hours a day at max and still keep the company humming along. Most work is on how to design the business long term for success and often not directly involved with clients.

AI helps immensely to quickly get things out of the way and only focus on essential things. Many mundane tasks can be done using AI now and it really is a game changer and makes it easier to take on more complex tasks as a business owner.

AI only wasted my time. It cannot really solve anything beyond basic StackOverflow questions and it even fails on super simple questions too. So I wasted hours to discover the fact.

I work as long as I want in theory, but I try to work 8hr/day, which is expected from me, but of course at least 2hr/day is spent on meetings. Sometimes I don’t “work” at all (I mean coding), usually I get around 2-4h to think and code.

I’m not worried about layoffs, while I usually don’t believe in myself I feel I still have a strong skills that are needed on the market and the worst that can happen is a little smaller salary in another company.

That lines up with my AI experience, too. These days the entirety of my AI experience is sitting on huddles with juniors/intermediates who will type out half a line of code and then wait for Copilot ad infinitum. It can be a bit annoying–just write the code yourself!

I think these tools have some time saving applications for writing boilerplate, but I’ve never been able to use them to actually solve a real problem. ChatGPT feels like an improvement over Copilot but there’s still a ways to go.

I’m interested to see how Copilot X [1] turns out. Maybe it will be more useful.

[1] https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x

A friend of mine working as a deep learning engineer at one of the big tech companies is working her ass off due to fear of layoffs. She mentioned that their manager takes quiz! from them and gives them performance tests. The vibe is incredibly tense and except a few who are working on secret projects, the rest are left hanging in a looming lay-off round.

Every day she works till late at nights or awake 5am to continue working. She now thinks that working like that over the pas few months has reduced the chances of her being laid off but she’s is completely fed-up and I think she’s risking having a burnout.

Wouldn’t it be — at least, with the safety of looking from a distance — be better that she found another company which actively wants her?

I always get suspicious of mass layoffs — I always think they are not connected to performance but to networking and marketing of your work.

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

So I probably only work around 1-2 days a week right now, if that. It’s not healthy. I have a full time job paying 100k as well as an “on the side” freelance gig paying between 4 and 5k a month. I don’t feel guilty as I feel I am still delivering “enough”. Will it last forever? Probably not. Will I get more into it? Hopefully.

Been in the industry for 20 years, I should be able to retire before AI becomes even a close threat to me.

Not making big tech money, but I probably work around 4 hours a week total at my salaried job, and 1 hour a week at my small business — which even at 1/4 the time brings in 1.5x the money.

In the past few years I have taken substantial steps to reduce the amount of “work” I do and increase leisure time. It is what it is, I’m not here to toil my life away.

Typically 7h30m at my desk. Not all of that is work and of course little of what is actually work is effective work.

There is no change in management and I have not heard of any layoffs. I work with software but in traditional industry. (i.e. stable, relatively low-paying software jobs compared to ‘big tech’, and where people tend to stay 10, 20, 30 years in the company).

2 times 8 hours a week, software made my life at work worse (at first it looked like a really good deal then the Government managed to convert my database software to database service with some extra responsibilities on me about uptime). The layoff wave have not touched me yet but since I’m a male Ukrainian, the danger of mobilization is hanging over me which will make my working hours 24 times 7 times 365 times life.

I don’t know how many hours I work, but recently I saw that in the last week I was in front of a screen for almost 12 hours on average (per day)… And that’s with going out for lunch and sleeping. I wasn’t even working for a lot of those hours. It’s been a long cold winter here in the north. Currently I’m rapidly introducing some corrections, as I felt I was a wreck.

I would say I work 4-6 hours per day. I rarely work more than 40 and make sure I make up that time if I ever do.

Not effected by layoffs – my company mostly runs of government money which appears to still be flowing.

Ai has saved me very little time so far. It’s probably cost me work time as I ask it more non-work related stuff.

I am working on average 1-3 hours a day of paid work and rest is tinkering and playing around with stuff i like.

I do alot of ML in my sparetime for my hobbyprojects, so AI is speeding stuff up if i need something boilerplated.
However it has slowed me significantly down if i try to use AI for things that are hard and complex.

4-8 hrs/day depending on load. Not affected by layoffs except for an uptick in freelance gigs. Not using AI, doubt it would save any time.

No, I don’t work more because of the layoff waves. As a recent father with scars from a close-to-burnout situation, I value work-life balance more than anything else.
So far, I’m not using AI much, mostly because I lack the routine to use it, but I’m not opposed to using it if/when it can help me.

I don’t use AI in my day to day (yet, probably) but I am bullish on it in general. I currently work ~8 hour days M-F, typical stuff.

> Did the layoff wave push you to work more hours than expected?

No. I am a top performer (not a self assessment, officially documented) so I figure I’ll be the last to go.

> I figure I’ll be the last to go

False sense of security. Quite a few other things can take priority over being a top performer, when it comes to cost cutting.

Depends on the day. Anywhere from 0-12.

Some days, just nothing happens. Can be spooky quiet.

> Did the layoff wave push you to work more hours than expected?

No. It is unlikely to affect me.

> Does AI save you time already?

No. It’s done the opposite – I spend a lot of time either fielding questions about how we can use it (in most cases we can’t, yet).

Trying out entrepreneurship for the first time, and looking at my coding activity tracker I put in around 7-9 hours of coding, with perhaps 1-2 hours on top for non coding activities, each day.

I usually take a day off each week with little to no work.

I have a four hour work-week (30h), and work on average 6h a day, sometimes 6.5-7 if I have something I’m in the middle off. Certainly used ChatGPT to save some time, but hasn’t affected my working hours.

Lots!

If considering what’s called “Deep work” only. Then 3-4 hours max. Otherwise, whole day.

AI has definitely helped me save my time debugging issues. Otherwise, there has been no increase in pressure. Rather, I have stopped preparing hard for interviews.

Professor, so maybe not who you mean to ask. Four hours of deep work, that is, creative work. Maybe another eight of stuff. No AI yet, although I’m super interested.

Depends on how you define work.

I work 30 hour weeks at my day job, works out to 6 hours a day with change. Then I spend anywhere between 0 and 10 hours more working on my personal projects.

I have a 30 hours per week contract. Though I sometimes find it hard to actually work 30 hours and not much more (when I am trying to tackle an interesting problem).

6h30 to 8h a day (that’s 37h a week for me). I like my job and I have fun but It’s still to much for me. I’m looking into a 4 days week kind of contract.

It varies a lot, but as a rule of thumb, I consider that if I have spend 8h per day of active work, I failed to organize, plan or share load.

I work very hard to work as little as possible. On a given day I put in ~ 3 hours.

I realize that sounds very low, but I think as long as I am exceeding the expectations of my team and director, which I am, that is all that should matter..

My job could be done by AI, but it would take a different kind of system than what we have. It would not put my career out of business by any stretch, but it would close off a pathway.

Real work.. I’d say about an hour a day. The rest is pulling my hair out because of all the self defeating decisions I’m living with.

Define working – is it actual work or sitting at computer on standby not getting paid for sitting?

Monday I did ~3 hours of actual (paid) work, yesterday ~2.5 hours, last Friday ~3.5 hours (though some of that at very slow pace waiting for slow server), I’m usually not paid by hours (besides those slow on server tasks).

I sit at my computer roughly between 8-15 on standby (minus usual lunch break walking those 8 meters to kitchen) unless I go to pick some paper at doctor, going to dentist tomorrow, etc.

Moving clocks surely Fcks my schedule twice a year, since my client is from country, which doesn’t observe this European/Northamerican DST nonsense.