How many hours during the work day do you actually do productive work?
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How many hours during the work day do you actually do productive work?
Obviously, no one expects a newly graduated hire to know everything during their first week, but early impressions stick. Question for the managers and senior engineers on here: What can a new grad do in those first few days to make you incredibly glad you hired them? What sets them apart early on?
What’s the biggest productivity killer in your typical workday? For me, it’s usually constant context switching between unrelated tasks. It feels like losing momentum over and over again. What’s the biggest distraction where you work?
How do you handle disagreements with your manager about technical decisions? I’ve learned to pick my battles and always come with data instead of opinions when I do push back. It doesn’t always work, but it at least keeps the conversation productive. How do you approach it?
💭 If you were let go from your job tomorrow, what's the first thing you'd do?
What’s one engineering “best practice” that you think is actually overused or applied in situations where it doesn’t add much value? For me, it’s excessive documentation on very small, low-risk changes. Documentation is important, but I’ve seen teams spend more time documenting simple fixes than implementing them. Where do you draw the line?
In an 8-hour day (gee I wish I was only here for 8 hours), about six "work hours" are actual work. There's a 30-minute lunch break and two 15-minute "stretch breaks." I would guess there's about an hour of downtime wedged in the other seven hours. Of course, I usually come in at least 30 minutes early to prep my desk and go over my to-do list and stay 30-60 minutes late to wrap up what I was working on when the whistle blew and clean up the work area to be ready for the next day.
On a day packed with meetings I would say about two hours and on a day without meetings as much I would say about five hours. When I used to work mainly solo on things I used to say the full 8 but now with a team it’s usually no more than five hours because something or someone is always calling me.
I feel this so much. The amount of meeting at certain times of the year are overwhelming. So many meetings could be an email or email response…
1 hour
I start early to get a few productive hours of work before meetings begin
12hrs
Different “work cultures” expect absolutely different approach on employee’s productiveness. Chinese working cultures (as i know from my ex Chinese housemate) does require people ro be 101% engaged into workload of “9/9/6” which means from 9am to 9pm monday-saturday. russian corporative culture is even worse. You have to secure or work on a system 24/7 - so if anything is not “in favour” or your Boss than you have to fix it or solve core problem straight away. I came to UK 4 years ago as a political refugee having 13 years of russian cultural experience. Here, in UK, if you text your line manager on a weekend he will be angry as so as he would want to fire you.
I'd say 6 hours (including productive meetings). I usually multitask on worthless Teams calls too.
8 out of 9.5 doing "productive" work. However, productivity slows as the day goes on. I'd say only 3 hours of 100% productive capacity and declines to 20% the last hour. Studies show that is the norm for office work environments. And I try to be the norm.
I had this same question before. Based on my survey people worked 60-70% of the day. I think that's probably lower now since meetings have become more prevalent and can be a big drain for a lot of people.
Please Elevator supervisor job required
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