How many hours a day can a programmer work? Versions of the answer from Yandex

This time, Yandex developers were asked about what they do not so often argue about, but what everyone thinks about at some point in their life. How many hours a day can programmers work? To whom are they closer - to the artists or to the workers in the factory? Will the eight-hour workday apply to them? Does the developer work when he drinks coffee or sleeps?



This time, not only those who work in the Yandex office in Moscow answered our questions - we also reached our colleagues in Nizhny Novgorod in order to get a little more diverse opinions.

Andrey Mishchenko
Moscow. In Yandex - 9 years.
')
He came to Yandex as a developer in C ++, for a long time was the head of the Blog Search Development and wrote in Perl. Andrey is a Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Now he is working with Andrey Gulin on improving machine learning algorithms in search.

When we participate in ICFP , we are given three days for which you must write the best program. You allocate yourself some time for a dream, of course, but it turns out several hours a day, and you program all three days, as far as performance is enough. Then, it’s necessary to leave for a week, but in the case of an emergency, this is normal. It is possible to work for four hours, and for 10. This is not digging trenches - the head gets tired with other mechanisms.

Roman Kashitsyn
Nizhny Novgorod. In Yandex - 1 year

Developer in a geodata storage system development team.

It is difficult to say, because I can not work in a rigid framework. I can work, for example, four hours a day and just get tired, or I can sit for 12 hours without a break - it all depends on inspiration or flow. If you enter the stream and you feel that now everything will work out for me, now I can do everything, then you can work for a very long time. But two days in a row, this does not work. In any case, if there is no inspiration, you should try to do something to get it.

Anton pg83 Samokhvalov
Moscow. In Yandex - 9 years.

Came to Market by a C ++ programmer. Worked on a variety of service tasks. A few years later I moved to search, where I took up the reliability and performance of the runtime search. Now he is working on an assembly system that will allow us to collect our entire code base in a few minutes on a large distributed cluster.

Yes, how much he wants, so much can work. I have had times when I could write code for 15 hours a day, and it happened that you couldn’t write a single line a day. It depends on what you do and how. Sometimes you will write five lines, but they are very complicated, and you really have grinded them, and sometimes you will write a thousand, but they are about nothing. Just sit and write them. If we talk about me and my working day, then I have it completely not normalized. I can work at home, I can work in the office. I wake up, read mail for a few hours, respond to emails, read reviews. In fact, reading a review, evaluating someone else's code is also a big part of the work. Then I can program a little bit, talk to people. I can spend 10 hours at work, I can - one hour, and work the rest of the time from home. In general, everyone has different ways. Someone can work 8 hours, and someone - 20.

Stepan Koltsov
Moscow. In Yandex - 7 years.
Senior developer in the development of data storage and processing systems. Steppe from those employees of Yandex, who left, but then returned. Now he is working on monitoring systems in search.

First, it very much depends on the working environment, where the person works, whether they interfere with it. If the room is noisy, then work more than three hours is very difficult. Secondly, on what the programmer is currently doing. Routine tasks can be done continuously - calmly turned on your music and do it. It happens that you need to sit down and think about something intensely. In such cases, pure programming may not take a lot of time, but at all other times, when a person is sitting, he thinks, he is dull, he looks at Facebook, he actually works too, because sometimes, to write code, you have to think how to write it. And I have such a conviction that thinking comes not only when you think about it directly, but also when you think about something of your own: walk down the street, look at the trees. There is some kind of background process going on in my head that lets you know what needs to be done. Sometimes, when a person comes to work and is stupid, in fact, he also works in a sense.

Alexander sadovsky Sadovsky
Moscow. In Yandex - 10 years.

I came to Yandex to work on projects related to the search. Under his leadership, a blog search , Yandex.XML were created, a new ranking algorithm was launched, and a robot for promptly indexing up-to-date information, an assessor service was created and a search quality measurement started. Sasha is the author of many publications in scientific and popular media about search engine algorithms and website promotion on the Internet.

A spherical programmer in a vacuum can work until he falls asleep. I still remember how my friend came before the diploma defense with keyboard prints on his face, because at night he did a diploma, fell asleep, and nothing could wake him up. If we talk about productive work, then I believe that everyone here should catch their own rhythm. Find your combination of relaxation and communication, which is very important, because during it new ideas come, some new concepts are born, you understand something that is wrong in your code.

Sitting at the computer at any time to debug a program or write code is rarely one who gets productively more than a few hours in a row. And programming four hours in a row is effective, in my opinion, this is a super result. After them, breaks are required, some new inspiration, and, in my opinion, it is difficult to talk about some kind of formal working day. Rather, it should be said about the correct alternation of different periods: the state of the stream with the state in which you do more routine tasks, debugging, when you curse everything and look for this error and try to understand why everything falls, what it is.

Artyom Breqwas Kulikov
Moscow. In Yandex - 8 years.

Yandex was called for parsing data from Blog Search using Perl. They called not only to scold, but also to work. For many years, did a search on blogs, in particular, was the main developer of the Yandex.Pulse sub-service. Now he is developing an Advertising Network, one of the most critical services in terms of fault tolerance.

Is an eight-hour working day applicable? The question is, work every day for eight hours or not each. Sometimes it happens that drowned and everything - you sit for a long time, and then wake up, and already the middle of Saturday. I don’t know the average time that a programmer can work, and the minimum is zero. You can not work at all if you do not immediately notice that you are not doing anything, but you can - until you fall. In practice, besides the work of knocking on the keyboard, there is still work to think, there is still work to talk, to poke someone and ask: “Why have you not done anything yet?” Or poke and ask what you have done and why it is. All together, this is an eight-hour working day. You can spend eight hours at work and do something useful all the time. But not all this time will be busy working with the code.

Aleksey kappa Kapranov
Moscow. In Yandex - 3 years.

Once was the leader of the Rambler-Mail . Now he is in charge of the personal services infrastructure group at Yandex. Lesha told on Habré how we taught Mail to exchange letters on IPv6 and support SSL encryption.

There is such a well-known, though a little controversial Chinese quote: "A person who has found a favorite job does not work for one hour in his life." An enthusiastic programmer, without prejudice to health, can work 10-15 hours a day absolutely exactly.

Alexey Zakharov
Moscow. In Yandex - 6 years
Head of Java-development in the department of cloud services.

The programmer is also human. He not only programs, but also thinks about what he has to program, participates in some meetings in order to find out that his colleagues want him to program to share some ideas. Everything depends, of course, on the person, his age, rhythm, and how well he leads a healthy lifestyle. It seems to me that 8 hours of linear programming per day is hard. Even though I’m now half the boss, and half the programmer, I’m trying to do everything related to complex programmer work in the morning when my head is fresh. And it would be good what I am going to do in the morning to think from the evening. When I studied in high school, it seemed to me that programming was very easy, because it was pleasant and interesting. Over time, I realize that this is difficult.

Sergey svv Vavinov
Moscow. In Yandex - 6 years

Came to Yandex by Yandex.Video developer. He was mainly in the development of music, then in the service of media services. Made several projects for Yandex.Disk. Now - the head of the group of technologies for working with big data. One of the tasks Sergey is working on is Yandex’s projects for CERN.

A programmer can work eight hours a day, and more. It depends on the project and how much a person is passionate about, how much he entered the stream. For myself, I try to limit this matter in some sense. There are periods when I sit and program for 12 hours in a row. It is after this that I feel somehow completely sad: I don’t want to go out into the street, and my mood deteriorates. But if you limit and cut into some pieces, work for four hours, it will be perfect. To solve a problem, write a meaningful code, you need to immerse yourself in such a special state for several hours - just four hours. Therefore, an eight-hour working day is how to count. If two times four hours, you can solve two such problems. It’s probably not worth it to work eight hours.

Gregory Bobuk Bakunov
Moscow. In Yandex - 10 years

Once came to work as a system administrator, and now - director of technology distribution.

It depends, of course, on the programmer. It can work 24 hours a day, but if we talk about effective work, directly engaged in programming, that is a very simple norm. I say that all employees of the creative specialty: marketers, artists, musicians, programmers - can never work more than four hours a day. Something in the brain does not allow them to engage in creative work more than this time. Even if you now talk with programmers who programmed for 20 hours in a row, it turns out that about 3-4 hours they were engaged in creative activities, the rest was spent fixing bugs, inventing how to properly implement their idea, and so on. Creative activity takes 4 hours. All the rest of the time you can do whatever you want. I know a programmer who develops his daily norm in 2 hours, but he writes very quickly.

Pavel cadovvl Sukhov
Nizhny Novgorod. In Yandex - three months

She teaches at the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Higher School of Economics at the Faculty of Business Informatics and Applied Mathematics. In Yandex - an intern in a group of storage geodata.

We have to work while working, while from this rushing. You can work 18 hours in a row, and you can work for an hour and understand that today you can’t do anything more. The work of a programmer is very creative, you cannot do it through force, you can’t do this eight-hour working day. But there is a dangerous side to this business - if you allow a programmer to work when he wants, then he may want to do it three hours a week. But on the other hand, if the programmer does not want to program, then this is definitely a bad programmer.

Andrew styskin Styskin
Moscow. In Yandex - 9 years.

Came to Yandex by a Java developer to the Market search group. He was engaged in the classification of commodity texts and the extraction of facts from product descriptions. So began his passion for search and machine learning. Outside of work, Andrei made various IR-toys: a generator of poems on language models, a robot for pumping social networks. Now Andrey is in charge of the ranking department, in which a team of almost 200 people works.

If we consider work only to write code, then I doubt that this is more than two hours a day. And if you consider work as the time when you think about architecture, go through code review and keep it in mind that someone else will use what you are doing, it just starts to pull eight, ten, twelve hours . And then for later sitting in the office, which all our developers suffer.