Shorter hours in software

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months or more, and more than a third of respondents said they work 65 to 80 hours a week during crunch time.

"I don't think the software industry will ever go to a 9-to-5 industry, but it is moving away from 15-, 17-, 20-hour days."

--Fred Hoch
VP, The Software &
Information Industry Association

Such conditions triggered a rebellion of sorts late last year. A Web log posting critical of game software giant Electronic Arts led to a flood of complaints about work hours in the industry. EA, which also has been sued for allegedly failing to pay proper overtime wages to some workers, eventually sent a memo to employees acknowledging a problem and promising workplace reforms.

One reason the computer game field may continue to wrestle with exhausting work hours is its relative youth. As software vendors as a whole have aged in the past few decades, their employees have come to put in shorter days, suggested Fred Hoch, vice president of software programs for the Software and Information Industry Association trade group.

"Software is a maturing industry," Hoch said. "I don't think the software industry will ever go to a 9-to-5 industry, but it is moving away from 15-, 17-, 20-hour days."

More time for open source?
In fact, government statistics show reduced work hours for software professionals throughout the U.S. economy. Computer software engineers, who work in industries such as software publishing, telecommunications and computer systems design, worked an average of 41.5 hours on their main jobs last year, down from 42 hours in 2003. The average-workweek figure for all occupations in the United States held steady last year at 38.3 hours.

Some programmers may be spending additional hours in front of computers outside their principal job. For one thing, many techies these days get hit up for computer help by friends and relatives. Then there's the thriving open-source software community, in which coders contribute to programs that can be freely distributed and modified by others.

As open-source software like Linux has become a bigger commercial hit, some technology professionals now work with it as part of their regular job. But many technology workers have volunteered their time to such projects--to the tune of about a day a week.

Devoting time to pet open-source programs may be more feasible now for techies because of shorter hours at software companies. Even some computer game publishers have adopted less grueling work schedules.

"In order to make the best games, people have to be having fun. They can't be feeling under the gun all the time."

--Jeff Briggs
CEO, Firaxis Games

Employees at Hunt Valley, Md.-based Firaxis Games occasionally put in long hours to complete projects, but chief executive Jeff Briggs said he doesn't expect workers to log more than 40 hours a week. "In order to make the best games, people have to be having fun," Briggs said. "They can't be feeling under the gun all the time."

For their part, nascent software firms and other start-ups aren't likely to be the manic workplaces they were a few years ago, in part because of more mature--and thus better--management teams, according to Laura Roden, president of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. "You don't see the cars in parking lots all night. You don't see people sleeping at the office," she said.

Overtime overrated
Research indicates that long hours don't translate into heaps of extra work. Consultant DeMarco has studied productivity data and concluded that workers putting in 44 hours per week generate

[bjbrock]

Pardon me if I don't feel sorry for programmers

working 50 - 70 hrs. a week. As a technician, there are many such weeks with those hours. Why? Because the programmers products keep getting lousier and lousier. And just keeping their trash up and running is a monumental chore.

I think that there is software available today to do anything you could want. It may only work half the time, though. I think these programmers need to fix their junk and then all find other lines of work. We could get along with the software already out there. Any new stuff will just be a bigger piece of trash and more headache.

If their stuff doesn't work, why are they working on new stuff instead of fixing what is out there?

[C.Schroeder]

40 hours max for everyone

Nobody should be working more than 40 hours per week in any profession, period (especially health care). If you are required to work more, then it is a staffing problem that needs to be addressed by management. This problem isn't limited to just the software industry.

[C.Schroeder]

Macho programmers

Maybe the macho programming environment of the dot.com boom is partly responsible for the decline in women studying Computer Science in recent years?

[Ubber geek]

Science in recent years

http://www.analogstereo.com/rover_45_owners_manual.htm

[Marcus Westrup]

Management still doesn?t get it

Coding is not a traditional job; it is as much an art form as a discipline. Good programmers don?t work well 9 to 5, the creative process happens in spurts.
From my experience a session can involve staring at a screen for days trying to get around a problem, getting an idea and pouring out the talent all in one long push. That might mean a 30 hour stint without food or sleep, followed by crashing for a few days. And then some grunt work to clean things up.

To put this in perspective: The 9 to 5 programmers I?ve know in the past are still working 9 to 5. The others are running their own companies.

Wasting Time at Work - Results of a Study Conducted by the Government

In companies that have a lot of overtime, they waste a lot of hours during the workday,"

Agreed. According to http://www/ch4nce.com, lots of people are wasting time by gambling online while at work. The study is here: http://www.ch4nce.com/story/2005/2/22/203725/371

[qazwiz]

Another reason for Changing Hours

Twenty five years ago the programming methods were vastly different. When you wrote a program you were given a list of what needed to be accomplished and pretty much carte blanche there after. The system had each programmer writing in their favorite style and method. the key phrase "document your work" was just emerging and commenting in programs varied widely. We quickly learned that comments weren't supplimental but rather KEY to good programming so a revisited program could be quickly understood. But we still did most everything even when it had to interact with another program the only consistency was what went in and what was supposed to come out. A new program for each machine, optomized to use the precious resourses of memory and storage,(remember reel to reel tapes?)(this created the memory saving practices that later gave us the Y2K fraud) this meant the program on your machine was entirely recoded if it was to run on mine. Each program was effectivly started from scratch.

The change to drivers that run hardware,(small programs that give identical output from identical input) allow for common ground to programmers for the various flavors of a machine

Likewise the programming languages have evolved too. Few if any comercial programs are written in machine code which changes with each CPU. Higher level programming languages allow a program to be ported from system to system, sometimes with little more than a recompile, and the Object orination allows a more complex style to be expressed in a few words that use to take code that looked like spaghitti, (if it worked you couldn't figure out why).

Microsoft displays the convience of the new programming style. The infamous Longhorn has reciently been announced to be void of at least three sections of its original intended system. This likely was accomplished by just commenting out a handful of lines that said #INCLUDE and recompiling thus excluding them from the final product.

Likewise current programing, when done modularly, can also be included or excluded with ease.

No more hairpulling sessions(for those of us who still have hair:))you just check the input and output of each module. Since the module is common for its function, other programs can also use the function. resulting in a savings in programming and debuging time.

DON'T REINVENT THE WHEEL
This is why Open Source is the future of the industry. Use the widgets you need and only write what isn't available elsewhere.

When you eliminate the redundent redundency of repeated repetion you have more time for other, more important, activities