How Many Hours a Week Can You Program?

An anonymous reader writes "How many hours a week should a full-time programmer program? Trying to program anywhere near 40 wears me out. On a good week, I can do 20. Often, it is around 10 or 15. I'm talking about your programming session at the console, typing mdash; including, of course, stopping and thinking for a minute, but not meetings, reading programming books, notes, specifications, etc., which by comparison feel like lunch breaks. I rarely get called to meetings (which is good) but that means to keep my brain from overheating I spend several hours a week surfing the web (usually reading tech news but also a few stops on Facebook, email, etc.). I should add that I am interrupted a few times per day. Me and another guy maintain an intranet site of a couple dozen web apps for an IT department, so we work on a few different things: phone calls, bug fixes, feature adds, as well as writing new web apps from the ground up, all in a day's work. And I know that wears a person out more than if they had just one project to work on. I wonder if programming is like mental sprinting, not walking, so you can only do it in bursts. Am I normal or stealing?"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fask.slashdot.org%2Fstory %2F10%2F04%2F14%2F1925218%2FHow-Many-Hours-a-Week-Can-You-Program" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=How+Many+Hours+a+Week+Can+You+Program% 3F%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9dxT07" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/04/14/1925218/How-Many-Hours-a-Week-Can-You-Program?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Vh3opNOSjHf_rTSzrb-a3B3Un2I/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Vh3opNOSjHf_rTSzrb-a3B3Un2I/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Vh3opNOSjHf_rTSzrb-a3B3Un2I/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Vh3opNOSjHf_rTSzrb-a3B3Un2I/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/8vuVxGKJtYg" height="1" width="1"/

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