Can we talk about how much more CS people are expected to work than people in other fields ?
For most people here, CS is their hobby. So a lot of learning and knowledge acquisition happens during 'leisure' time. This is rarely the case in other professions.
If we count all the time we spend resolving environments, getting setups right, learning new tools and reading papers as work (as we rightly should), then most people in tech would be working far more than 55 hours/week.
This already ignores a lot of the quiet time people spend pondering over things and letting them stew semi-consciously. CS work is flexible, but is not easy or less-time consuming by any means.
If we try to force people into CS, then we will get what India has. A massive glut of incompetent tech 'talent' with BS in CS, but need to be retrained all over-again to even do the most mundane sweat shop coding that companies like Infosys and TCS need their employees to do. (I say this as an Indian). Millions who hate their job, earn low pay and have a very small set of nontransferable skills, because what they actually know is 'sweat shop tools' and not CS.
IMO, if there is any demographic that AI/ML is most poised for eradicating, it is likely this one.
If CS in the US wants to increase participation without compromising on its present identity, then the only solution might be to foster interest and love for science/math/coding early in life and hope you can cast a wider net to capture everyone who would come to consider this profession a hobby.
Alternatively, it can go the way of every other mature profession and turn into a 9-5 boring thing you hate, but still continue doing because you need to put food on the table.
I know plenty of contractors who improve their own homes in their spare time, artists who paint in their spare time, writers with side projects, teachers who do planning/look for lessons, etc. etc.
That said, I think we'd all be better off if engineers demanded collectively not to work more than 40 hours. (Tech unions/guilds could be formed and focused just on stuff like limiting hours/paying for overtime and oncall, btw.)
I've done it individually, and it has never slowed my career progression -- even when I worked at Amazon, I was adamant that my family and personal time came first, but I still was promoted regularly.
I still code in my spare time, but it's totally unrelated to work.
In general, the less hours everyone works, the greater the advantage you have in working more. By just working 10 extra hours, I can be 25% more productive (there's a lot of simplying assumptions there, of course). This is why the 4 day work week never took off: I can just work one more day and realize a 25% boost in output, a major boon to my career.
Developers don't have much in common with the workers who originally created unions. Some of the differences are that work can be done at home, the potential for advancement and greater salaries is very high, and that the non-physical nature of the work allows you to work very long hours. All of these factors conspire to undermine any 40 hour max set by a developer union.
As average hours worked go up, the benefit of each extra hour goes down. I'm not sure where exactly the equilibrium is, but personally, I find that over the long term, over 60 hours per week leaves me feeling a little shitty and depressed, especially if I have a commute. I think most over can boost up to 80 and be fine for a couple months though.
If there's one profession where people are expected to work more than devs it's finance. New analysts in finance are pulling 100-120 For at least their first. I've done those kind of hours for maybe one week, but it kills you, both physically and mentally.
> most over can boost up to 80 and be fine for a couple months though
Staying alone and being a well put together human with relationships becomes completely impossible the second I go past 55-ish hours.
> people are expected to work more than devs it's finance
Finance is toxic at a whole another level. The rampant smoking, cocaine use, work hard/play hard etc. is in some sense mirrored in similarly intensive silicon valley startups where aderall abuse is just as rampant.
I am also not sure if the finance analytics work is as creatively taxing as coding (at least the design stage), which can be a major distinction.
Either ways, I hope CS never becomes like finance, ever.
> I find that over the long term, over 60 hours per week leaves me feeling a little shitty and depressed
We must have different bodies. 40 hours a week is plenty to do that for me (and I don't really work nearly enough 40 hours during the supposed 9-5). At the end of a typical workday (mostly coding), I experience quite thorough mental depletion. It is very unpleasant and makes the remaining hours of the day mostly a pointless and sucky experience, as I don't have the will to do anything (although sometimes I do recover after an evening of 3-4 hours of doing nothing and get a little energy back - however it's bedtime then).
How common is this 55+ hours a week thing, really? I've only been a developer for 2.5 years now, and I spend some of my own time, say an hour a day (3 hours a night, once every three nights usually) working on side projects, and another hour reading technical articles or tech blog posts.
But I've never had a manager ask or pressure me to work more than 40 hours a week. In fact, they opposite is true, they've actually often discouraged me from working outside of core work hours because they don't want their developers to get burned out. Maybe I'm just fortunate that I'm smart enough, and productive enough, to get everything done in the 40 hour work week and I should feel blessed to be as smart as I am? (generally in the top 3-5% on all standardized tests throughout my life)
But to the best of my knowledge, my coworkers weren't being pressured to work more than 40 hours a week either. Or maybe they felt ashamed of having to work more than 40 hours to keep up and didn't mention it? Maybe the pressure wasn't direct pressure from management, but an indirect pressure just to keep up with everyone else?
Maybe it's the benefit of working in the Midwest?
I don't honestly know. But I can say that in my (short) time at both companies I've worked for, I've only met one developer that reported being asked or pressured to work more than 40 hours a week. So it just seems so strange to me to keep hearing it as a truism on here.
In my experience most professional software engineers don't actually code much in their free time. I feel like that's something that you do more when you're starting out (esp. if you're self-taught and need to build your resume), but as one gets older their priorities tend to shift towards building a family, pursuing other hobbies, etc. It's really tough to spend 8 hours/day at a job coding, and then spend your free time afterwards coding again.
Agreed so many professions have to keep a bit up to date but 90% of the stuff they need to know is learned on the job or in college a long time ago. In Software I feel like the things I was working on 10 year ago are completely different to what I do now, which is why 50yo devs are competing with 25yo for the same jobs (assuming you dont want to be a manager)
regarding india, you are confusing over hiring of engineers by consultancies like TCS. they take people from any stream of engineering (even other ones) and then train them. CS people formna fraction of it. and if you compare engineers who have CS degree in India and those who don't and yet work in TCS, you will find a lot of difference in skill. Lastly, money drives quality. from same University in India, you have CS students going to Google and to TCS. good money attracts talent. you have no incentive to improve in low paying job unless you want to switch
For most people here, CS is their hobby. So a lot of learning and knowledge acquisition happens during 'leisure' time. This is rarely the case in other professions.
If we count all the time we spend resolving environments, getting setups right, learning new tools and reading papers as work (as we rightly should), then most people in tech would be working far more than 55 hours/week.
This already ignores a lot of the quiet time people spend pondering over things and letting them stew semi-consciously. CS work is flexible, but is not easy or less-time consuming by any means.
If we try to force people into CS, then we will get what India has. A massive glut of incompetent tech 'talent' with BS in CS, but need to be retrained all over-again to even do the most mundane sweat shop coding that companies like Infosys and TCS need their employees to do. (I say this as an Indian). Millions who hate their job, earn low pay and have a very small set of nontransferable skills, because what they actually know is 'sweat shop tools' and not CS. IMO, if there is any demographic that AI/ML is most poised for eradicating, it is likely this one.
If CS in the US wants to increase participation without compromising on its present identity, then the only solution might be to foster interest and love for science/math/coding early in life and hope you can cast a wider net to capture everyone who would come to consider this profession a hobby.
Alternatively, it can go the way of every other mature profession and turn into a 9-5 boring thing you hate, but still continue doing because you need to put food on the table.