> Are programmers doing 60 hrs of work a week? Yes, if you count planning, talking about work to be done, thinking about work to be done, commuting (s/buying groceries, shuttling kids), mentoring, dealing with other people’s complaints & personal issues, dealing with red tape (forms to be signed, reports to review & give feedback on), etc, etc, etc
I'm pretty senior and I barely think about work outside my forty hours a week of in-office time. An hour or two a week, most weeks, I'd guess. Maybe your experience is just different from other people?
I find the 8 1/2 hours a day statistic to be perhaps true, since some types of work expand to fill the time allotted. I don't believe the 5.7 hrs a day statistic for working moms, though. That would imply that a working mom spends essentially every waking, non-commuting hour working on housework during the week, then six hours each day on the weekend.
40 vs 60 hours isn't really the issue. It's: what counts as "work" to be included in the total, and more narrowly, what counts as "housework"?
My whole argument is that just as cooking, cleaning, and laundry shouldn't be all that's considered "housework"; coding, deploying, etc aren't all there is to "work" as a programmer.
I think "homemaking" makes the distinction clearer in the narrow case. In the larger sense, I'm just saying that "work" isn't just what's on your job title or how you'd describe yourself, e.g. "coder", but "all of that which is necessary to fulfill your duty".
I think there are a large number of working moms who'd agree with the statement, taken not literally but also not hyperbolically: "I spend essentially all my waking non-work time on homemaking (housework + parenting)"
I'm not making a squishy argument about "emotional labor" either, but if it means anything at all, it definitely includes attending to the emotional needs of your children & partner
At a certain point people are voluntarily choosing to take on certain responsibilities and workloads. Why is society supposed to care that people are choosing a particular labor intensive standard of living?
I do the same thing. I work 4 days a week, to spend one weekday (as well as the weekend, of course) with the kids.
Still, my wife regularly points out that I again forgot to do the laundry on that day off, and most of the time she still cooks that day. I want to, but still haven't fully picked up my share of the household work. And the worst part is that she still has to point this out to me.
I do better than most men and am still falling short.
So, no then.