Do programmers work at night or during the weekend?

Abstract

Abnormal working hours can reduce work health, general wellbeing, and productivity, independent from a profession. To inform future approaches for automatic stress and overload detection, this paper establishes empirically collected measures of the work patterns of software engineers. To this aim, we perform the first largescale study of software engineers' working hours by investigating the time stamps of commit activities of 86 large open source software projects, both containing hired and volunteer developers. We find that two thirds of software engineers mainly follow typical office hours, empirically established to be from 10h to 18h, and do not usually work during nights and weekends. Large variations between projects and individuals exist. Surprisingly, we found no support that project maturation would decrease abnormal working hours. In the Firefox case study, we found that hired developers work more during office hours while seniority, either in terms of number of commits or job status, did not impact working hours. We conclude that the use of working hours or timestamps of work products for stress detection requires establishing baselines at the level of individuals.

Today Was a Good Day: The Daily Life of Software Developers

“…While this includes an average of 44 minutes non-work time spent at lunch and with bio breaks, the time spent at work is nonetheless higher than the often considered 8 hours for a regular workday (e.g. [64]). Since developers at the studied organization can freely organize their work hours, this might be an indication of developers working overtime, an observation that was previously made for German and Finnish workers who had autonomy over their working time and worked overtime [65], [66].…”

Understanding the Working Time of Developers in IT Companies in China and the United States

“…In the sector of software development, Claes et al [7] investigated the timestamps of commit activities of software projects from Mozilla, Apache and a local Finnish IT company to study developers' working hours. They found that two-thirds of the developers typically worked from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and did not work during nights and weekends very often.…”

“…To investigate the situations of overtime work, first we need to determine working hours of the companies. We follow Claes et al's method [7]. Companies are assumed to follow an eight-hour work schedule on work days.…”

“…For managers and executives in industry, knowing the general working time of their employees could help them set expectations and work conditions to achieve higher work efficiency. However, previous studies [7], [8] related to working time in the software engineering domain were mainly project-based or individual-based, which had a limitation for interpreting working time at organizational level. Furthermore, working time are likely to be influenced by local cultures.…”

“…The frequency of commits during a period of time to some extent reflects whether developers are actively working on software projects during the period. The temporal distribution of the commit activities could reflect the circadian and weekly work pattern [7].…”