Do Programmers Work at Night or During the Weekend?

TL;DR

This study analyzes the working hours of software engineers using commit timestamps across large open source projects, revealing most work during typical hours with variations and no decline in abnormal hours as projects mature.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of software engineers' working hours, highlighting patterns, variations, and implications for stress detection methods.

Findings

Most engineers work during 10h-18h, avoiding nights and weekends.

Large individual and project-based variations in working hours exist.

Project maturity does not reduce abnormal working hours.

Abstract

Abnormal working hours can reduce work health, general well-being, 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 large-scale 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.