this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
123 points (93.0% liked)

Programming

25983 readers
153 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The cognitive ceiling. Research by Ericsson, Mark, and Newport shows that 3-4 hours is the daily maximum for concentrated effort. Beyond that, diminishing returns.

"Diminishing returns" is not the same as zero returns. You'll get more coding done if you work eight hours a day than four hours a day. There's certainly a point where the quality gets so low that the returns are negative (by introducing bugs / technical debt / stuff you have to rewrite the next day), but in my experience 4 hours is not it.

In fact, if the problem is very complicated then it might even take you three hours just to get up to speed with what you were doing the day before.