Let's be honest, how many hours do you really work per day?

I feel like its difficult to quantify for jobs where you're being paid to think. Even when I'm goofing off, the problem I need to solve for the day is still lingering in the back of my head somewhere. Actively squinting at it doesn't seem to make things go any faster and when I do return to work it's usually to mash out reems of code after letting it stew, but yes, the actual amount of time I'm fulfilling my job description is... less than my working hours.
- I agree with you. I am far more productive at problem solving walking my dogs than I am sitting at my desk staring at my code.
- I feel like its difficult to quantify for jobs where you're being paid to think.
  I mentioned once that I feel like my real job is usually done during my morning shower, and wondered out loud whether I could earn more by showering twice each morning.
  My boss told me flatly that as an annually salaried employee, I was already being paid during my showers.

Depends on the day.
Some days I have audit reports due and I’ll have my nose buried in data for six or seven hours at a time. Other days? Can be as low as 3 to 5 hours of actual work, the rest is scrolling Lemmy. 🤣
- I'm more or less on the same ranges ha ha

Programming is my hobby, too, and we are currently using fun/productive technologies, so I have no problem filling out my contractual 7 hours per day.
But all the orga tasks and meetings can easily take up more than half my day. Sometimes, it's barely a quarter of the day that I'm actually doing something productive.

I average 7-8 hours, but it varies wildly. Sometimes I'll be at my computer for 10 hours straight getting tons of work done, and other times I'll not be getting much done and just be done for the day at noon.
Last Friday I discovered some bullshit in how the Outlook APIs handle online meetings. If you directly create an online meeting you can then make a GET request for the meeting id and password. However, if you create an event with the online meeting parameter set to true then whatever is backing the GET request no longer works. This all completely ignores that the credentials should be returned as a response to the initial request to create the meeting. Needless to say that was a leave at noon day.

I work as a bartender. I'll be working the whole shift from 40% to 100% anything less intense then that I'll be on break or asked to start later or go home. Usually it's a 730pm to 2am deal so 6ish ours not including break
- Hello,
  Thank you for your comment, but indeed this community is about computer science. Interesting to know, still!
- This is asking about computer science jobs, see the community

I have a self-imposed limit of 4 hrs/day of productive code-writing; beyond that, quality drops too much to be sustainable. There's plenty of things to do during a workday, of course; salaried days deserve 8 hrs/day, and I've been on on-call rotations that require 12 hrs/day of presence.

It depends on what's going on. If I have a ton of stuff to do, then 12-14 hours, if things are calm and I'm just working on projects and everything's in hand, then maybe 2. I don't get paid for having my butt in a seat, I get paid for results. No one gives a flying fuck how many hours I'm actively doing shit.

In the many years of commuting to an open plan office I think 4 hours was probably the max, and usually it was less.
Since working from home, I'm not sure exactly but it's a lot more, and honestly it's more than is healthy. I'm still less tired overall though.

8-10 hours with few breaks. (I used to skip breakfast and sometimes lunch too...coffee diet) It started as a necessity and then became a habit. I have to retrain myself to take breaks and walk away and give my brain some breathing room and fresh air. This doesn't include the time I spent thinking about problems while driving or in the shower.... I've made progress breaking those habits though.
- I can relate to this. It takes quite a lot of effort/mindfulness or cannabis (or all of the above) to come down off the work buzz and actually stop working in my head! Otherwise, as much of my day as I can get away with will be either work or personal projects (which are very similar to my work for the most part)

Depends if you count pointless meetings my company requires as work.
We work 9-5 with an hour lunch. Most of the day is pair programming, so there's not the same tendency to fart around on Reddit I had when working solo. We take breaks, so it's basically 6 hours on no-meeting day.

Depends. The meetings I attend are mostly useful so I’ll count those as work. Usually 6-8 hours, sometimes 8-10 on outlier days (stay late to work with AU/UK teams, running something outside US working hours, etc.)

Anywhere from 1-7 depending on my mood, how many "useless" meetings I have, how many interruptions find me, how you want to count the questionable-usefulness meetings, and how long I look at slack/email/etc or just thinking about work while at the bar.

About 4 ~ 12 a day, though roughly about 50 ~ 60 hours a week.
A 4 hour day would be if I have some problem that I know has a good implementation, but I just can't figure out how to do it. Then it's better to just stop and do something unrelated.
Though then once the problem is solved and all the puzzle pieces fall together - and I can just work on implementing it, and refactoring it into a good solution - I can continue working on it without caring about the time.
But I don't have a lot of days where at the end of the day I'm like "Yess, I'm finally done working, now I can start doing something fun!" - The working itself is already fun, so that creates a different "Working vs Not Working/Having Fun" dynamic