On how many multiple projects do you work?

Question

I work in a small (unter 10 people) company. We make a handful of programming projects mainly for research purposes. At the moment I am switching between 5 to 7 different projects. Not always on a daily base, but several times a week.

Some other questions here on stack overflow and elsewhere in the internet let me think that this will be the normal case for the main part of my life as programmer. Is this true? Is there still a possibility to get the chance to work on one project so you are able to concentrate on this? (Or at least to have other projects only now and then.)

So, how much projects do you work on? Do you like working on multiple projects at a time?

Answer 1

I have about 6 that I am actively working on during any given week.

Answer 2

I usually have a number of projects going at once, but I can't say I bounce between them that quickly. And not all of them are programming. Usually it's 5 or 6 at a time, in various stages of completion, and I might shift every couple weeks or so. I suppose it probably varies per-person. I'm the sort who can't get anything done until I can get a number of hours to concentrate on it with no distractions beyond my mug of coffee, and who gets loads done during those sprints.

Answer 3

That sounds like the way it is for us, too, and we're also a small team (under 10 people). We've got about the same number of projects open at any given time. For us, the projects are driven by the customers. Each customer wants us to work on 1 or 2 projects at a time. With 5 customers, that ends up being 5-10 projects at any given time, usually closer to 5 though (perhaps 6 or 7).

EDIT: A little more detail, like others I find it hard to split time evenly between that many projects, in reality in any given week one particular project will get 40-60% of my attention, and then the rest of the time is split between the "minor" ones.

Answer 4

I can't handle much more than two projects at a time. And hopefully one of the two doesn't take much bandwidth.

Answer 5

For me, it's about 3 real projects, and a dozen people with the human equivalent of a hardware interrupt button, which amounts to 2 or 3 random small projects per week.

Answer 6

Realistically, it's usually around 0.5 to 1 for me.

Answer 7

As an independent consultant, I'm currently active with 3 clients, and I can jump between approximately 6 projects in any given week.

But no, I wouldn't consider this normal, even if you are consulting. Normally, your employer will want you concentrating on as few items at a time.

Answer 8

The way our line-up is, I generally have one major project that I am working on at any one time (in this case a second round of development for a product already implemented for a client).

I will normally spend most of my working hours on that project and then only take at most an hour or two per day to deal with issues relating to other projects. This can vary depending on the frequency of client calls or new RFPs that get sent out.

Answer 9

My company also has less than ten programmers, but we're very focused. Each programmer is assigned to one of the 2-3 projects we have going at any given time and very rarely works outside the scope of that project.

I think I have the opposite perspective than you do, though. I would rather be working on multiple projects, so that I have more and different problems to think about during the course of the day. Working in the same problem domain for months at a time tends to dull my thinking, although I guess it's a necessary evil. I work on my own projects in my spare time to make up for it.

For what it's worth, I've worked in very few companies in which I've had the opportunity to work on more than one project at once (in fact, only one springs to mind). To me, that seems to be more the norm than the situation you describe.

Answer 10

I typically work on 6-8 projects a week with small interruptions for technical support. We are also a very small company so no one works on one project at a time. I don't mind it thus far, keeps me busy and makes my day go fast. Also keeps me from getting bored and forces my ADHD down :)

Answer 11

My company have less than 10 programmers and there aer someone who works in different projects. I work on a single project with small interruptions for customer support. It's been three years that i work on this project and quite tired right now :)

Answer 12

Where I work right now, I only have one project that is where all my focus is currently. In the past I have had a situation where I worked on a couple of projects and that was OK as I understood how I should divide my time between them. I'd think 3 would be my limit as once I get more than that there is a bit of a context switching. However, I would put out there the caution that at times my job can have many different sides that get attention as I can envision all of the following are parts of my job where many are outside of project work:

1. Project work - This is obvious in the sense that this is clearly known what the goal is and what kind of plan there is to get us there.
2. Support work - Similar in the sense that it can be an obvious aspect to the job. This can be thought of as handling support/trouble tickets/requests depending on how one wants to call this.
3. Professional development - This isn't either of the above but is something I consider to be part of my job. My skills have to be kept sharp and I may need to learn some new tricks so that I can become more valuable and thus merit raises in pay as well as responsibilities. Reading various technology news and blogs can be parts of this too.
4. Administrative overhead - Time sheets and team meetings on non-project stuff come to mind here as stuff that I have to do in my job and can take some time in some cases.
5. Personal development - The difference from 3 on this is that this is outside of a specific job role. How do I as a person grow? How can I be better on this planet? How do I manage relationships with people in terms of handling trust and other responsibilities? What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? Those kinds of questions get some of my time, granted it isn't a lot on company time but I do think there can be some merit in spending some time here to become a better person that may lead to being a better worker.
6. Keeping needs in check - This is where I take the break to get something to eat or drink, go to the washroom to remove something from my body or wash hands, go for a walk to stretch or rethink about what I'm doing, etc. At times this can be important as if I passed out into a diabetic coma in the office that wouldn't be good, or at least that is my thinking and I don't want to test that theory out.

Thus, I may be getting 10 things done today and it can fall into various buckets as sometimes there can be that gray line of doing support on a current project that can be one and two or learning about lambda expressions to do something that is needed for a project that is also professional development just to give a couple examples.

Answer 13

I'm currently working on four distinct things -

• our primary product (client/server app in PowerBuilder/SQL Server. team of 8 developers.)
• installer for the same (NO skill overlap, so I think it's a distinct project. sole developer)
• our replacement product project (Silverlight. team of 10 developers. much overlap with 1.)
• internal tools (Word/Excel/VBA/VSTO. sole developer.)

Maintenance & bug fixes for all. In a given week, one of them usually has more emphasis than the others, depending on where in the cycle things are.

Our releases or other special projects also get one of the devs assigned as lead - right now, I'm responsible for managing the migration of our code base onto a hugely modified database schema and into TFS. (don't miss the meeting where they talk about this stuff!)

Edit: Yeah, i like having multiple things to think about, but it's a pain in the fanny when two or more of them need things done right now.