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

We perform an initial study on the working time of software developers in IT companies across China and the United States by investigating the timestamps of commit activities on GitHub. We identify three temporal patterns shown in commit activities among these companies. We find that Chinese companies are more likely to follow long working hours than American companies. In addition, in China, developers in large companies are more likely to work overtime than those in small companies. Also, if developers in Chinese companies have to work during the Lunar New Year holiday, they are more likely to work in regular off-hours than in other dates. Furthermore, we conduct a survey on the trends of, reasons for and results of overtime work. Our study could provide references for developers to choose workplaces and for companies to make regulations.