[davidwf]

My answer is: as much as possible! I willingly took a 50% paycut this year and left my $big_company job to invert the 80% meeting / 20% tech ratio, and it was the best decision professional decision I've ever made.

On a day-to-day basis, there's always going to be a cyclical element -- I just spent two weeks writing code nine hours a day to push through a big feature, and now I expect to spend a week or two on less focused work, catching up on all the things I ignored while I was heads down.

I also try to turn non-code work into coding work. In lieu of doing a BUFD, I'll try to throw together a proof-of-concept or do a spike. Whenever there's a production issue, I try to turn that into a project to eliminate that class of issue. If there's some repetitive administration to do, I try to automate it.

[muzani]

I'm not sure why it pays less. It's a "demotion", but between a skilled middle manager and skilled developer, the skilled developer is more valuable. I actually got a slight pay rise going from mid manager in a big company to developer in a startup, albeit I had to give up the free parking, nice dinners, and free coffee/boba.

[brtkdotse]

> between a skilled middle manager and skilled developer, the skilled developer is more valuable

I disagree. While the skilled developer might add to the teams output, a skilled manager will multiply the output (by 1.x) of the whole team.

[sjg007]

Meh, you need both skilled developers and skilled managers.