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by wakatime 1946 days ago
These estimates are time spent *thinking* about programming. The average dev doesn't get to code a full 8 hours per day. On average from WakaTime data, devs spend only 1-2 hours per day actually typing code. With 261 working days per year, that would take 26 years to reach 10,000 hours.

For example, the total combined hours spent programming the wakatime.com website over the last 7 years was 4,035 hours.

10,000 hours assumes an 8 hour workday. For coding time like WakaTime measures (actual hands on keyboard time), the goal should be 2,000 hours.

1 comments

Am I to believe that you think time spent writing code is the hard or main part of software engineering rather than the thought that went behind that code?

Writing the code is the easy part.

Different people in different situations use different ways to refine 'the thought that went behind that code'. Some like to write on paper/whiteboard, some like to draw graphs, some like to research for similar solutions on the web, some like to directly code. Time in IDE/Editor is easy to quantify, time thinking about solving the problem is not. That is strictly individual work, though. Time spent convincing the PM/stakeholder to reduce/change scope is one that is very productive but rarely quantifiable/counted.
> Time in IDE/Editor is easy to quantify, time thinking about solving the problem is not.

That's the key. To find the time thinking just fill in the gaps between the time spent coding. For ex, the GIF in this post https://wakatime.com/blog/27-fill-the-gaps-in-your-coding-ac...