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by jamil7 959 days ago
I probably spend around 80% of my time coding in a senior role with around 12 years experience. I think it depends highly on where and what you work on.
2 comments

Yup. 20+ years experience and I spend the majority of my time coding. The solution is easy IMO: work for startups not politics riddled corporations
Contrary to widespread beliefs, startups are frequently full of politics.
Except not many startups are 40 hour work committments.
And mostly on how many reports you have.
I agree.

If you have 8-10 engineers you’re supervising and are the person interfacing with management, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to spend half your time coordinating, teaching, and planning.

So scale down the expected SDE 1 quotas (~50% coding), and you get around 25-30% coding time.

I think a lot of people confuse being an experienced career engineer with being a technical lead; that’s the real jump from SDE 2 to SDE 3.

I think I'd get a lot less than 25-30% coding time while managing 8-10 people (and also depending on what you're doing while "supervising", if there's a dedicated project/product manager in addition to you, how senior are the other engineers, etc)! In fact at that point I think I'd be managing too many people ("ideally" 1 lead/manager isn't managing more than 5 ICs).
My experience of Big Co is that you have both a manager (HR and business sense) and a supervising/lead engineer (SDE 3) for a product.

I don’t think I explained that well — but a 3:3:1 to 5:5:1 SDE 1:2:3 mix is fairly standard across industry. (Again, with an SDM doing the managing.)

I used the word “supervising” because I wanted to distinguish that technical leadership from managing, but didn’t explain enough. Sorry for the confusion.