[bluefirebrand]

> Over time I came to believe, this is what people in dysfunctional organizations say to justify endless political back and forth over painfully trivial matters and constant turf wars

Maybe yes

But I'm really referring to the idea that at some point you should more or less create a solution in a spec, and then code should just be an implementation of the spec

If you are still spending 95% of your time writing code after 20 years as a programmer, then either you are incredible at creating specs in a short period of time, or you are still just doing "I'll start coding and figure it out as I go"

Or worse: "I'll just hack something together without thinking about how it fits overall into the whole"

Writing the code is translating a solution into computer language. Creating the solution is the part that should take majority of your time

[throwawayb299]

> But I'm really referring to the idea that at some point you should more or less create a solution in a spec, and then code should just be an implementation of the spec

This sentence is a little ambiguous, so I might be reading it wrong. But if you're literally referring to the idea of a spec so detailed it's virtually coded in a natural language, then I find this idea baffling. We have a specialized tool for this job - programming languages, which I enjoy quite a bit, btw. Are these somehow beneath a true software engineer, who's supposed to program in English?

Anyway, let's do a bit of napkin math here.

- So, a real Senior Software Engineer spends 95% of their time producing specs.

- Say, coming up with this particular spec took 16 hours, then the time dedicated to implementation works out to approx. 51 minute.

- Assuming their typing speed is 350 characters per minute (nothing to scoff at, especially considering typing is such a minor part of their job.)

- Now, their style guide sets the cutoff for a line of code at 120 chars (they aren't some 80-char cavemen, are they?)

Putting it all together, banging out code non-stop for 51 minutes, they'd end up with O(150) lines of code to show for 16 hours of planning and speccing... I say someone is coasting as if it were the last day of their life. Curious to hear your take!