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by gigel82
418 days ago
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I have to disagree. I have 25+ years of full time software engineer positions (after a short stint in management I've been back to IC for 15+ years) and it's extremely rare to spend more than 10% of my time coding in any given week. Things were different when I was doing contract work, and every month brought on a new project that we'd have to quickly spin up. Nowadays I work in mature (legacy) codebases where introducing a new feature requires interacting with undocumented libraries last touched decades ago. I spend 1/2 of my time debugging code, 1/3 in meetings, emails and code reviews/coaching, and the rest in planning and coding. There's definitely some degree of dysfunctionality in the orgs I worked in, but this has been consistent across 3 employers (bigger companies / FAANGs, not startups though). |
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A minor point I'd make is you seem to define coding as strictly typing out... well, code. My perspective is that interacting with undocumented libs definitely counts towards coding and debugging might, depending on the context.
Now, if you scroll way up to the comment that kicked off this thread you'll see it lists three kind of activities a software dev's job is made up of and claims that that the first two are supposed to take the overwhelming majority of time and effort.
Let me quote:
> Why am I doing this? Understanding the business problem and value
> What do I need to do? Designing the solution conceptually
> How am I going to do it? Actually writing the code[, debugging, and refining]
>
> That last part is actually the easiest, and if you're spending inordinate amount of time there...
Let's go along with this notion for a moment, if a dev spends 95% of their time on the first and second parts then for every 16 hours they dedicate 51 minutes to actual coding (as in legacy libs spelunking, debugging, and typing out code)
And that's what I call utter bs on.