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by mark_story 4972 days ago
Do you find that frustrating? For me, days with less than 30% time spent doing coding feel like a waste. I think I value coding and the surrounding activities far more than any other type of work activity. For me that other 75% (I'm guessing spent in meetings) would feel like a time vacuum.
2 comments
justincormack 4972 days ago
Deciding what code to write is not a waste, writing code that is not needed is far more wasteful. Defining that as "in meetings" is not very productive.
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HeyLaughingBoy 4972 days ago
In any given day, I may have a number of meetings; I have to write any variety of documentation; get into discussions about whether or not a particular requirement is correct and stated properly; answer technical questions of the "what if..." type; investigate strange behavior to see if it's a bug or just normal, but misunderstood behavior; review other people's designs, code, or test cases, etc...

When all that's done, there's not a lot of time coding.

No, it's not frustrating: it's just part of the job. I mentioned in another topic a few days ago that my dept. won't hire people who are "just coders." We expect developers we hire to be able to take on all aspects of the job from gathering requirements though final test, if necessary.

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mark_story 4971 days ago
Fair enough, I always considered looking into production and customer issues, digging through log files, and doing code review as part of 'coding', even though that's not the literal meaning.

Perhaps I'm using that term a bit too loosely then :)

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