[icedchai]

I agree it would be absurd for it to take 95% of your time. I have, however, seen that it takes a lot more time than one would think.

I did some contracting work for a severely dysfunctional meeting heavy organization and it was about 2 hours of meetings for every hour of real technical work!

[skydhash]

Even when it’s not dysfunctional, you spend a lot of time on communication and reading stuff other people wrote (including code). It’s very rare to work in isolation.

[hjort-e]

I guess it depends on what you feel coding is. To me it's the architecture planning and reading other people code, not just writing code. If we say it's just typing, then 95% is not absurd no

[skydhash]

> it depends on what you feel coding is. To me it's the architecture planning and reading other people code, not just writing code

And that would be where we disagree. I don’t read code to look at code. When I’m reading code, I’m looking for the contracts to follow when interacting with a system. It would be nice if it were documented, but more often than not you have to rely on code.

It’s very rare that I plan with a technical mindset. Yes I use the jargon, but it’s all about the business needs. Which again create contracts.

Same with writing code. Code is like English for me. If I don’t have a clear idea on what to write, I stop and do research (or ask someone). But when I do, it’s as straightforward as writing a sentence.

[hjort-e]

Huh? So you you don't research if something is technically feasible before you promise your stakeholders a delivery time/ price estimate?

We all do the same stuff, the disagreement would just be what you feel coding is and if you think technical work is the same thing or a superset. If you as software dev aren't hands on with planning or working more than 5% of your time, you are basically a PO with a programing hobby

[skydhash]

> So you you don't research if something is technically feasible before you promise your stakeholders a delivery time/ price estimate

I believe 99% of requests are not about what’s technically feasible. And the rare time I encountered one of those, my answer has mostly been “you don’t have enough resources to try solving that problem”.

If you know your fundamentals well, very often you will find the same common blocks everywhere. People much more smarter than me has solved a lot of fundamental issues and it’s rare that I see a business request that doesn’t reuse the same familiar stuff.

That’s why coding is mostly boring. You follow the same pattern again and again. But what dictates the flows are the business parameters. And that’s why most senior spend so much time gathering good requirements. Because the code is straightforward after that.

[fragmede]

So about 26 hours of meetings to 13 hours of "real technical work" per week, but that's is 33%, not 5%.

[hjort-e]

Ah yes agreed, if it's more than 90% it just signals to me that a developers skills are probably being wasted too much on business/coordination stuff.

But i guess if we mean actual time tapping your keyboard making code, then it's true some days for senior+ devs, but definitely not technical work overall.