Ask HN: Why aren't you coding?

The last time I was paid to be a developer by a company, the most prominent reasons I was not writing code were:

1. I am in the 5th meeting to discuss the details of a 10-page document about a feature that would take 100LOC to write if we weren't using Spring.

2. I am waiting for a dependency manager that is incapable of resuming downloads to download my dependencies from the private repository of dependencies which is located overseas, and my ISP has shitty QOS to that location, and the company's dozens of network and infra people don't think it's worthwhile to set up a proxy on this continent. Or I am using wget to download the dependencies and manually moving them into the dependency manager's cache on the filesystem, which is still slow, but more certain to eventually succeed, since wget can resume downloads.

3. I am learning in my 1:1 that if another developer on my team has attempted to set up some alerting, and our QA has signed off on the alerting, and our SRE has signed off on the alerting, but the alerting is not actually working, it is my responsibility to ensure that the alerting is actually working before my manager learns that it is not working. So I should just do all the work that nominally belongs to my teammates all the time, and delegating tasks is some fake thing to make others feel good, not an actual way to designate a DRI for an objective.

I am not paid to write code.

I am a scientist, paid to write papers, grants, and a summary of my PhD.

Now why am I not writing the grant?

Because I would rather write code

I'm always amazed at people who think that programming languages and typing and editing are the hard part of what software engineers do. I spend much more time trying to understand the problem that I'm trying to solve, and to make decisions about how to do that in a way that I won't regret.

One of the best software engineers who worked for me was the guy who deleted the most code. He absolutely produced negative net lines of code, and it was a running joke that we were paying him to write code, but he was doing the opposite.

I’ve discovered that using my coding skills as leverage against the management class is the best way to earn more.

So I’m not coding until I get promoted. I got a raise and a promotion last year, did about 2 weeks of work to give the management the marketing feature they wanted, and now I rest. I’m currently holding out on another marketing feature because the management has no choice but to go with me (deadlines, talent challenge, budget challenge). So I’m using my skills as leverage to earn more.

I told my VP that this feature can’t be delivered until I’m made a Director.