I'd say about two-thirds of the time is coding / engineering work. The larger a project gets, the more coordination is required in order for all its pieces to come together at the right time and in the right way for it to to succeed.
Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#1250%, I'd say. Breakdown:
- Reading code: 20% - Writing code: 10% - Debugging code: 20% - Meetings / administrata: 10% - Other productive tasks: 10% - Goofing off: 30%
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#13Funnily, I spend my daytime researching, reading code, meetings about meetings, gathering requirements.. doing the human interaction aspect. I'll spend a lot of time assembling modules in my mind, while doing the dishes or house chores. By experience, I prefer spending days of hard thinking and hit the keyboard once I know where I'm heading. Coding is easy, programming an efficient system is hard.
I know it goes against TDD but I have the same thought process. Lots of time thinking and then implementing when I'm convinced of the design choices.
:)
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#14around 40% unfortunately. I wish it was closer to 75-85%, but I was moved to a cloud computing focused team that seems to involve mostly dealing with configs and the AWS console, which personally I really don't enjoy. I hope to go back to doing mostly backend web dev and other related work soon...
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#15How much of a carpenter’s day is spent assembling wooden structures vs. measuring and cutting?
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#16Funnily, I spend my daytime researching, reading code, meetings about meetings, gathering requirements.. doing the human interaction aspect. I'll spend a lot of time assembling modules in my mind, while doing the dishes or house chores. By experience, I prefer spending days of hard thinking and hit the keyboard once I know where I'm heading. Coding is easy, programming an efficient system is hard.
I'm exactly the same as you mnault000.
Typing code is the easiest part!
The tough part is the whole thought process you have to go through to visually see the whole picture more or less completed.
First, write it down, break it to smaller pieces, find potential obstacles that could backfire at any time, break it down to even smaller pieces if possible, and then convert the whole procedure to coding.
To me the most difficult, yet challenging thing to achieve is to train your mind to think as simple as possible, to the point of exhaustion.
If you start thinking complicated patterns and methodologies, eventually you will end up with an over-engineered infrastructure that could have originally been implemented with standard tech stack, for example in web development with LAMP and a shared hosting service.
If code base is rather small, refactor as soon as possible and follow techniques that allow you to expand your project(s); else, you end up maintaining legacy code that takes a great amount of effort to interpret of what actually does...and good luck with that!
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#1730%, the rest is just emails, thinking, slides
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#18These days it is around 60% vs meetings, however soon it will get back to 90% again when work starts on the new product.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#19My answer is: as much as possible! I willingly took a 50% paycut this year and left my $big_company job to invert the 80% meeting / 20% tech ratio, and it was the best decision professional decision I've ever made. On a day-to-day basis, there's always going to be a cyclical element -- I just spent two weeks writing code nine hours a day to push through a big feature, and now I expect to spend a week or two on less f…
I'm not sure why it pays less. It's a "demotion", but between a skilled middle manager and skilled developer, the skilled developer is more valuable. I actually got a slight pay rise going from mid manager in a big company to developer in a startup, albeit I had to give up the free parking, nice dinners, and free coffee/boba.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?
#20As a junior developer, I spend around 4-5 hours coding and the rest of my time is taken by meetings and code reviewing
As a senior developer, I skim the code reviews and spend a few hours to fix the mess this creates.