I'm a staff engineer about five years into my software engineering career. I have long periods of time where I write little code. I'm on a small, special-purpo

I'm a staff engineer about five years into my software engineering career. I have long periods of time where I write little code. I'm on a small, special-purpose team and we spend a significant amount of our time investigating what we're going to work on next. From there, we put together docs and justifications that we take to the team that owns that service so we can achieve buy-in from them. We frequently run projects in parallel, so we can end up being the point-person for one project while assisting on others. I'd say I spend 30-40% of my time actually writing code, though this is extremely bursty depending on the project. The other 60-70% is spent writing docs, doing research, or achieving cross-team buy-in.