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Agreed that the more senior you are the less time percent-wise you will allocate to just coding but for strong developers this doesn’t mean your output drops co
by dbish 4y ago
Agreed that the more senior you are the less time percent-wise you will allocate to just coding but for strong developers this doesn’t mean your output drops compared to juniors, it drops compared to what you could do if you were only heads down coding. It’s easier in many ways to have higher output as you become more senior if you stay close to the code, know more about the code base, and can be much faster, all the best devs I’ve loved working with are like this. Many of the less productive senior folks that drop in their output and don’t code much (i.e. modify < 100 loc in a month as a normal occurrence) become architecture astronauts which is not imho what a senior dev should be doing as they will lose touch and eventually their guidance is less useful on the complex matters where they are most needed which in turn means their team and company impact is not what it should be.
- BigJono 4y agoI've worked with a ton of architecture astronauts, and while a bunch of them are just shit coders, you can definitely create new ones out of otherwise good coders with the wrong environment. Those seniors that maintain their output are only able to do that as long as they maintain their knowledge of the codebase. As soon as you lose control your output goes from 10x to 0.1x in the blink of an eye. At that point your options are to look like a fucking idiot because your juniors are out-doing you, or to optimise for blowing smoke up the manager's ass. Easiest way to do that is large sweeping rubbish architectural changes that look good on paper. Some people will take a stand, but most just play the cards they're dealt. Every great engineer I know has had both 0.1x projects and 20-50x projects. Knowing why that's the case is more important for a senior/lead dev than coding ability IMO. Get the best out of others and all that...