5 ms·

There's something deeply depressing about a modern software developer role consisting of 20% coding.

by tr888 3y ago

sverhagen 3y ago
It depends heavily on the company and the team you're on. If you are a more seasoned professional, you probably get the luxury of filtering on this criterion. And a lot of people also really enjoy the other eighty percent.
Apocryphon 3y ago
Maybe, but you also have to consider how much preexisting code has been prewritten in frameworks and libraries. Consider how much of “coding” is spent integrating that code instead of typing out new lines of code.
- 6510 3y ago
  Coverage for preexisting conditions.
glutamate 3y ago
If 80% is spent in progress meetings, scrum point estimation, and other acts of performative taylorism, yes. If 80% is spent understanding reading about the domain in which you are working, talking to your users and domain experts, documenting your work, and mentoring juniors or being mentored by seniors, there should be nothing depressing about that.
6510 3y ago
A great software developer doesn't have a computer. He lives alone in a cabin in the woods. He knows it is better that way as it minimizes harm to others and allows him to skip all of the meetings forever, until the end of time...
- bluGill 3y ago
  Ada Lovelace is a hero for having the sense to die before computers were powerful enough to run her programs.
rafamvc 3y ago
If you considering code reading part of coding, coding 20% of the time is certainly not enough. The article is meant for a neurotypical ideal average employee. There are many effective programmers that have different workflows. A trait of a good manager is allow different people to be effective in the collaboration of writing software together. The article paints an unreal rosy picture where "everything runs smoothly and has forward momentum". Working with a live system is messy. There is always compromise because there is never enough time to keep everything smooth. It is very common to be stuck at some problem. That moment you let a problem clunk around your brain and you randomly think of a solution in the shower or at the grocery store is way too common. And honestly fun.
jamil7 3y ago
I probably spend around 80% of my time coding in a senior role with around 12 years experience. I think it depends highly on where and what you work on.
- ido 3y ago
  And mostly on how many reports you have.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    I agree. If you have 8-10 engineers you’re supervising and are the person interfacing with management, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to spend half your time coordinating, teaching, and planning. So scale down the expected SDE 1 quotas (~50% coding), and you get around 25-30% coding time. I think a lot of people confuse being an experienced career engineer with being a technical lead; that’s the real jump from SDE 2 to SDE 3.
    - ido 3y ago
      I think I'd get a lot less than 25-30% coding time while managing 8-10 people (and also depending on what you're doing while "supervising", if there's a dedicated project/product manager in addition to you, how senior are the other engineers, etc)! In fact at that point I think I'd be managing too many people ("ideally" 1 lead/manager isn't managing more than 5 ICs).
      - zmgsabst 3y ago
        My experience of Big Co is that you have both a manager (HR and business sense) and a supervising/lead engineer (SDE 3) for a product. I don’t think I explained that well — but a 3:3:1 to 5:5:1 SDE 1:2:3 mix is fairly standard across industry. (Again, with an SDM doing the managing.) I used the word “supervising” because I wanted to distinguish that technical leadership from managing, but didn’t explain enough. Sorry for the confusion.
- davedx 3y ago
baz00 3y ago
20%! Where is this magical place you work? I think I write perhaps a couple of lines a week and that's usually patching something in an emergency after other people have failed. Advice: never get too senior.
rkangel 3y ago
Not all engineering is coding. If I'm debugging a couple of hard to find problems this week I won't write lots of code but I'll certainly be doing valuable engineering.
bcherny 3y ago
This was my life, until I moved from SF to Japan. Now my life is 90% coding and I’m 350% happier.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  How many hours a day though?
yodsanklai 3y ago
Yes, pretty sad. Even worse, these 20% coding can be fixing bugs in different projects your team work on, and on which you have only a basic understanding. The percentage of coding on a project that I get to design is even lower.

There's something deeply depressing about a modern software developer role consisting of 20% coding.

by tr888 3y ago

There's something deeply depressing about a modern software developer role consisting of 20% coding.

It depends heavily on the company and the team you're on. If you are a more seasoned professional, you probably get the luxury of filtering on this criterion. And a lot of people also really enjoy the other eighty percent.

Apocryphon 3y ago

Maybe, but you also have to consider how much preexisting code has been prewritten in frameworks and libraries. Consider how much of “coding” is spent integrating that code instead of typing out new lines of code.

6510 3y ago
Coverage for preexisting conditions.

glutamate 3y ago

If 80% is spent in progress meetings, scrum point estimation, and other acts of performative taylorism, yes. If 80% is spent understanding reading about the domain in which you are working, talking to your users and domain experts, documenting your work, and mentoring juniors or being mentored by seniors, there should be nothing depressing about that.

6510 3y ago

A great software developer doesn't have a computer. He lives alone in a cabin in the woods. He knows it is better that way as it minimizes harm to others and allows him to skip all of the meetings forever, until the end of time...

bluGill 3y ago
Ada Lovelace is a hero for having the sense to die before computers were powerful enough to run her programs.

rafamvc 3y ago

If you considering code reading part of coding, coding 20% of the time is certainly not enough. The article is meant for a neurotypical ideal average employee. There are many effective programmers that have different workflows. A trait of a good manager is allow different people to be effective in the collaboration of writing software together. The article paints an unreal rosy picture where "everything runs smoothly and has forward momentum". Working with a live system is messy. There is always compromise because there is never enough time to keep everything smooth. It is very common to be stuck at some problem. That moment you let a problem clunk around your brain and you randomly think of a solution in the shower or at the grocery store is way too common. And honestly fun.

jamil7 3y ago

I probably spend around 80% of my time coding in a senior role with around 12 years experience. I think it depends highly on where and what you work on.

ido 3y ago
And mostly on how many reports you have.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  I agree. If you have 8-10 engineers you’re supervising and are the person interfacing with management, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to spend half your time coordinating, teaching, and planning. So scale down the expected SDE 1 quotas (~50% coding), and you get around 25-30% coding time. I think a lot of people confuse being an experienced career engineer with being a technical lead; that’s the real jump from SDE 2 to SDE 3.
  - ido 3y ago
    I think I'd get a lot less than 25-30% coding time while managing 8-10 people (and also depending on what you're doing while "supervising", if there's a dedicated project/product manager in addition to you, how senior are the other engineers, etc)! In fact at that point I think I'd be managing too many people ("ideally" 1 lead/manager isn't managing more than 5 ICs).
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      My experience of Big Co is that you have both a manager (HR and business sense) and a supervising/lead engineer (SDE 3) for a product. I don’t think I explained that well — but a 3:3:1 to 5:5:1 SDE 1:2:3 mix is fairly standard across industry. (Again, with an SDM doing the managing.) I used the word “supervising” because I wanted to distinguish that technical leadership from managing, but didn’t explain enough. Sorry for the confusion.
davedx 3y ago

baz00 3y ago

20%! Where is this magical place you work? I think I write perhaps a couple of lines a week and that's usually patching something in an emergency after other people have failed. Advice: never get too senior.

rkangel 3y ago

Not all engineering is coding. If I'm debugging a couple of hard to find problems this week I won't write lots of code but I'll certainly be doing valuable engineering.

bcherny 3y ago

This was my life, until I moved from SF to Japan. Now my life is 90% coding and I’m 350% happier.

Apocryphon 3y ago
How many hours a day though?

yodsanklai 3y ago

Yes, pretty sad. Even worse, these 20% coding can be fixing bugs in different projects your team work on, and on which you have only a basic understanding. The percentage of coding on a project that I get to design is even lower.