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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.
by 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 agoAnd mostly on how many reports you have.
- zmgsabst 3y agoI 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 agoI 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 agoMy 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 agoYup. 20+ years experience and I spend the majority of my time coding. The solution is easy IMO: work for startups not politics riddled corporations