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What is coding? Actively typing in code, maybe 30 minutes long term average, with spikes up to 8 to 10 hours when the road ahead is clear and what to do is obv

What is coding? Actively typing in code, maybe 30 minutes long term average, with spikes up to 8 to 10 hours when the road ahead is clear and what to do is obvious, which happens about once a year for a few weeks. It's quite rare outside of greenfield, which itself is rare. It's much more common in hobby projects. Debugging? Sometimes I can spend several days debugging a problem, not actively writing any code which goes into production, but creating harnesses, ad-hoc logging, verification / assertion routines and so on. The amount this averages to depends heavily on the maturity of the product and the health of the code. A mature product with a gnarly codebase means a lot more time debugging. Reading code? I spend a fair amount of time reading and analyzing code before a chunky task, figuring out where the seams are, where the data I need comes from, what the best places to add code are, figuring out data flow. When I'm at the start of a task like that, I can do that for 3 or 4 hours a day. But long term average, it's more like 10 to 20 minutes? Reviewing code: this is similar but different to reading code. I don't do as in-depth reading as I do for a task, but if I find something suspicious and I want to make sure I'm right, I can go for an hour or two on research, to prevent something problematic hitting production. But I guess this averages about 20 to 30 minutes a day long-term. I don't do as much code review as I used to when I was more senior roles before. Expect a lot more code review with more seniority.

perrygeo 2y ago
Well said. Reading, debugging, reviewing - provides a nice taxonomy for the things we do with code when we're not writing lines of code. I'd also include time spent in books, forums, and documentation as reading about code; sometimes you need the concepts in plain language. Given this broader definition of coding, I'd say I do roughly 6 hours a day, with 2 hours spent on email/meetings/etc. The time spent actually writing lines of production code is significant but highly variable - maybe 0 hours for the first week, 25 hours the next. Only when "the road ahead is clear", as you said. So the primary work of software engineer tends to be "clear a path so that I can write code" - which involves reading, debugging, reviewing...

perrygeo 2y ago

Well said. Reading, debugging, reviewing - provides a nice taxonomy for the things we do with code when we're not writing lines of code. I'd also include time spent in books, forums, and documentation as reading about code; sometimes you need the concepts in plain language. Given this broader definition of coding, I'd say I do roughly 6 hours a day, with 2 hours spent on email/meetings/etc. The time spent actually writing lines of production code is significant but highly variable - maybe 0 hours for the first week, 25 hours the next. Only when "the road ahead is clear", as you said. So the primary work of software engineer tends to be "clear a path so that I can write code" - which involves reading, debugging, reviewing...