Ask HN: How much of your time at work as a software engineer is spent coding?

Probably around 4 hrs a day (or half a day). The other time is taken by code reviewing, video calls, spec writing & research

I spend a long time getting requirements for a job. Then a couple of days reading documentation and slowly coding my way into a bunch of corners resulting in code that doesn't work. So after 3-4 days of "working" on a project, I'll actually get into a groove where I can knock out a decent app or tool in about two days. Then add another day for testing and documentation. With fixes needing to be made here and there, that means two good days of coding (and a couple days of bad coding that might be thrown away) for two weeks.

If I start spending a lot of my time coding, that means I'm running off without getting requirements, or I'm stuck with a problem I don't know how to make progress on. So for me this is a good cadence.

I’ve been freelance for a year now and so far it varies hugely. My biggest two projects this year took several months of full time coding and not much else, occasional discussions over slack. In between where longer periods of not coding at all, doing tax and trying to generate leads.

As a junior developer, I spend around 4-5 hours coding and the rest of my time is taken by meetings and code reviewing

As a principal engineer at a 3k employee company, my amount of coding has shifted down to around <30%, but it comes in tides. Last week was zero coding, but the two weeks prior, I had fun coding 6 hours a day. But generally, I'm at the point where two hours of coding is about all I can hope for.

When I was senior at a 500 person company, I could spend half the day or less in meetings, but not every day. Maybe 70% coding.

When I was at more of a start up and midlevel, my meetings tended to be 1hr-2hr or less a day, several days only with scrum.

When not coding/testing/code-reviewing, it is meetings, notes, documents, communications, driving alignment, finding requirements, digging into data, ...

Funnily, I spend my daytime researching, reading code, meetings about meetings, gathering requirements.. doing the human interaction aspect. I'll spend a lot of time assembling modules in my mind, while doing the dishes or house chores. By experience, I prefer spending days of hard thinking and hit the keyboard once I know where I'm heading. Coding is easy, programming an efficient system is hard.

My answer is: as much as possible! I willingly took a 50% paycut this year and left my $big_company job to invert the 80% meeting / 20% tech ratio, and it was the best decision professional decision I've ever made.

On a day-to-day basis, there's always going to be a cyclical element -- I just spent two weeks writing code nine hours a day to push through a big feature, and now I expect to spend a week or two on less focused work, catching up on all the things I ignored while I was heads down.

I also try to turn non-code work into coding work. In lieu of doing a BUFD, I'll try to throw together a proof-of-concept or do a spike. Whenever there's a production issue, I try to turn that into a project to eliminate that class of issue. If there's some repetitive administration to do, I try to automate it.

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I'd say about two-thirds of the time is coding / engineering work. The larger a project gets, the more coordination is required in order for all its pieces to come together at the right time and in the right way for it to to succeed.

50%, I'd say. Breakdown:

- Reading code: 20% - Writing code: 10% - Debugging code: 20% - Meetings / administrata: 10% - Other productive tasks: 10% - Goofing off: 30%

around 40% unfortunately. I wish it was closer to 75-85%, but I was moved to a cloud computing focused team that seems to involve mostly dealing with configs and the AWS console, which personally I really don't enjoy. I hope to go back to doing mostly backend web dev and other related work soon...

How much of a carpenter’s day is spent assembling wooden structures vs. measuring and cutting?

30%, the rest is just emails, thinking, slides

These days it is around 60% vs meetings, however soon it will get back to 90% again when work starts on the new product.

I'm a senior full stack engineer that is considered a lead developer on a project usually. I spend about 20 to 30% of my day coding. The rest of the time is code reviews, pair programming, reading, and meetings.

The overhead of Agile/Scrum/SAFe takes around 30%, other meetings take another 10-20%, other stuff probably takes another 10-20%.

So there are weeks with 30% coding and others with 50% but not much above that.

>(and just justifying the work they're doing or waiting for answers).

I am curious as to what you mean by this? It sounds like you are suggesting that this work is not valid? Is that what you think?

Here is a quote from "The Tale of J. Random Newbie" by ESR:

"He had heard in college that in industry, a hundred lines of finished code a week is considered good performance."

I'm tech leading a small project (~5 people). How much time I spend coding varies quite a lot, usually 20-50% in a typical week. I spend more time than I would like in meetings of various kinds: interviews, 1:1s, planning for the next quarter, etc.