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Ask HN: Is there any data on how much time developers spend looking stuff up?

9 points by bharal ↗ HN
Is there any data on how much time - or percent of work time - is spent by developers looking things up?

Even better if it is cross-referenced with developer experience (although I guess this varies by experience in particular technology, rather than overall experience).

11 comments

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gregjor
Anecdotally, a lot, and not enough.
bharal
I'm always surprised nobody has any data points on this. Not even stackoverflow, who you'd think could take a stab at it in their annual data dump.

They kind of dance around it, to be honest.

muzani
Not really, but as an Android developer, it's a ton. Maybe 80% of the work (including the dread and procrastination). The documentation is pretty bad, or incomplete. Stack Overflow used to be a good substitute for documentation, but it's hostile to all new questions, so the new stuff isn't really covered. I'm considering doing some open source documenting to help make up for this but I suppose none of us could spare the time.
bharal
I'm asking everyone this - what is your experience level? I know it isn't a good data point because you can be a 20 year java veteran but that isn't the same as a 5 year android veteran, but it's a start!

yes, documentation would be great, but it's so hard to do properly (and basically unrewarding).

2rsf
I don't have official number, but join the "a lot" vote.

I am not sure if you'll find a good correlation to developer or area experience, at least by my personal experience people offload memorizing of stuff to Google search

bharal
Yeah, I'm not sure how effiecient that google-vs-memorising is. I do know it is incredibly polarising - say developers need to memorise and you get hammered by people passionately proclaiming that memory is dead.

But there are - as an aside - very real health benefits to having memorised the work. You're making less decisions (ie "what to google" and "is this useful"), which means you have way more willpower and energy for your daily life. Which is, of course, largely anecdotal but I think goes a long way to explaining traditional developer body types vs those in, say, finance.

(It's not like finance people are "less academic" than developers, for example).

kingkongjaffa
For me there are a bunch of different kinds of looking stuff up as well. It’s almost all valuable though.

Sometimes there’s highly specific - reading the docs.

Sometimes it’s adjacent or wildly different technology/concepts.

Sometimes it’s thinking about a side project or making a toy piece of software to try something out, and the reading that goes into learning how to do that.

Equally just browsing HN and others.

I find there’s a lot of learning by osmosis that’s necessarily not measurable/quantifiable.

bharal
It is wild that nobody seems to know - anecdotally (it's all anectodal, i guess) i've heard anything from 20% to 90%, it really depends who i ask.

how much development experience do you have, and are you front/backend (or devops?)

developer92
Add to that in my current job, reading confluence, trying to work out if the page is up to date, and asking other people. So lots of product/our specific legacy code knowledge is needed which can't be found on the internet.
giantg2
I spend a lot of time looking stuff up. It's just that most of it is not relevant to development.

As an expert in the system, I've done very little research - maybe 1 hour per day helping others troubleshoot. As a new guy in the system or as a security resource, I've done a lot - maybe 3 hours per day.