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Ask HN: Technical founders: What percentage of your day is coding?

8 points by dquail ↗ HN
I'm doing some research on the dynamics of founding teams. One of the core elements is understanding patterns in technical founders - particularly how much they code. This is part of our general interest in how successful people spend their days: http://blog.zenlike.me/category/how-they-work/ But it'd be able to quantify some of our research with data. Thanks for any help!

8 comments

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eudoxus
Depends what stage you might be in. I started at pretty much 90
waster
Think I'm a hybrid vs. pure technical founder, though I am doing all the frontend and in theory will be doing some of the backend too. I spend 90% of my day coding.
Sealy
I find that my patterns of productivity when varies a lot when coding. Occasionally I get in 'the zone' where I have laser like focus and can knock out hundreds of lines of code in a night. Other days, I have no inspiration and write next to nothing.

Can you clarify how you would measure a percentage of a day (are you referring to a 24 hour period or the awake hours)? I think a more sensible metric would be to ask how many hours per day on average does a technical founder spend coding.

Averaged out in the first few months, it must be around 40-50% of my day. (~5-6 hours max).

I find it hard to believe that anybody could clock more than 70-80% sustained for more than a week. With 8 hours of sleep a day, you would get 16 hours of potentially productive time. 80% would equate to ~13 hours of coding leaving you with 3 hours for meals and general 'life admin'. That's not much.

dquail
Good points. I should rephrase the question and probably re-post later. I'm most interested in knowing what percent of the working day a technical cofounder spends coding.

The problem with raw hours is that it's less meaningful without the total hours. Ultimately I'm trying to understand how these people balance their days. Coding vs. non coding

Sealy
You're asking two separate questions here. Try not to merge them into one. Try this.

During your start-up phase, on average, how many hours a day do you spend on:

a. Coding

b. Non-coding activities (related to your start-up)

That way you can deduce total hours spent (on average per day) on the start-up.

Also it would be useful for you to ask how long the 'start-up' period lasted.

dquail
Good points, thanks for this!