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Ask HN: What is the expected capacity for a full time developer?

2 points by blahbap ↗ HN
At [large company] there I work as a contractor, several projects are being planned with only a limited pool of resources. Initially plans where laid expecting everyone to deliver at 100% capacity - meaning that 8 hours of work would be done during an 8 hour workday. But if you subtract lunch, meetings, procastination, interuptions et al. - what is the expected capacity (%) of an experienced developer in a semi-agile environment?

7 comments

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bayonetz
Hoped and dreamed for? 100%

What I actually use when preparing estimates?

40%-75% which depends on stuff like the developer being staffed, how short the project is (shorter = more productive), how bleeding edge the tech is (higher tech = less productive), etc.

toledi
The question doesn't really have a well defined answer. It would vary tremendously by the organization and project they're working on. Also depends a lot on their level. There are senior engineers who code probably <25% of their time, but add value by helping other engineers, planning, architecting, removing obstacles, etc.
debacle
80% if you have a lean development cycle. 50% if your organization loves meetings and project plans.
brudgers
What unit is developer capacity measured in?

Lines of code, bugs per hour (clised?, created?, avoided?), revenue per month (a contractor standard), etc.

Utilization is different from productivity.

matt_s
I used to use 25 hours out of 40 in burndown calculations, so 5 hours a day. This was then used against task lists that had estimates in hours of 1,4,8,16 increments. If something needed a re-estimate after work began that was taken into calculation.

That was with a fairly low amount of BS. If there a lot of meetings then lower it. If you work in an open plan work space with people not directly contributing to the same effort, lower it some more.

skylark
I work at an extremely large non-tech company following a semi-agile process.

Officially, we're expected to do 6 hours of coding per day. However with meetings and lunch, we only really have 4.5 - 5 hours of time that isn't blocked off.

Then, because some meetings aren't scheduled back to back, we essentially lose the time in the middle (especially if that time is only ~30 minutes).

When all is said and done, I'm probably putting in 3-4 hours of code in per day on average. It's more than enough to get the job done.

It's soul crushing and I'm looking to quit soon.