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Ask HN: How much code do you write in your job?

by gosenx on 1/5/24, 6:55 PM with 45 comments

• by bob1029 on 1/6/24, 1:39 AM

  I am the most senior technology person in a <20 person startup and I do a pretty even 50/50 on code vs non-code tasks. It's not very stable though. Some weeks I'll be on calls for 30+ hours, others I'll be locked in the dungeon and pushing hundreds of commits. Really depends on where we are at. I am actively trying to get out of code duty because it's really hard to manage the overall tech strategy when you are 20000 feet deep fighting some ancient balrog for days on end.

  After doing this a while, I realized that writing the code isn't the part that takes a long time. It's rewriting it over and over because you didn't fundamentally solve what the business was asking for the first time. I prefer to focus on that part of the puzzle now. Making sure it gets done right the ~first time. Help others on the team avoid lava pits that they can't see yet.

  I try really hard to avoid writing any code until I am nearly certain how something should be implemented. Exploratory rabbit chases are quite rare for me these days. A younger me would be appalled, but I enjoy a new kind of game - Making the customer happy for minimal effort and then getting paid.

• by TrueDuality on 1/5/24, 10:52 PM

  I'm doing the CTO thing for a <10 person start-up that is actively building our initial product. I am rapidly and randomly switching from anywhere from 0-80% coding during any given week depending on what my team and the company needs. Probably closer to 20-30% on average.

  I come from a history of being an individual contributor (15 years of that) and I would say overall as I've gotten more senior in my positions I've done less coding as a % of my time, but the coding that I have been doing is individually more impactful or sensitive.

  The non-coding part of my time has gone more into mentoring, reviewing, design, business discussions & goal setting, policy writing and implementation, team organization & management, and interactions with operations.

  I think that about covers it, but feel free to follow up if you have anymore questions.

• by janosdebugs on 1/5/24, 11:45 PM

  I work on OpenTofu since November, lots of coding, docs, the rest is helping the community or coordinating contributions.

  I used to work for Red Hat (OCP on oVirt/RHV, Arcalot/Arcaflow, etc), in a little over 2 years I wrote somewhere around 40.000 lines of code that I can account for with 80%+ time spent, but that diminished greatly around the end as a lot of changes into the "Scrum to rule everything" direction happened, which decreased the amount of code produced by a lot.

  Depending on what you do you may want to go window shopping for jobs where coding skills are valued and that are low on process. If the interview process already puts heavy emphasis on your code, that may be a place for you. If, on the other hand, the quality of your code isn't appreciated as long as it works... Smaller companies/projects tend to work better.

• by drakonka on 1/5/24, 7:50 PM

  I'd say 85-90% of my work these days is programming. Both the actual coding and thinking through problems or architecture decisions, benchmarking, testing/comparing approaches, etc.

  It really depends on the position and nature of the responsibilities though. I've had position where at least half my time was meetings, and others where there was just a lot of Slack chatter to work through during the day. Right now I'm on a limited-time contract with a very specific project to iterate on and finish up, so I don't get pulled into peripheral company decision meetings, 1-1s, etc as much. This appears nicely conducive to programming time.

• by malux85 on 1/5/24, 10:19 PM

  I work at a hedge fund, and I spent 98% of my time writing code. I usually work on 2-3 experiments simultaneously, and every day or two take 2 hours off to work on "zany schemes" -- moonshot type ideas that occasionally are very lucrative, and therefore justified time-wise.

  1 meeting a week, for 1 hour.

  I work 3AM to 11AM, then about 12:30PM to 6PM on my side gig https://atomictessellator.com

• by mortylen on 1/5/24, 10:04 PM

  Depending on the type of project, sometimes 70% of the time is programming and 30% is consulting with the team. Other times I do 60% design and 40% programming. It's project by project. For me, most projects are greenfield development. Some of them don't even come to fruition after weeks of designing and are lost. The main thing is to do your job the best you can.

• by cmaggiulli on 1/5/24, 11:57 PM

  My title is director of product development. I manage a team of roughly 30 people with 1 layer of management between most ICs. While it’s not evenly distributed, over the course of a year I spend about 10% of my time writing code. I’ve worked in strictly development roles before where I was still coding less than 50%

• by thewizardofaus on 1/5/24, 11:49 PM

  Solo founder; it tends to change rapidly depending on the stage of the product.

  Probably 90% of the time writing code currently. Once the hardware product is released publicly it drops to 10% (maintenance) and then ramps up when new significant features are added.

  Broadly speaking..

  Stage 1: design specs 0% code

  Stage 2: prototyping 50% code

  Stage 3: the hard work 90% code

  Stage 4: selling and maintenance 10%+

• by comprev on 1/5/24, 10:47 PM

  About 80-90% at the moment due to project work where I'm (currently) the most experienced/knowledgable person on IaC in the company.

  A few colleagues are learning very quickly so looking forward to taking a step back and focus on other things in 2024.

• by garlandkey on 1/5/24, 7:17 PM

  I'm fortunate enough to work for a small company with a tight group of devs. We have daily stand-up and I'm pretty much left to research and code for the rest of the day. I'd say I code about 80% of the day.

• by strobe on 1/6/24, 2:42 AM

  almost at any place that rate is not really stable over time and overall if you have something close to 65-70% then it's probably just average situation.

  From my experience places where more programing happening are: - mid-big companies where you role could be very specialized - small companies with focus on creating tech products or where tech has lot of impact on end customers (like if fixing few bugs could instantly lead to making additional money for a company)

  Companies from non-tech word usually value non-coding stuff much more.

  (I currently have about 50/50 rate and sometimes even less)

• by asfarley on 1/6/24, 7:21 AM

  Nearly 100%, the other time is spent planning tests, discussing new features with users. I probably spend 90% of the time actually coding.

• by hnthrowaway0328 on 1/5/24, 7:51 PM

  Almost zero. I refuse to classify YAML as code.

• by mu53 on 1/5/24, 9:54 PM

  You just have to find the right company and role. I have always been able to get out of meetings by "focusing on being an IC"

• by psyclobe on 1/6/24, 3:57 AM

  A metric shit-ton!