Ask HN: How much of your time do you actually spend coding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much of your time do you actually spend coding?

14 pointsjrs23510 comments

How much of your time do you actually spend coding versus say thinking about and discussing design, architecture, etc. with your colleagues or attending meetings, etc?

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You can log it via rescuetime.com. 53% of today was in software development. That's a good day. It typically goes between 30% - 45%. This is baring in mind pretty much all I'm supposed to be doing at the moment is coding, ie no support and less than 5 emails a day.

That figure is skewed downwards as there is 15% for reference / learning which is a ton of me watching coursera videos in the evenings.

Out of curiosity what sorts of things do you watch on Coursera? I was a big fan in 2013-2014 and did a bunch of courses. Some of them, like the Scala course, were very self-contained and great, especially with the automated graders. Mostly, I found the platform frustrating, though.

The artificial pacing of the courses made it essentially impossible to go through any faster than you would in an an in person class. Also the honor code prevents people from actually helping each other when they're stumped in the forums. There's clearly some tension between my goal of learning and the platform's focus on credentialing (via credentials that carry almost no weight).

Many courses were watered down versions and since different institutions break up their coursework slightly differently, there was a constant problem of repeating material or missing parts of prerequisites. Now it seems nearly all the courses are watered down and most don't seem to have any prerequisites at all.

Is it possible to do an entire technical degree's worth of material on Coursera, even at the undergrad level? Regardless of the value of their own certificates and capstone projects, if a student could learn enough to pass a GRE subject test, that credential that would actually carry some weight.

Andrew Ng's Machine Learning 18 months ago and now his deep learning course. I do them because he's the best lecturer I'll ever have. So I'm not so bothered about credentials because I know I'm learning valuable information. The ML course was a bit limited as it was all Matlab, but the deep learning is all python and tensorflow. I also started the Scala course, but stopped as life was too busy, and I'm half way through Geoff Hinton's NN but he's just not as good at explaining things as Andrew Ng.

I spend almost all time programming and thinking. Occasionally, I discuss some issues with colleagues. Other than that, I attend approximately one hour of meetings per week in total. I like this hands-off kind of management.

Depends on the structure of your team and the stage of your company, doesn't it? For example in the first year of STOMT i developed STOMTs backend / API but in the meanwhile i do not code anymore and my focus fully transitioned to other things: sales, hiring, fundraising, legal, bureaucracy, etc...

Which is a good sign i guess. I miss my IDE though... a little bit. :)

I'm in a semi-management role, so 10-15 hours working directly on programming projects on a good week, zero on a bad one.

Of that time, probably a quarter is spent running tests over and over again. For a project that's just applying something I've done a dozen times before, I'll probably spend half of the rest of the time just understanding the part of the codebase I'm applying it to. For something that's new or rusty, I'll spend 90% of the time in the beginning and 20% at the end researching or planning or just looking up APIs in the documentation.

Personally I think most of time is spent on either design or debug. The actually coding period would be short if you have a clear design. And you would spend much of time on debugging some really rare but strange issue. If you are in the correct direction, the issue would be found quickly, otherwise it may take hours if not days to dig out the issue.

Another point is that it also depends on the familiarity of the technology/language you are using.

Logged at my day job using toggl: around 50% at most (if you include reviewing others' code). Closer to 25%-30% if you're only talking about writing. Another solid 25% of my average day is taking breaks.

4 hours a day max. Any more and I get exhausted.

I'd actually count design and scheduling as coding, because that's where most of the code is written.

Probably 50/50 over the long term, but I'm usually either in a mostly-design mode or a mostly-coding mode. If in design mode, I'm spending 1/3 of the time doing productive work, and the rest procrastinating. If in coding mode, I'm spending 8-12 hours a day head-down writing code, with small breaks to step back a bit and think.

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