Ask HN: How much of your day is spent writing code? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much of your day is spent writing code?

3 pointsjhferris32 comments

I know this probably varies a lot depending on type of company/position in company, but I'm curious. How much time do you spend thinking about/writing/debugging code? How much time do you spend wrestling with server configuration/makefiles/other roadblocks? Do you find it varies a lot company to company?

I ask because in the one internship at a 'real' company I've done I felt like I spent surprisingly little time actually working with code, and am finding the same with 2 (sort-of) research projects I'm doing this semester.

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Anywhere Between 0 and 80% of my time.

Starting out a project, there is a lot more wrestling with stuff. You also spend more time wrestling if you are just learning the technology. After a while of using something, it gets quicker.

On certain days, I have meetings and stuff, or I am doing things management requires me to do.

Other times I spend all day as tech support hotline. (Some programmers don't like that type of stuff, but I like helping people. It is a nice break from code).

Other weeks I will spend almost all of my time coding, whether I'm working on my own project, bailing on someone else's deadline, or fixing bugs/documenting.

I also spend a lot of time outside of work thinking about the code I'm going to write. It is easy to underestimate the amount of time you spend thinking about coding harder problems in your free time. Stuff will just come to me at odd times. A lot of the time I will go home and five totally lost, and come back at 8 ready to type up a solution.

From my point it depends mostly on your role and your responsibility. If you're responsible for the architecture, design and concept, and beside you also other resources in your company are available - you're right, that you won't spend the most of the time for writing the code. From my personal experience I can say if you deal with IT-operations, even if you automate the processes (deployment, roll out of new servers etc.), there are still about 1-3 hours a day that I hack into the terminal/console to take care and improve my infrastructure.

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