I am not a FAANG SV top notch developer, just a data scientist in a successful but still small European start up so my experience must be very different from the one of crowd here.

I have noticed that most of my time is spent finding what to do, get their opinion about new projects from my team members (who are nice people I enjoy working with), and most of the time I find that I am not the person qualified for the job and the problem can be solved in a way that does not involve data work.

Finding what to do and how to minimize the effort in implementing a solution is 90% of my job.

There are days I write SQL as well and those day I am very focused. The days I am not focused it's mostly because There is no go from A to B job to do.