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Comment by Gene_Parmesan | Hacker News Reader

No, and this is a core misunderstanding of the profession.

The job of software engineers is to design and implement solutions to business problems with technology. The job of a software engineer is not merely "write code." Writing code will almost certainly be the smallest percentage of a skilled engineer's time. They need to be spending their time thinking and designing.

We're talking about solving extreme scaling problems at extreme scales here, not churning out crud apps at a local freelance studio.

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Junior/Mid Perspective: "I was hired to write code, sometimes I solve business problems"

Senior/Staff's Perspective: "I was hired to solve business problems, sometimes I write code"

Hacker News Perspective: “I’m a software developer — how dare you ask to see my code! How dare you even imply that developers should be writing code! The best software organizations are the ones where barely a few people (out of thousanda of developers) actually write any code at all.”

;-)

You're completely right, maybe a software developer's total contribution to the bottom line can be conveyed with a few snapshots of context-less code. Maybe every complex problem humanity faces today has an equally easy solution. Maybe nuance and being methodical is for chumps.

> maybe a software developer's total contribution to the bottom line can be conveyed with a few snapshots of context-less code.

I've never suggested someone should be fired if they can't produce code snippets. But it's fair to expect people who don't actively code (when they're not managers or have a non-coding title) to have a reason they're not coding. And there are many perfectly great reasons, especially for very senior engineers. But if someone isn't coding and they're not actually doing anything else of particular value... well, they're not valuable engineers.

Code is not the single-and-only decider of an engineer's contributions, but I reject the notion that it can't be a starting filter to evaluate someone's contributions, and the assessment to proceed from there.

I am not misunderstanding the profession. At a small or a large SW company, engineers should —by and large, with some exceptions— be writing code. I don’t care (and never mentioned) how much time the writing of code takes… whether people spend one hour a day typing or 8.

But while engineers obviously have to spend time thinking and designing, it’s the code that does the actual work and embodies the value of the engineer’s plans. I simply fail to see how a software org could exist where only a small minority of engineers are coding. Makes no sense to me, sorry.

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