Amazon says developers spend 'just one hour per day' on actual coding

This is just an advertorial for Amazons "AI" tool. I wouldn't put any weight on any of the claims.

Developers are some of the most highly skilled and heavily paid workers in the tech world. But when it comes down to it, developers get to do very little of what they actually want to do: coding.

Amazon Web Services said in a post on Tuesday that developers report spending an average of “just one hour per day” on actual coding. But that doesn’t mean these workers twiddle their thumbs the remaining seven hours per day.

Instead, developers spend the majority of their time on “tedious, undifferentiated tasks such as learning codebases, writing and reviewing documentation, testing, managing deployments, troubleshooting issues or finding and fixing vulnerabilities,” according to Amazon Web Services.

But thanks to artificial intelligence, developers may be able to offload some of that tedious work. AWS announced new capabilities for its AI-powered assistant tool, Amazon Q Developer, which can help developers design, build, test, deploy and maintain software. This new product will “give more time back to developers to enable creativity and innovation,” Jessica Feng, senior manager of Amazon Q Developer at AWS, said during the company’s re:Invent event on Tuesday.

To many interruptions means it takes a long time to get back into the "efficient programming zone" , is my opinion ........

Jira and meetings is what many developers spend much more than an hour a day. Allow to work more with code they probably would. But working with code is not always about writing new lines.

How nice of them to identify a problem and offer their paid solution in the same article.

When you stack bricks for a living you're either stacking bricks or you're not, and the total number of bricks stacked in a given amount of time is a pretty good measurement for who is most efficient at stacking bricks.

Coding is not stacking bricks. It's problem solving. Sometimes I'm problem solving in the shower after a long day. Sometimes I'm solving problems by getting away from the laptop and running on the treadmill for 20 minutes. Sometimes I lay down in bed at night, sleep for a couple hours, then sit bolt upright because I just figured out the problem that has been stopping me from seeming productive all day. The amount of time I spend making my keyboard go clicketyclack or the total amount of code I write is an objectively shit measurement of my coding efficiency because, again, coding is not stacking bricks.

Ever since Agile was perverted into Scrum, corporate software development has been broken.

In my experience it is true that developers average almost no time actually writing code per day but the article is far too generous to guess at where developers actually do spend their time. It is also my experience that when not in meetings developers spend a significant amount of time compensating for slow, defective, and sometimes completely broken internal software and processes.

I suspect that is why corporate software has developed such an extreme Invented Here culture of irrationally fearing anything created by people they know. Of course, that is actually an excuse to not write code which creates a negative feedback loop further qualifying the problem.

Because of all that nonsense my employment experiences have taught me to never trust in the competence of corporate developers unless they write code outside of their primary job AND are required to own liabilities/health of their assigned code items.

My daily average isn't too much better and I have no concerns. I know that the time not spent writing code is spent reading code, working within processes that ensure security/quality/performance/whatever, improving my skills, or any other number of things that ultimately make the value of that code worth far more than it would without that rigor.

I’d want to see actual sources for that claim. Some organizations have out of control meeting process but I’ve also seen claims like this where the business folks are talking like everyone is playing games in the office but what’s actually happening is that they’re not good at tracking support costs or process overhead.

From my experience, it is about 3h per day where I can be productive. But one also has to include the problemsolving thinking that takes place outside of these hours.

And that is why AI can't replace us

Since I can only read the first two sentences, the rest being blurred out by the paywall, I will only comment on those two sentences.

It's true. Developers are paid a lot, but there's often a lot of bullshit in the way of actually writing code. Such as meetings, calls, more meetings, inefficiencies in how tasks are assigned, dead time while you wait for other people to finish whatever they're doing.