How Much Did You Code Last Week?

March 23rd, 2007

Each month am privileged to have an early breakfast with a group of very senior developer types, as the Boise Software Architecture Group.  I enjoy the sincere dialog and earnest debate.  ORM mapping seems to be a hot topic lately, along with measuring code quality, Agile methodologies, and VSTS.  Few of us are exclusively developers anymore, sharing titles like Manager, Director, and Architect. 

I have been particularly whiny this last year about the rare time that I get to spend coding.  This is a significant reason I am so excited to be moving into my new position as Chief Architect for Healthwise.  I will have no direct reports and will re-focus on technology.

Despite my wide eyed exuberance, my friend Jason Grundy pointed out at breakfast this morning that many architects are non-coders as well.  He predicts I will find myself with little more time in front of an IDE.  This begged the question around the table: “How much time did you code last week?”

With 5 people at the table, answers were: 6 hours, ~25 hours, 0-4 hours depending on what you mean by coding, ~12 hours, and 6 hours. 

I am particularly interested in job title to coding time ratio.  What is your job title and how much time did you spend coding last week?

David Starr

  • http://blogs.meetandplay.com/wpierce/ Bill Pierce

    Title: Grunt Programmer
    Hours: ~25

  • http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/netblog Benjy

    Title: Solutions Architect
    Last week: particularly good: ~25,
    otherwise most of the time is spent mentoring the team, helping bugfix, review code or write code for my own open source project (bizunitextensions). It aint good i know and being a developer at heart, the weight of all the documentation and management and no time/permission to actually code is terrible, but such is life.

    cheers

  • http://blog.torresdal.net Jon Arild Tørresdal

    Title: Solutions Architect
    Hours: ~5

  • http://www.chrisbrandsma.com Chris Brandsma

    Title: Senior Programmer
    Hours: ~30

  • http://themicrobusinessexperiment.blogspot.com John K

    Hi David,

    Title: Senior Developer
    Hours: ~5

    Too many meetings and design sessions!

  • M. Holmgren

    Title: Senior contract developer (or something like that I guess)
    Hours: ~25
    (the rest spent in Word documenting my proposed design & code changes, some traditional team meetings and of course the mandatory friday free donut meeting!)

    For me that is a pretty good week. Some weeks have a lot less coding, esp if we need to tweak CC.NET quality reports or if I have to do project mgmt type tasks, quality reviews (read code and write about it in Word), etc…

  • http://jasonlangston.blogspot.com/ Jason Langston

    Title: Applications Architect
    Hours: ~20

    small team, not as much coding as I’d like … but not bad.

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