How Much Did You Code Last Week?
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?
Title: Grunt Programmer
Hours: ~25
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
Title: Solutions Architect
Hours: ~5
Title: Senior Programmer
Hours: ~30
Hi David,
Title: Senior Developer
Hours: ~5
Too many meetings and design sessions!
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…
Title: Applications Architect
Hours: ~20
small team, not as much coding as I’d like … but not bad.