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Comment by hamdingers | Hacker News Reader

> In most teams, coding - reading, writing, and debugging code - used to be the part that took engineers the most time, but that is no longer the bottleneck.

Do most engineers find this to be true? For me the balance switched within a few years of being a senior (nearly a decade ago). Writing code is easy, negotiating over what code to write takes time.

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I have found it to really depend on the company. Large companies, there is a ton of time spent on architecture reviews, paperwork, design, hitting new library updates, etc. That work is on seniors, then mid levels do a lot of the actual coding (at least in my experience).

But I have worked in some areas that its not like that. What we are building is decided pretty quick, but the implementation takes a month of two.

The constant back and forth between architecture and product and project management roles is the new norm for more senior/staff engineers it feels like. rarly do i get an opportunity to work on code during regular hours.

my days are spent in meetings discussion how to implement things or why do it certain ways - when most of that time spend asking inevitably turns into "when can this be ready?"....well if you didnt have me stuck discussing it for the last 6 months it would've been ready yesterday like you wanted.

Even when I was a junior (<2y experience) on a one pizza team of mostly juniors..no, coding was not the bottleneck. And definitely not the hard part.

I'm with you and I'm a solo dev right now. Reading, understanding, and trying to decide what is the right code and how that code fits is the most time consuming.

No, most studies find that engineers spend only about 20-30% of their time coding.

Really depends on the company. For me it isn't true, but it used to be when i worked at a bank with terrible management. Nowadays i'm in a tooling team (for Network and security teams), where my "clients" are other devs from the same company. Of course we still have negotiation, but i'd say 60-80% of my time is spend coding, and that's with me being basically a "senior".

And by the way, one thing is missing from the OP graph: i now spend maybe 50% less time writing my own code, and 100% more time fixing my juniors PRs and fixing production issues after my reviews miss issues...

That's my experience too. And my employer has generally internalized it into their process: instead of negotiating over what code to write, write it all the ways, A/B test them, and negotiate over which code to launch once you have more data about how different approaches might affect user behavior.

Interestingly though, the experimentation process itself seems very under-optimized, and so it is frequently the bottleneck.

I find that I spend less time reading, writing, and debugging code. That much is true. But it has been replaced with context switch recovery time. Its like having a coworker who nags you every few minutes. I see no apparent increase in output. The bottleneck just moved the goalposts around.

Seems to me like this depends more on the existing codebase, framework suitability etc. than position in the hierarchy.

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