Programmers do not write the program all day long

A recent study showed that this is not a secret for most developers: writing code takes only part of the working time.
For example, besides development, they drink coffee :)

A recent study on how developers spend their work time has shown that programmers spend most of their time NOT writing code. Eric Cloud surveyed 443 software developers and found that, on average, they spend less than half their working time on “development and coding.” Most of the time is spent on such things as: brainstorming, administrative tasks, environmental management and testing.

If it looks strange to you, it means you have never worked as a programmer. Even for non-developers, this news should not be a shock, because Are there many professionals in a particular area who spend all their time on one kind of activity? Other similar studies show that:
• Design engineers spend only 60% of their time on technical tasks.
• Wedding photographers are only 40% of the time busy taking or editing photos.
• High school teachers in Denmark, only 20% of working time is devoted to teaching students.

However, the results of the study seem to me somewhat deceptive. Although there are quite a few days, where the development takes less than half of the working time, there are also plenty of days, or weeks, where most of the time is spent on meditating on Perl, PL / SQL or Shell scripts. The only thing that can be said with confidence about the work of a programmer is that my activity changes significantly from day to day. As a rule, what time is spent for depends on what stage of development is what he is working on.
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In the early stages of development, for example, a content management system, very little coding is required. Most of the time will be spent on participating in meetings, collecting and analyzing requirements, finding tools and solutions, creating functional specifications, planning, etc. When it comes to the actual development, writing code can take 90 or even 100% of the working time. Closer to the launch of the product, the working time will be evenly distributed between coding (completion of functionality, testing, error correction), writing documentation, training end users, etc. After launching the application, but before starting the next major project, time is mainly spent on support, but it can also be easily spent on things not related to writing code, such as reading and learning new features of languages ​​and platforms, attending trainings and conferences.

Therefore, no, the fact that you are a programmer does not mean that you write code all day, although there are also days occupied only with this. This is a job with a wide variety of daily tasks, many of which do not require being behind a computer screen. Programmers who work in a different environment (for example, they practice pair programming) may have different experience in this regard, but the basic idea is that there is no concept of “average” working day or “week” for a software developer.

Although, after all, there is one important task that becomes a part of every working day, because it is critical for the ability to effectively do its job: getting and consuming coffee :). What a pity that the employees of Electric Cloud did not allocate it to a separate point when conducting a survey of developers. Maybe next time.:)

Looking from personal experience, looking at your working days, you understand that “less than half of working time” is far from the limit. :) It seems that the neighbors in the openspace in the cozy Moscow office of Intel can not understand what my colleagues and I are doing. We do not develop product development, we do not release releases, support is also not for us ... No matter how you look at - drawing on papers or marker boards, reading articles, tea and talking on abstract topics ... What to do, Industrial Research has its own characteristics.

And how is your “average” working day?