About Developer Workdays

Research on software developer’s workdays offers interesting insights. Last time, we talked about specific factors contributing to good or bad developer days. This time, we are going to look at more general findings:

Writing code

On average, developers spend more time collecting needed information and collaborating with others than writing code. This is especially true for senior engineers. They spend more time on activities like agreeing on specifications, participating in meetings and helping others. Interestingly, seniors also tend to value these activities more than their junior colleagues (on average). According to one study, the longest typical period of uninterrupted programming time was 47 minutes.

Meetings

While meetings can be a time sink, developers do not consider them bad by default. Rather, meetings are considered more useful during phases like planning, specification and release management. One study reported the average daily time developers spent in meetings as 19.5 %.

Emails

Contrary to popular belief, emails are not a typical source of distraction and dissatisfaction for developers. (Personal note: In my experience, chat tools have replaced a lot of email conversations by now. It might be useful to look into these instead.)

Helping others

Helping others is generally considered useful and fulfilling. However, it can go the other way when developers are so involved that they cannot make progress on their own tasks. Sometimes, there can be a strong conflict between individual progress and team productivity.

What is your experience with the topics above? Does it match your expectations, or were you surprised by some of these findings?

Here are the sources for my research-based insights on developer workdays:

• Today was a Good Day: The Daily Life of Software Developers by André N. Meyer, Earl T. Barr, Christian Bird, and Thomas Zimmermann
• The Good Day Project by GitHub

Note: You can also find this episode on YouTube and Spotify.

#SoftwareEngineering #Productivity #Programming