alt Hacker NewsThis is a bit of glib answer. Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API.
OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to get the drill string put together. They went in with a plan, but the reality didn't agree and they are on a tight schedule.
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Your answer reminds me that my biggest gripe with this site and programmer forums in general is the lack of awareness of the breadth and scale of software development. I'm curious what you work on, because it doesn't sound anything like what I work on.
> Most of the time is spent coding which encompasses typing, retyping, and retyping again. It also includes banging your head against the wall while trying to get one of your rewrites to work against and under-documented API.
I don't think I've experienced this to a large degree. Maybe early in my career. Most of my time now is spent formulating a solution, and time spent coding is mostly spent trying to compose my changes with the existing code in a way that is performant, reliable and meets the specifications.
Glib is called for. The amount of information asymmetry that's still on the table as vibe coders and vibe engineers and vibe doctors emerge is staggering. Professional experience is still incredibly valuable. Most software developers might spend more than 6% of their time coding but no senior developers are banging their heads for hours over typos.
This is far more true for junior and perhaps mid-career engineers, unless you're working in an extremely well-defined problem space (* see below).
When working as a SWE, the longer I did it (~30 years) more of my time was spent understanding the problem, the edge cases, how to handle the edge cases, how to do all of it affordable, on time, and within budget.
That's engineering.
What you're describing is "writing code". That's lower value than "solving the problem".
I imagine a response, "But agile development, etc."
Yep. Part of solving the often sometimes involves creating prototypes to determine the essential viability of the solution. But that's only part of it. Which prototypes do you write? How much time do you allocate to same before accepting it's a dead end (at least for now) and punting on it?
That's engineering.
Me probably coming across as a dick today? Well, I was diagnosed autistic a year ago, and I'm on extended sabbatical/unemployment (3 years now) due to autistic burnout. And masking is part of how I got the burnout.**
* Why would someone be paying for that when there is likely someone else already doing it? Unless you're the rare person who hopes to "disrupt" the competition).
** has me begging the question of why I write here at all. SMH. Why do I do what I do? No idea sometimes.
Let's also not forget a lot of the market edge of SWEs comes in knowing how to navigate these parts. The fact you needed to be reasonably fluent in a language was already a barrier to entry which meant in better times new grads could earn six figures at their first job just for putting in that effort.
Maybe you will still be needed. That is one question. How well you will be paid and treated when the barrier to entry is now "I can think" is another. As the parent indicates, most people doing software are not doing things akin to pure math. I don't think most SWEs want that lifestyle anyway.
It's ok. You shouldn't fight the coming change. Instead use the time we still have to fight for more equal outcomes (vote for politicians that support UBI, Medicare for all). The longer you delude yourself that you are uniquely needed in an increasingly mechanized world the worse all our outcomes will be.
Are you, perchance, assuming that since you spend most of your time struggling with actual code, this is so for everyone else?
Or are you saying that I'm lying. That I am secretly hammering away at my keyboard while pretending not to?
No, writing code hasn't been how I spend most of my time for many decades now.
>OP's formulation makes SWE sound like a purely noble enterprise like mathematics. It's more like an oil rig worker banging on pieces of metal with large hammers to get the drill string put together.
Those two formulations represent different developers' approaches to the same task. The former being developers who are much better at planning than the latter.
Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.