When someone starts learning programming and searches for information about how a developer lifestyle is, it’s easy to find a lot of contradictory messages and some of them are really unhealthy. One of the most controversial topics is how a programmer spends his time, and that’s why I’m writing this article, to bring some light and clarify how in my experience a developer spends his day.

First of all, I will share a little about myself so you can have some context about my experience as a developer. I’ve been working as a frontend developer in Spain and Ireland for more than 7 years at the time of writing this article (August 2024). I worked in a medium size consultancy company for a year, around 4 years in a small consultancy company making projects for IBM and other companies of different sizes, then I've work for a year at Atrapalo who is an online travel agency and my last two jobs had been in Ireland working on a product company and my current one is an AI startup. As you can see I have experience in consultancy but also in product based companies, and startups and I worked in very different environments, projects and applications.

How developers spend their time

Is pretty common to hear in the IT community about developers who say that they spend hundreds of hours per week developing, or working on side projects, contributing on Open Source projects, drinking coffee and writing thousands of lines of code. But what is the reality of an average developer? I say “average developer” because some of the people who share their content on social media aren’t showing the reality of their life, but the parts they want to share, and usually the reality they show isn’t the one of an average developer as you or myself.

Some people think that a developer is a machine that transforms ideas (and coffee) to code, but programmers do way more things other than programming. For example, if you work in a medium or big company it is usual to follow an agile workflow, that means that the application or product that you are developing would be released to the client in different phases. If you work with agile it is common to have a meeting every day with the developer team to share with your teammates what you did the day before, what are you going to do today and if you had some problems. And also it is common to make demonstration meetings with the client every few weeks to show him the project progress.

Whether developers work in an agile workflow or not, they will spend time in meetings every day because in the real world, the team needs to prioritize tasks, share knowledge between them, or discuss the better way to solve a problem.

Every day when a developer starts working, the first thing is to remember the work done the day before, it may sound dumb, but a lot of time is spend this way, and if the problem is complex, the amount of time needed to start working will increase exponentially. And after every meeting this process starts again, so if a developer has lots of meetings in a day it would be very difficult to be productive.

When developers start working on a problem the first thing they do isn’t write code, the first thing usually is analyze the problem, and figure out the best way to solve it. If a programmer starts writing code without analyzing the problem, the code resulting will be in most cases poor, so the most common scenario is spending some time thinking about different ways to solve it. Also it is common to ask for help or different opinions to another teammate, specially when you're facing challenging problems.

The developers face new problems almost every day, so it is common that they need to learn new things constantly. They spend a lot of time googling, learning from tutorials, forums or documentation. A developer doesn’t need to know everything, only where to find the information needed every time.

Finally, when a developer isn’t in a meeting and knows what needs to be done and how to do it, the programmer will start writing code. As you can see, writing code isn’t the first thing a developer does every day in the morning when starts working.

How much time does a developer spend writing code?

Is difficult to measure how much time a developer spends writing code, but if we are talking about an 8 hours workday, I assume that only 3–5 hours will be spent writing code, but definitely no more than that. This is an approximation, it is impossible to measure the amount of time spent programming, and it depends a lot on the experience of the developer and the company that developer is working for.

Is common to think that the more experienced the developer is the more time spent programming, but this is completely wrong. In fact, the more skilled you are the more the team will need your help. Also you will spend more time helping other teammates and taking part in meetings with clients or the product team instead of programming.

I hope that this article will help to break some myths about how a developer spent his time. What do you think about it? How do you spend your time? Do you think that you spend more than 3–5 hours writing code?