Developers Spend Less Than 10% of Time Coding

Knowing how they spend the time, is key to improve their productivity. TLDR; it is even less, starting with meetings, plannings, …

In this story, I will try to create a comprehensive list of all the tasks that a developer is facing in its day job, so we can understand better how they spend the time, and how we can improve their productivity.

I have read some sources pointing that the time coding is around 50%, but after talking to some authors, or they either confessed that they put that number just to avoid confrontations, or they include other activities as “Coding time”.

Meetings

When we think in coders and productivity, we know that they do not spend all the working time in front of the computer. That is the percentage of time that we mostly agree in which the developers do not spend their time coding. Yet, they can be productive.

Typical meetings in a day by day job of a developer may include all the ceremonies: standups, decompositions, plannings, and retrospectives. All of these are nowadays standard de facto in most of the companies, and take around 1 hour a day (15%), up to one day per week (20%).