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How Developers Waste Money
Developers acknowledge it as soon as they realize it
Let’s do a small exercise. Imagine that you are a developer creating software. Where do you think that you spend more time? Do you spend more time thinking? Do you spend more time writing? Or, do you spend more time debugging?
I have been asking it in front of several audiences for years, almost a decade; The answer is always the same: Writing, and sometimes, thinking. People, including programmers, usually believe that they spend more time writing. Although, they confess that they should spend more time thinking. Let’s review what really happens.
The typical programmer
People usually think that programmers spend more time writing. It is easy to understand, programmers are in front of the screen most of the time. But reading, not writing. Let’s check the facts: faster typists' speeds are 150 words per minute, although a moderate typist writes at 35 words per minute. It does not seem too much, but code does not grow at high speeds either. A moderate chunk of code of 400 lines, may contain 1000 words, which takes 30 minutes. Writing it is not the bottleneck.
Programmers really do spend a lot of time thinking about features. Grooming and planning meetings are part of the thinking. They need to understand correctly the features to create a suitable solution. Programmers also need to review the code and look for the best way to add the new code. Even more, programmers also look for the best way to future-proof the code.
Debugging is the big overlooked. Programmers often see debugging as a step after the coding, not as part of it. But features are not finished until they work as expected. And debugging is very slow.
If you ask any programmer to think about the time spent debugging, they will realize that it is most of the time. So, with no doubt, programmers spend more time debugging, some thinking, and almost nothing writing.
