TL; DR:
Why Senior Engineers Spend Less Time Coding
If you’re early in your software engineering career, you might imagine that the higher you climb, the more complex code you’ll write. The gnarlier the systems, the more interesting the technical challenges, the deeper the architecture.
And yes, the complexity does increase… But the amount of time you spend writing actual code?
That almost always goes down. Well, at least proportionally to some of the other things you're going to be doing in your role.
Recently I talked about this on Code Commute in response to a Reddit post. A senior developer said that for the past few weeks, they’d only written a handful of trivial code changes and spent the majority of their time writing docs. They understood that senior roles come with non-coding responsibilities, but they were starting to feel like something was off. You can see
my thoughts on this here:
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