Why aren't you coding?

Because Coding is not Working. Coding is not Planning. Coding is not Being Efficient. Coding is not Accomplishing Goals. Coding is not Saving Money. Coding is not Gaining Customers.

I am getting paid to get things done in a good manner. If I wanted to have a house built for me, I would not expect to pay somebody and immediately have them start laying bricks without them looking at the land, taking soil samples, sketching up drafts of what the house should look like within the constraints available, and then plan the foundation of which to start building.

If they came and immediately just started laying bricks, I'd know I have a really shitty house builder.

I mean no offense by this, but "why aren't you X" is a bit naïve and comes off as lacking a good amount of experience in that field. There are many reasons why not doing X is right, including social/mental recovery and prevention of burnout.

I am paid to solve problems, programming is one part of that, thinking about the problem and the code is a prerequisite to programming. Sometimes one needs to step back and let things sink in rather than continuous action (programming)... while doing that you can even play games, I'll admit some activities are better than others for the purpose of de-focusing your subconscious - but sometimes you also just need a short mental break, that's often when I go to HN.

For the same reason our job's don't stop when we go home (or turn off slack) either, we are essentially paid to think and our brains do not care about the arbitrary thresholds set by 9-5. I fully realise how much someone is actually able to practice this has more to do with the organisation they work for appreciating the difference between cognitive and manual work.

I finally checked out the link. You're looking for material to use in a comic? And I'm trying to give you a serious answer. Maybe these experiences will help:

Had a coworker get promoted way past his level of incompetence. He never accomplished much before, but afterward he spent all of his time lobbying for his ideas and undermining those of us that were trying to get work done. Wasted a lot of time dealing with him until mgmt got a rare clue.

Another coworker would ask a 5 minute question and an hour later come back and spend a 1/2 hour telling me over and over how my answer helped him solve his problem.

Incomprehensible emails from corporate telling us something that might or might not be important. We had to try to decipher them to be sure. Much unproductive discussion ensues.

Had an company exec that liked to go around glad handing everyone. Nice guy, but man could he blow a couple hours of our time.

Woman in the next cubicle arguing with her kids over the phone - loudly - for two hours.

A loud snuffler in another cubicle. Still can't understand how he didn't give himself brain damage.

Yak shaving: get a bug report. Run the debugger: crashes with no message. Research debugger failure to no avail. Go to file a problem report: reporting tool is down.

I'm sure a lot of people have this problem: naming things. Can't code until you figure out what that variable should be called.

Mainly because I’m helping other people be able to code. One of the interesting things about the 10x engineer meme is that they’re 10x because they improve the productivity of their team. Well extend that to DevRel and that’s maybe another order of magnitude or two of effect again. Extend that to the average person looking to build and it’s another order or perhaps two again. Hopefully the stuff I’m doing now will get ten people off the ground immediately (I already know it’s reached at least this many people) but another 1000 going this year and another 10,000 if not more going over the next two years.

Whereas my programming and design work has only reached tens of thousands interacting with it over the last two years this is hopefully seeding for a big future.

I'm constantly bombarded with "quick" questions from coworkers about how some part of my code works (or more often why it doesn't). After several such interruptions it's harder and harder to even try to focus, maybe some kind of neurosis, fear of being interrupted once you are again in flow?

I'm not coding because I'm reading a webcomic about why other people aren't coding.

Feature request: when someone goes to "https://whyarentyoucoding.com/", can you cleanly redirect them to "whyarentyoucoding.com/NAMEOFCURRENTCOMIC"? It makes it easier to share the latest comic since sharing whyarentyoucoding.com results in a stale link after a few days.

I'm burnt out.

I've been on sick leave for over half a year now. Luckily I am in a country where I am protected, but I'm receiving less salary as the law indicates. I'm trying to focus on the good things in life. In my downtime from work I've tried to start a few personal projects, but I just can't seem to stick with it and I end up just playing video games all day. I just wanna crawl into the fetal position and die sometimes. I've often contemplated suicide but I know it's not the way out and it'll hurt the people who love me more than it will help me. I haven't told anyone the last part yet, including my therapist. I know I'll never make that move, but it has been on my mind.

I'm working 2 half days a week now, and it's hard. Therapy helps, even if it's just someone I can talk to without judgement, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to stop soon because it's costing me too much. Unfortunately the waiting list for therapy covered by insurance is extremely long.

Covid was part of the problem. Because of it, we just got more work and longer hours and I was given some high stress projects and clients that were way beyond my capacity. Couple that with WFH and a bunch of other personal things that happened, I got a burn out. Without going into details, I feel my employer failed to protect me and our relationship has soured. I want to quit and find a new job, but because of my situation I can't just start a new job and work 40 hours again. OTOH continuing where I work now is just causing me more and more stress and anxiety I'm also underpaid for my level, and on top of that I'm only earning 70% because of my sick leave. Rock and a hard place and all that.

I'm lucky to have my partner, she tries to be understanding but she's also had a tough year.

Anyway, that's why I'm not coding.

Some recent reasons:

1. I am stuck in a meeting

2. Everyone is arguing about requirements in Slack and I am waiting for that to sort itself out.

3. I am coding, just a Reddit script instead of my work.

4. A fellow developer friend is also not coding and wanted to chat.

5. My Surface blue screened.

6. I have to write a pull request

7. The API I am working with is down

8. With work from home, my thoughts drift to napping

9. I am on Udemy figuring how to code it

- Burned out

- Depressed

- Anxious

- Covid-induced (likely) brain fog (maybe the depression/anxiety also is from presumably having covid back in April)

- Can't find a freelance client

- Broke

- Want a passion project

- Want to be part of a co-op not a cog in a machine

- Want to be on a team again

- Can't pick a side project to work on for some cashflow

- Too busy promoting my gofundme to pay rent

- Want to be a game dev this week

- Will want to be a systems dev next week

- Wanted to be a blockchain dev last week

- ADHD (apparent?)

- Mid-life crisis? Or is it just covid brain

- Wow, this has been catharctic just free-writing like this.

- Are you still reading this?

- Really bad schedule

- Brain struggling with organization

- MOTIVATION <--- mostly that..or the lack thereof.

- I'm 41, I guess as senior a dev as you can be in php/vue, feel like a junior dev, imposter syndrome.

It is probably roughly analogous (I do consulting but not specifically coding), but much of my "down time" truly is "letting the ideas percolate" because properly thinking through what you're planning to do slowly and methodically saves you so much time and frustration in the end.

Of course then there are days when I just don't feel like it. I get paid hourly so I don't feel bad about it. I also get paid over twice what is technically the hourly rate of a normal employee. This leads me to think that companies expect employees to spend half their time doing what I do when I'm not billing them -- letting ideas percolate.

Mentally spent, in the back of my mind I have this feeling like "why aren't you accomplishing something" but I just literally can't. I can't even watch tv or something I'm just in a bad mood in general today idk what to do, kill time till I fall asleep. Wake up with a fresh brain and then do the hardest thing first. In the end... it is just passing time... I guess I'm lucky I at least have a job that pays... what I build isn't Uber or something you know it's just like a self jerk "look at me I made a todo list" kinda crap.

Currently, I am waiting for inspiration to strike.

Sure, I am polishing up some other projects, slowly extending them. You know the drill -- better commentary, testing for more unusual conditions, making the "pipeline" reach further in both directions, that kind of thing.

However, I have a Difficult Problem that will require something special to get me going. The last time I was faced with a similar issue (some rather geometric issues, given that it is GIS), I kicked it around for months. One night I was ill and had to take my usual medications for it, and as I became very sleepy, the solutions began to appear to me as well-illustrated diagrams in different colors, with drafting-style callouts and such, a long parade of what I had been looking for. When I woke up, I drew them out and after then, I could begin to code.

Everything else I am doing is basically pick and shovel work of coding. For this, though, I await the call from my muse.

Code you write is code everyone will now have to maintain forever, so naively, you want to solve problems with as little code as possible, and maximize the value being generated by your codebase. So you should be spending your time on... properly validating the business value of your projects, properly designing what a system should look like on paper, properly considering use cases and edge cases, finding what code can be eliminated, finding what code can be refactored, finding the single line that you need to change to make it all work.

> The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.

is preferable to

> $10,000 for building a new printing press system from scratch.

I'm not coding because there are more important things to be done. For example: - I have to groom tasks and interfaces across team boundaries. - I have to review others code. - I have to help someone with their problem so they can proceed and deliver. - I have to onboard. - I have to make sure processes are working well. - I have to make sure the team works well. - and so on and on...

Some programmers are much more valuable to their employer than just for the code they write. You don’t become a 10x engineer (if such thing even exist) by writing 10x more code but you can enable others and make sure things work and easily deliver multiple times more value.

Good managers understand this very well.

Because I’m having an existential crisis thinking how incapable I am and have been winging it all along. Keep stressing over how long would it be before they find out and kick me out.

Lack of sleep, have a young child at home ... can't really focus on anything else but documenting own older code or watching lectures right now.

The last time I was paid to be a developer by a company, the most prominent reasons I was not writing code were:

1. I am in the 5th meeting to discuss the details of a 10-page document about a feature that would take 100LOC to write if we weren't using Spring.

2. I am waiting for a dependency manager that is incapable of resuming downloads to download my dependencies from the private repository of dependencies which is located overseas, and my ISP has shitty QOS to that location, and the company's dozens of network and infra people don't think it's worthwhile to set up a proxy on this continent. Or I am using wget to download the dependencies and manually moving them into the dependency manager's cache on the filesystem, which is still slow, but more certain to eventually succeed, since wget can resume downloads.

3. I am learning in my 1:1 that if another developer on my team has attempted to set up some alerting, and our QA has signed off on the alerting, and our SRE has signed off on the alerting, but the alerting is not actually working, it is my responsibility to ensure that the alerting is actually working before my manager learns that it is not working. So I should just do all the work that nominally belongs to my teammates all the time, and delegating tasks is some fake thing to make others feel good, not an actual way to designate a DRI for an objective.

Because I build furniture now and I'm much happier for it.

Why am I not doing that right now? Because I'm waiting for some of my mistakes to get enough heat into the wood stove so I can leave it to its own devices and head to the shop.

If I write code when I feel physically unwell or tired, I have to undo it later.

If I wander HN in the same mental fugue state, I often find things that save me effort later.

In a theoretically optimal world, all engineers would have immediate and omniscient knowledge of all dependent teams, and stakeholders interests. They would also have immediate knowledge of all system complexities and have no operational burden or customer's that they need to help. Of course in this optimal world engineers would always have instant access to all knowledge of their toolchain and not need to perform research, and the build would of course never break.

The unfortunate reality is that developing roadmaps/managing stakeholders/building team collaboration takes a large amount of time.

Arguably 90% of this effort could be eliminated if the number of stakeholders was reduced, or the company exercised more trust that their engineers were working on the right things. There is a tremendous amount of waste introduced by the endless tracking of engineering deliverables.

from developers who are being paid to write code

Who is paid to write code? I'm paid to ensure my team delivers quality software, on time and to spec. Typing out code is the least difficult part of that.

What does "coding" exactly mean here?

If we include the whiteboarding and sketches, I'm coding all the time! If we're talking about literally inputting code, well it's because it's very difficult to solve hard problems without some sort of planning first.

Also, administration of issue trackers, etc. Meetings. Helping a coworker. Writing documentation. Waiting on a response from a 3rd party vendor, etc.

One of the best software engineers who worked for me was the guy who deleted the most code. He absolutely produced negative net lines of code, and it was a running joke that we were paying him to write code, but he was doing the opposite.

Because I am working on another team's code base and my code merges are dependent on their whims and schedule. Submit pull request, wait for one week for somebody to review and give feedback (all of which is bullshit nitpicks about spacing, one style of unit tests over another etc.), implement the feedback, wait for another ten days for the same person to review again and provide another round of more bullshit feedback. In the meantime, my boss says you are not coding enough to get promoted to the next level. I have started doing LeetCode because I was concerned that I might forget coding and also it will help me find another job.

This year: most of the time I am not coding is because I am making sure my 6-year-old is paying attention to Zoom Kindergarten.

I guess I have coder's block... the thought of a big project makes me more reluctant to start.

97% of my time is spent debugging(other people’s code), profiling, reading code, working on automation etc.

The larger system you work on, the larger fraction is spent on non-coding. I happen to work on a source base of ~14 million LoC.

I'm most comfortable coding in a unix environment, but I built/bought a windows computer to play video games on, and I'm too lazy to either install a linux distro on here, or setup a dev environment using WSL, etc. Also, I don't really have any projects in mind that are grabbing my fancy.

I’ve discovered that using my coding skills as leverage against the management class is the best way to earn more.

So I’m not coding until I get promoted. I got a raise and a promotion last year, did about 2 weeks of work to give the management the marketing feature they wanted, and now I rest. I’m currently holding out on another marketing feature because the management has no choice but to go with me (deadlines, talent challenge, budget challenge). So I’m using my skills as leverage to earn more.

I told my VP that this feature can’t be delivered until I’m made a Director.

Working on a project that is being wound down due to lack of sales but the remaining tasks are asinine compliance requirements imposed by the new parent company - we have been acquired recently - that are "non-negotiable" even when the project is going to be sunset soon. Management also is dragging its feet in finding a new project for me. Motivation to play along is low. Working from home as single is doing its own part. Management doesn't seem as isolated because they're in calls all day or have family.

Profectionism procrastination: Because I haven't figured out the best perfect solution that solves all the problems without any trade offs. I'm waiting for the perfect design to occur to me. I'm hoping it might occur to me while working on something else, reading blogs, watching youtube, in the shower, or while I'm sleeping. Or, I'm waiting for inspiration of any kind. Or, I'm waiting for an idea that intrigues me enough, or that I might learn something from, that I think is worth attempting.

Not late enough yet.

I only code productively between the hours of 10 pm and 4 am. If the baby sleeps.

Morning coding time is spent fighting with my inner manager about how to present last night’s work at standup.

Afternoon coding time is spent in a stupor wondering why the coffee has no effect anymore.

Because I'm an engineering manager :p

I do try and find time to code on the weekends, but the pandemic has all but destroyed my motivation to do anything beyond the bare minimum.

"because I'm compiling the kernel for the 8th time, waiting for my manager to ask me what I'm busy with so he'll know I do a job he can't. Witch kept me hired so far" ( not from me, yet true )

Actual experience I had recently that could work here:

1. I'm simultaneously filling out performance feedback while supporting infra and a team who is developing said tool.

2. I go to merge code from said team to fix a UI/UX issue of decent urgency. Looks good, builder succeeds, deploy to staging quickly to confirm before going straight to prod. Deployment fails. Odd. Check, odd errors. Turns out JFrog is experiencing an outage and that's a dependency on the builder, keep that status page open, go back to actually filling out performance feedback.

3. Get some unusual flakiness on the performance tool, don't think much of it.

4. See update from JFrog, they are down due to a GCP outage. I go to GCP to see what services are down, and Cloud SQL (the database the performance tool is on) is experiencing issues.

In summary, GCP goes down while dealing with a bug in a performance feedback tool that I am both in the middle of using and also assisting with in a non-coding capacity. There's some non-coding for ya :)

The most common reason I'm blocked from coding is that I'm still doing the analysis necessary to figure out what needs to be coded. Examples:

- I am currently not coding because I have a profile running, to figure out which part of the code I'm working on is slow before fixing it.

- Shortly after pandemic lockdowns, I was not coding because my employer had a problem, and we could only come up with two solutions to it. Both were very high-touch, in the sense that either would require hundreds of dev-hours divided across at least a dozen individual developers. I was not coding for about two weeks there because I was the one tasked with doing an inventory of all that work, so we could make an informed decision about which solution to pursue.

The other way of putting this: The job of a software engineer is not just (or often even mostly) coding.

Queue Hal changing a lightbulb: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t

Yesterday I was not coding because my simple change required a bloom filter. I spent a little time finding an appropriate package. I went to import it and my IDE couldn’t. Now I am trying to find why the the manifest is borked, decided to re-pull all dependencies from scratch, find out three of them are incompatible, so I have to figure out what version to pin them to, etc. One lib had a breaking change in a patch version that I could address in our code. Cool, now back to using a bloom filter...

And our integration tests are more and more brittle as we put more and more services into our docker compose files. And they take longer and longer.

Busy talking to people, splitting work into issues, writing the issues to put on project boards, finding which project board to use, searching for which issue I'm working on, searching for which project board I put it in, updating project boards, starring at the 150 crap email filling my inbox everyday, writing filtering rules for my inbox, double checking if I didn't miss an important email, looking up unread Slack messages, following up on unanswered questions, getting up to drink some water, getting up to piss that water, taking a break to eat lunch, dropping my daughter to the daycare, picking her up from the daycare, making coffee, ordering coffee beans, reading up documentation, reading code, reviewing PRs, writing code.

When you do contracting, you outline a maximum number of hours you can charge. It's usually <=20/week for any given client if you have high rates.

You don't usually get overtime or benefits, so working more than ~120% time sets a bad precedent. (It's good to do right by your clients, and people appreciate not being specifically billed for small things)

Setting aside time to not-work is a good hedge against getting over-committed, especially since individual contracts can ebb and flow in the volume of work required.

Also, do you realize exactly when you are asking this question? It's two days before Valentine's Day, and a Friday evening for most readers. I know this is Hacker News, but I'm kind of surprised at how tame the responses are.

Because my title includes the word "Engineering Manager", which means if I code people will think I'm a shitty manager who should be an IC. So instead I'm required to write a bunch of docs and attend meetings, and explain ideas to smart developers who don't quite get it the first few times... but once in a while I'll crank out a demo to show the team the way, quietly fearing my career advancement opportunities diminish if my own leadership finds out :-)

Only slightly exaggerating. Still, it's no fun being stuck between loving to code and building virtual machines with my own hands, and loving to lead teams and drive projects and see the amplified output of a group working together.

Developers are not paid to write code, they are paid to come up with a software solution to a (usually business) problem.

I take you'd better read an honest answer about what makes people avoid positions where there's much coding in favor of others rather than some joke or anecdote about why I'm not coding right now.

Coding has the seed of burnout. Not everybody ends up burning. Most people control it. Some people build barriers to contain it. Some people develop intrincate kinds of neurosis. Some people use drugs. Some blows up.

Dealing with machines is frustrating. Dealing with humans too, but machines are more difficult to hate. The printer scene in Office Space is hillarious just because that.

Because my boss's boss has sent down a directive that there will be NO MORE MEETINGS. This then requires every manager to meet with everyone they have ever talked to (not just their direct reports) to explain that there will be no more meetings.

However, customer meetings are exempt, so the time previously taken up by meetings with co-workers is now used by sales and project management to "improve communication" about the customer needs or to "give them higher visibility" into our (non-existent) progress.

Meetings, most of them without bullet points or a specific topic.

I'm coordinating another devs too and that costs less time then meetings to projects. We don't have the best product owner culture, so I need to fill that role too. But we are working on that topic atm and we are reaching the first goals.

It's funny and I like it, but sometimes I just block time in my calendar to do tasks two weeks ahead. So nobody is able to schedule me on a meeting without asking before.

That makes most people think about if I'm really necessary.

Going for a walk. Many problems solve themselves during a walk. M

I'm stroking my beard and thinking hard about a problem, trying to sink back into some kind of productivity about being interrupted 3 times in the last 10 mins. Probably stretching my back, feeling the tiredness in my shoulders, noticing my coffee has gone cold, thinking about the next cup; with an added sense of regrets for the wasted time and gut wrenching sadness about how fast I used to be at programming.

But honestly the fact is the sheer complexity of the problems I'm looking at requires so much thinking. That complexity wasn't there in the older days. There were also a lot less people involved in a project and that causes added complexity, in fact, exponential complexity to most changes in code, since code has become product.

Code is now of biblical importance. In the olden days, it was about getting things done. Today, you write code that could make or break the company. People judge you on 5 lines you've written 6 months ago within thousands of other lines; the more experienced you are, the more ways you can implement something, with many consequences compounded by who's going to use it and how within the next 5 years.

I’m gathering requirements. Since all my projects are badly under (or over) specified.

So, a lot of my time is spent making sure I give my team something they can work with.

—

Another one is that our dev environment is broken. Our developers have a bad habit of deploying their local branches without integrating the latest version of master. And suddenly the UI devs are twiddling their thumbs because someone has to run a 20+m deployment to get it back up to date.

Recently...

1. On StackOverflow learning more about how C# works under the hood to understand memory/CPU usage (newer to C#, used C++ in a past life)

2. Building/debugging a spreadsheet in Excel (not a software engineer by job description)

3. Debugging software issues on hardware by messing with the hardware

4. Thinking about how to code to solve the problem; drawing/writing things out, etc.; rather than just diving in head-first (need to do this more...)

because im vacuuming the db, flushing the cache, rotating the logs, retrieving the stats, rebooting the server, teaching you to change the background in the chat, commenting on the tickets, adding to the docs, onboarding the noobs, upgrading the libraries, adding ips to the firewall, updating the ssl cert, installing, compiling, backing-up, migrating, doing my timesheets, ive got 3 'training modules' i haven't completed yet, 5 invites to a PMs weekly catchup I cant make, I've been asked to review the spec on some other project, still need to setup the VPN access, get passwords for the VNC, need to email support to put my keys on the new server so i can jump host as working remotely, editing crons, editing configs, security updates, replying to client emails... oh and that line of code i wrote this week. sadly I had to write that as there was no other solution. I mean I googled like fuck for ages but this is the only way.

Writing a proposal for a customer in the millions range. Not coding; but figuring out if we undestand well the rewquiremente, figuring out what has to be done, when, how, and whay kind of problems might arise (imagination is important, and beigng pessimistic, too).

On monday, I will git pull the repo and add some test the team needed to write, but had no time to code.

Thinking through a very complex and delicate concept, trying to come up with the best way to solve it. It's been a few weeks.

The last time I was employed, almost a year ago, my answer would have been one of the following.

1) I can't concentrate with the sound of this dickhead next to me eating 5 times a day.

2) You keep asking me why my ticket isn't done yet

3) I'm troubleshooting this other problem for a customer that I'm for some reason supposed to do concurrently with my assigned tasks.

4) I'm not interested enough in creating what is ultimately a html/css page, but that has devolved into a complex state management, component architecture, strict typing, and build system monster.

5) Meetings, though the last place was reasonable about them for the most part.

If I were to try and answer why I would be coding, the answer would be that the problem is sufficiently complex or new to me, and I have the mental and physical space to tackle it. Every one of the above 5 are constants in most workplaces, and it burns me out to the point where I don't know what compels me to keep seeking jobs.

Love the comic! Sorry about all the people replying without visiting your comic.

For me, it is definitely schedule anxiety. If I have meetings throughout the day (I do), forget it.

Why aren't I coding? Because it's the middle of the day. I'll get going at 7-ish. Or tomorrow, when everyone else is taking their kids to the park.

Why aren't I coding? I have perf reviews that need to be completed by Wednesday. I HATE PERF REVIEWS! Unable to function.

Why aren't I coding? I have to do a presentation next week. I HATE PRESENTATIONS! Running on zero sleep. Unable to function.

Why aren't I coding? Because we are hiring. Always. Damn. Hiring. Non. Stop. Interviews. Please make it stop.

Why aren't I coding? I already have 4 changes out for review. My git skills aren't good enough to keep stacking these things and keep them straight in my head. I'll rewatch The Expanse while I wait.

I code at work and occasionally on quick personal tasks. I consider myself as someone who isn't coding enough.

I feel this way because over a year ago I began a project in the hopes of answering a single question. Every day I am looking for information that might help me answer that question.

Some people would argue that I should stop trying to answer the question and instead try to test things in code. That the process of coding will help me solve the problem. For this problem, I disagree. There is so much I don't know that sitting down and testing things feels like a waste of time. I refuse to program until I have the structure of the program cemented into my brain. Not every single little detail, just the big picture.

When I program, I am chasing an idea. And if I don't fully understand that idea, then programming it becomes so much more difficult.

At a previous job, I was asked to write up a list of my accomplishments for the previous year in preparation for my performance evaluation. During the evaluation my manager and I went over this list and I commented that it seemed to me that I hadn't accomplished a year's worth of work. He as happy with my work but acknowledged that there were a lot of things I did that wouldn't go on the list and I can't be expected to be producing all of the time. I suppose that's like focus factor in Scrum.

I still think it took too long to complete some tasks. They would occasionally bog down while I had to noodle with existing code to be able to add new features. So even if I'm coding, I may not be creating value but rather I'm paying down the company's technical debt.

I'm not coding because I don't believe the work I need to get done will fix the issues I've run into while trying to get my work done, and it's hard to find motivation in that situation.

In other words, I'm not working on The Real Problem, I'm adding a feature.

Technicians should be coding all the time. Engineers should be solving problems.

Sometimes it will be coding, sometimes it will be asking questions, sometimes it will be thinking, etc...

The more senior I become in my career, the more I realize that less is more, with coding. There is no thinking tech debt.

As a JavaScript developer I am paid to use enormous frameworks. Solving problems or returning value back to the business are often (not wanted) beside the point. Attempting to program real solutions in this line of work frequently results in hostility from your coworkers.

Because I've realized that for the things I want and need to build, I would be an order of magnitude too slow to go alone.

I rarely write any code myself these days (and when I do, I make sure I'm not doing that in any critical path of the company).

Barely just enough to stay sharp to remain an effective tiebreaker and stay respected by a highly capable team.

Mostly prototypes, tracer bullets, idea scribbles and PoCs.

Other than that, I focus mostly on distributing knowledge, connecting the dots and lay the tracks forward to make sure we as a team build something that creates value for the company and doesn't have to be thrown away.

Writing more code myself would be a dire waste of company resources.

I once worked at a company that, when they did sprint planning, counted a day as 4 hours, that is to say if you said a ticket would take 4 hours you were saying it would take a day. Which means that any 8 hour day was half not coding.

I feel like I'm just doing it for the greens ya know ? I started programming 'cause when I was a kid, I always wonder how the things I love like games and software that I used to use works. But since then, I found myself in need to earn money to keep life going, and that curiosity and possible passion has to turn a way to live and survive and, I confess, it's starting to lost its bright, there was a long time ago since I code something to myself; but this year I'm planning to change it, I don't want this passion to die and become something bored.

I have a date/time bug that I really dont feel like figuring out right now

Mobbing and pairing.

Not only they reduce the team output (pairing is acceptable because you're doing a pull request review at the same time, mobbing has a driver and someone helping around and the rest of the team barely follow along), they are also incredibly draining and I can't bring myself to do much more when the session is over.

I tried to raise it as a problem but we want to standardise practices and "be more collaborative". We're getting culture mandated from above and they hired an agile coach.

Because I'm a pro procrastinator.

Forgot to refill my ADHD medication

Because I'm in a zoom meeting while reading hacker news.

Unmotivated, I need a break T____T

Read-only friday

Accidentally became a manager.

It is funny to read all the comments and see the dichotomy of coding:

On the one hand, everybody wants people who can write code and keep them at the highest productivity level and on the other hand, code writers seem to care about not writing too much code, because all that new code must be maintained and might create necessary problems in the future which need to be solved :-D

To paraphrase Charles Babbage;

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

I am not paid to write code.

I am a scientist, paid to write papers, grants, and a summary of my PhD.

Now why am I not writing the grant?

Because I would rather write code

Because I'm updating my work log. Because my employer wants me to keep a log of everything I spend my time on. Or, because I'm updating my ticket statuses. Because my boss wants to see updates in tickets periodically even if there is no progress, so sometimes the udpdate is just "no progress."

When I first started, I thought I would by touch typing code all day long. It was within my first project I realised we were there to solve problems rather than hacking at a keyboard.

Since then I’ve learned it’s best to spend more time on a whiteboard or notepad than to jump straight into an editor - measure twice, cut once!

I find I have a limit to the number of hours I can code per week. Sometimes I'll spend a weekend on a side project or fixing some bug. When I go back to work the next week I just have trouble being productive. Same if I work late I can get stuff done, but tomorrow's productivity will suck.

Because my job is only about 40% programming. The rest of it is strategy, design, mentoring, and code review.

There are multiple ways of solving a problem and sometimes more code isn't the answer. Taking a few days to properly analyse a problem, examine the existing codebase and weigh up various alternatives is vastly superior to going in guns blazing and creating a giant mess in the process.

Depression and medication side effects I'm still working through. There's an intense fog that forms in my head when I try to think through a problem that didn't use to be there. Even problems I've solved before I have much greater difficulty with than I remember having.

Usually im talking or drawing. Sometimes writing.

Most of the problems to solve involve multiple teams, and getting timelines and interfaces right takes a fair bit of talking, drawing and writing. Once that's done the coding is quick and simple

I'm not paid to code though, coding is incidental to the engineering

Day job >> Kids >> wife >> dishes >> laundry >> bills >> depression

I have to break through all these barriers to get to spend a minute after work writing code. Before pandemic, would happen like once every other week, maybe. Now it's like once every three months.

Pretty severe bout of executive dysfunction.

It's February, it happens. As manifestations of seasonal depression go, it's really not bad, compared to spending a month wishing I wasn't alive.

Been keeping up with exercise, eating right for the most part, seeing friends a little. I'll get through it.

I took a temporary break from leisure-time coding, in order to finish writing my book on drawing algorithmic art with Go: https://leanpub.com/generative-art-in-golang

most of the things I want to "code" have problems with them I can't solve. I don't have the time or money to solve those problems so why start? I have some potential business ideas/big projects but I can't figure out how to make those things pay for themselves and some of the engineering requires solving problems I don't know can be solved.

I can't drop out of my job to start working on them because people rely on the money coming in from my current job which consumes all my time and energy. I could try to raise investor money but as I said, I don't know how to monetize these ideas or at least keep money coming in so no good investor would give me money and I refuse to commit fraud.

I'm spending less time coding now, but still writes more code than ever before. That's because I'm getting better at my craftsmanship. The issue is what I'm doing when I'm not coding.. meetings, chats etc. Total waste of time if you ask me.

Lack of motivation in my team and myself. A big merger has happened which has meant:

* various political machinations behind the scenes

* the gutting of the team I'm on

* the sunsetting of the project I'm on

* my contract coming to an end

The temptation to just browse reddit, twitter and youtube is one I'm struggling to resist.

Too much time and work involved, but the problem with buying software is you get too much bloat and poorly coded stuff despite having more features. Even if you are an amateur, coding it yourself can produce better results than even off the shelf stuff.

I was asked to document old code, which someone else had taken over before leaving and removed the framework standards while I was on another project. They renamed every file index.js,and now the cli tools don't work.

Waiting for NPM to install packages

Waiting for units tests to run

Finding the perfect Giphy to slack my colleagues

Fetching coffe

Installing OSX updates

I'm very much an amateur, and unless I have a project, I don't really code. My projects are generally configuring various WMs or Emacs, or weird stuff, like Gemini browsers, an abortive clicker game, et al.

Because in a sense I'm being paid not to write code. Company put me on furlough due to budget problems, but are paying the remaining 20% of my salary, so I'm basically being paid my full wage to not work.

I spend ~5% of my time writing new code. The rest is spent doing other tasks.

1. Napping 2. Obtaining coffee to stop the onset of napping 3. Code reviews

Simple, it's Friday :)

I'm not currently coding because running a company, talking with customers, learning to build hardware, solving electricity and magnetic problems. Coding maybe every second week.

Coding requires prolonged intellectual focus. Prolonged intellectual focus brings insanity. I dislike insanity, from top to bottom. Therefore I no longer code. Not much, anyway.

Writing JIRA tickets, meetings, running SQL queries to prepare reports for X number of reasons, on call operational work to keep our systems running, writing design documents.

My hands have hurt too much, continuously, ever since the operating systems course at Carnegie Mellon in 2008. The doctors claim they can't find anything wrong.

Because my compiles take to long - just noticed this. My compile takes a minute or so, so I flick to hacker news, reddit etc while waiting, then what was I doing...

Because it's Saturday and I don't want to code :)

Nothing! Since quitting my job and becoming self-employed, there are now no bosses or coworkers or anything else to stop me from coding (except HN of course!)

I'm busy learning art. All of the things I want to make (mostly games) will require good art, so this is as good an opportunity as ever to focus on that.

... Final Fantasy XIV

If I can only send you a meme, answering your question "what it is that's stopping you from coding". Coding is just a part of it.

Cos I’m making music

Because I'm waiting for another developer to finish his part of the code that my part of the code is supposed to talk to.

Ehh, was watching Youtude videos on Siggraph animation. One thing led to another, going down the rabbit hole of math videos.

Because M. Navier and Sir Stokes called up their buddies Euler and Kolmogorov... to melt my machine’s brain, ...and my own.

Internet comments. Emails. Startup launches.

Reading papers that would need coding soon.

Because it's going to be a long night debugging the [bleep] build and I just want to eat some of this pizza.

Because I'm on HN :-D

More seriously, I'm continually getting interrupted with support cases, and my head is destroyed.

Isn't there more than enough code already?

I'm being paid whether I write code or not, so there is that.

There's always more reading/planning than typing. Maybe that's part of coding?

Stopped coding in 2018. Gave away my small fortune. Went homeless. My time has come. Aloha.

I'm fighting with the tools.

Good question!

I know ultimately I want my own product. A simple, niche, probably boring, product that myself and my wife can maintain, and ideally - pay for our living expenses. That's the big shiny goal.

My agency (of 8 years) was acquired late last year, and I'm currently a little burnt out. I have so many ideas, a smattering of self-doubt, and I think deep down a bit to prove to myself.

So at the moment i'm taking a break, and focusing on something a bit left-of-centre (for me at least).

I am writing all my experiences of starting and running a software agency up at https://devtoagency.com . It's oddly cathartic, and as somewhen who has never written before I am finding it a mixture of fun, exciting, nerve-wracking and again - sometimes self-doubt inducing.

For the first time in my life I am also part of a community (on Twitter). I am conversing, and helping new developers, and it feels good... It's not all about "me", and I think that's what I need this minute.

This just turned into a weird self-help exposé ;)

TLDR; I am focusing on helping others through writing and community building.

My shoulder, shoulder blade, and elbow hurt. Overworked and under exercised. :-/

Not answering your question, but nice comics you have there. Is there an RSS feed?

reading more books to think better and doing manual labour to cleanse my soul

Java websphere stack is such a waiting game. Besides I don't love code.

I finished coding something ten seconds ago, and am taking a break on HN.

I love building side projects but I can’t think of anything useful :(

I am playing video games.

"What's stopping you" It's a 3 day weekend?

Not being able to find good variable names of the same length.

I'm way too tired.

I'm studying Latin and working with customers instead :D

Because I have a life.

I’m on parental leave

I turn happiness into code, but require more minerals.

Somewhat simple, I just haven't left my bed yet.

I am trying to choose which pet project to dwelve in.

Because Eclipse is so slow and hangs quite often :((

Because I am reading and commenting on Hacker news!

Daunting task ahead, little progress in sight.

to browse pornhub

What are the tools for making such comics? :)

My idea isn't "good enough"

Tendonitis :(

> Developers who are being paid to write code

You're imposing your own incorrect assumptions about what developers are paid to do.

I'm waiting for CI to run.

working on my Gramdmaster quest in Starcraft 2, and perfecting my yolo reinhardt play.

007 films

i like the comic, but it’s more funny if the time passes in the background :)

Because I'm designing

after setting up all the boilerplate I lost my steam.

i did, but now i'm depressed and burned out

Stack Overflow.

there's already too to much of it.

Burnout

Meetings.

Compiling!

(https://xkcd.com/303/)

I got promoted to tech lead for writing good code and now I have subordinates who wrote shitty code which I have to review. So I don't get to write code myself.

tl;dr: not my KRA anymore.