
Ask HN: How many hours of coding is reasonable to be doing each day? - hartator
I am currently doing 3 hours of code every day. As I am also the CEO, I&#x27;ve other tasks to do that is not coding. Sometimes, I wish I have more time coding to accelerate growth. However, I actually feel 3 hours is already a maximum and I won&#x27;t be really productive anyway if I spend more hours coding.<p>What is your opinion on this?
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Jugurtha
> _Sometimes, I wish I have more time coding to accelerate growth._

First: You may be at odds with what your employees are doing. Whenever I catch
the CTO/co-founder doing something I'm able to do, I'll gently push/nudge him
off of it and do it or take a mental note to learn to do it. I try to get as
much _off_ of his plate as I can (bug fixes, features, staying on the lookout
for tooling, best practices, thinking about new uses for our products,
refactoring and profiling/documenting/testing the code, trying other ways to
do things, polishing ux/ui, tweaking the servers, helping with hiring and
marketing, learning new tings, thinking about strategy and how to implement
it, mentoring junior members, prototyping and proposing things) do so he could
do the things he's really good at and squeeze the most value out of his work
day.

Second: Is your growth really driven by the number of lines of code and what's
the impact on growth of the code you write and is it the best use of your
time? My point is that if you're coding, I think it's good to ask if you're
spending time on code other members can't really write, and then eventually
think about hiring someone who can write it better than you so you could do
all the other stuff a CEO does.

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CyberFonic
I am surprised that as a CEO you even have any time to do coding. That is a
rare situation.

It is hard to put the 3 hours of coding into perspective when you don't
indicate how much effort is being put into design and specification of the
system. In my experience successfully deployed systems are bout 25% coding,
the rest of the effort is in gathering and documenting requirements, designing
the system from various perspectives and specifying the modules, etc. Of
course, in many cases people conflate all those activities as being "coding".

~~~
hartator
> It is hard to put the 3 hours of coding into perspective when you don't
> indicate how much effort is being put into design and specification of the
> system. In my experience successfully deployed systems are bout 25% coding,
> the rest of the effort is in gathering and documenting requirements,
> designing the system from various perspectives and specifying the modules,
> etc. Of course, in many cases people conflate all those activities as being
> "coding".

Yes, I am conflating all of that into coding.

We are an early stage startup, so I still feel I need to be everywhere even if
it doesn't make too much sense. Going to hire more in the coming months to try
to lower my own work load. But, I suspect it will be just keep increasing. ;)

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imauld
As little as it takes to accomplish the task at hand

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bjourne
4-5 hours of uninterrupted, high-quality coding time per day is plenty for any
developer. My opinion on this is that it is not the actual wall-clock time
that matters, it is the quality of the time. I'm most of the time not that
efficient myself because I read hacker news and shit. :) But if I weren't, I
could get everything done in 4 hours/day.

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xstartup
Owner of a company here. I code 10-18 hours day. But I don't code on all days!

