Written by Steve Ranger, Editorial director, ZDNet Steve RangerEditorial director, ZDNet<\/p>\n
Steve Ranger is the editorial director of ZDNet. An award-winning journalist, Steve writes about the intersection of technology, business and culture, and regularly appears on TV and radio discussing tech issues.<\/p>\n
You might think that the job titles 'software developer' or 'coder' are self-explanatory, but thanks to a variety of distractions and unexpected demands, developing software and writing code often come quite far down the to-do list for many.<\/p>\n
A survey has found that, on average, software engineers have only about 10 hours a week of \"deep work\" time, thanks to the distractions and frustrations they face during the day.<\/p>\n
\"Junior engineers have a lot more of this time on average -- in fact, 20% more than senior engineers -- likely because they've got less administrative overhead to deal with,\" the survey of 600 software engineers and managers by software tools company Retool found.<\/p>\n
SEE: 'Striking a balance': How one company is rethinking the office for hybrid work<\/p>\n
Both junior and senior developers said that testing changes -- writing tests or doing manual tests -- was the thing they wish they could spend less time on. Senior developers wished they could spend less time recruiting or interviewing prospective hires.<\/p>\n
Among the time-consuming activities that developers dislike are technical issues like slow SQL queries and database syncs. Working out who is actually responsible for a particular piece of code can take hours, while developers also complained about \"waiting on people\", including waiting for code reviews or requirements.<\/p>\n
Almost all of the engineers surveyed agreed that open-source code was at least \"somewhat\" essential to their day jobs. That's probably because many of them rely on it on a day-to-day basis: more than 80% of developers are actively pulling open-source code into their work at least once a month, while almost 50% are doing it at least once a week. <\/p>\n
According to the research, developers are regularly re-using code when they can: nearly half (44%) said they copied and pasted up to 50 lines of code a week from other sources, while a third (33%) said they copied somewhere between 50 and 100 lines a week; 13% said they copied 100 to 500 lines a week. <\/p>\n
\"In 2022, the vast majority of software engineers are running other people's code. They're building on top of open-source libraries, or re-using code from other parts of their company's codebase or from online tutorials,\" the survey said.<\/p>\n
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