The time you spend coding depends on several factors, not all of them independent.u00a0 I would eanywhere from 20-80% depending on your role.u00a0 The 20%'ers are team leads, devops, solution architects, maybe some directors or vp's of engineering who want to keep their hands on the code or are in smallish startups.u00a0 The 20-80%ers are most good developers who try to balance just banging out code with thoughtful design, stay on top of new technologies, understanding the requirements, participating in meetings, etc.u00a0 The 80%'ers are those devs who are in doing very repetitious work, often offshored.u00a0u00a0 Here are the factors at play:A big factor is your experience with the stack or that piece of the stack you are responsible for. So if, for example, you have built several generic CRUDu00a0 apps in ROR which you deploy into Heroku every time, you could theoretically hit close to 100% of your time coding.u00a0 I say 'theoretical' because it is unlikely a person or team could feed you requirements/stories consistently, testers would be ready to test, etc.u00a0 So you would have dead time.u00a0 You also have planning, perhaps code reviews, etc. So practically, you might only hit 80%.u00a0 But keep in mind that this is highly repetitious work by definition. So unless you like that kind of stuff, you dont want to be an 80% coder. Also, if all you did was bang out ROR apps all day, you are probably doing very commodity work and so are not getting paid too well (There are notable exceptions like, for example, very good full stack people).Another factor is developer motivation and curiosity.u00a0 If you get bored easily, like to learn and play with stuff, and seek to improve your skills and the craft in general, then you will simply not tolerate 80% coding. You will work for a firm that is doing something different, or you will lobby or steer architectural decisions to some new (to you at least) technology.u00a0 Yet another factor is your role.u00a0 As a tech lead, for example, you will spend more time in meetings, mentoring, code reviewing, and other non-coding technical activities.u00a0 Also, there are some roles, like a solutions architect in some organizations, that are part programmer and part customer facing requirements gatherers. At a very young startup, you may be wearing multiple hats. If you are a machine learning or computational programmer, you will spend a lot of time testing algorithms.u00a0 And for traditional cloud based apps, you also have deployment or devops which can burn tons of time, particularly for newbies.u00a0 There are some other smaller factors:1) Your experience with the domain or the degree with which technical marketing or others can insulate you from those issues.2) How many technologies you deal with. If you deal with many technologies, or very new ones, there are a lot of changes to stay on top of.