Ask HN: What is the expected capacity for a full time developer? At [large company] there I work as a contractor, several projects are being planned with only a limited pool of resources. Initially plans where laid expecting everyone to deliver at 100% capacity - meaning that 8 hours of work would be done during an 8 hour workday. But if you subtract lunch, meetings, procastination, interuptions et al. - what is the expected capacity (%) of an experienced developer in a semi-agile environment? |
That was with a fairly low amount of BS. If there a lot of meetings then lower it. If you work in an open plan work space with people not directly contributing to the same effort, lower it some more.
Officially, we're expected to do 6 hours of coding per day. However with meetings and lunch, we only really have 4.5 - 5 hours of time that isn't blocked off.
Then, because some meetings aren't scheduled back to back, we essentially lose the time in the middle (especially if that time is only ~30 minutes).
When all is said and done, I'm probably putting in 3-4 hours of code in per day on average. It's more than enough to get the job done.
It's soul crushing and I'm looking to quit soon.
What I actually use when preparing estimates?
40%-75% which depends on stuff like the developer being staffed, how short the project is (shorter = more productive), how bleeding edge the tech is (higher tech = less productive), etc.
Lines of code, bugs per hour (clised?, created?, avoided?), revenue per month (a contractor standard), etc.
Utilization is different from productivity.