I've been reading Code Complete lately, and thinking about what it is to be a programmer. What skills do I need to have. How does my job break down in terms of Design, Coding, Testing, and Documentation. How should any given project break down in terms of those four things. Are there other things.

And, I came to a tentative, v0.1 conclusion. They should (by hours) break down as so:

I'm thinking that I should be working on Design&Research 10-15x as long as I'm coding. This may be a skew from my current position, which requires an inordinate amount of business-specific knowledge. But, it also applies to my personal projects, too.

What do other monks think about this? Where do you, in your head, draw the line?

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/me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

Vote paco for President!


In reply to What efforts go into a programming project? (Somewhat OT) by dragonchild

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