One of my readers asked the following very reasonable question:
We are looking for industry benchmarks detailing the amount of time developers spend on a percentage basis in the following three categories:
1) Core job activities (writing, testing, deploying code, etc.)
2) Meetings
3) Administrative activities (training, reporting, etc.)
The questions are reasonable. Unfortunately, one of the lessons I've learned after looking at lots of data on questions like this is that sometimes reasonable questions don't have reasonable answers!
In this case, what I would call "project focused hours" per month can easily vary by a factor of two between different companies based on factors like how much time is spent in meetings, how long the work days are (think government job vs. internet startup), number of holidays, number of training days, number of non-project meetings, level of support required for software already in production, etc. A common "big company" planning number is 6 hours of project-focused work per day, for the days that the employee is actually at work, but that can vary a lot across big companies and even within big companies. Based on what we see in our consulting practice, I think it's rare to average 6 hours per day of truly project-focused work in a non-startup company. The most common distraction from project-focused work we see is time spent supporting prior releases that are in production.
The number of meetings varies a lot too and is significantly affected by company culture. When I was at Microsoft in 1990-91 I probably spent less than 5 hours a week in meetings. In contrast, I had a former Microsoft employee tell me earlier this year that on the team he was on he was booked in meetings from 10:00-4:00 5 days a week. Lots of managers at other companies have told me that they're in meetings all day every day and get most of their "real work" done during evenings and weekends, so obviously there's a big difference between Microsoft 1990 and Microsoft 2007, and among different companies.
The amount of training, reporting, etc. varies just as much--it varies even more on a percentage basis. Best in class companies typically devote 8-12 days per year to training, whereas many companies we see allow technical staff to take 1 class per year. Many of the companies we see don't systematically support any training days per year.
Bottom line is that there's just too much variation among companies to make meaningful statements about "benchmark" allocations to work and overhead time categories. That doesn't mean that you won't find published sources that claim to be benchmarks, but if you do those sources are usually limited by the fact that the authors haven't had exposure to enough companies to realize that there's as much variation as there is.
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