Indeed. What do we do? Well I was curious.
WTF you might say. "You're a programmer! Shouldn't you know what you do?" Well yes, I know what I do. What I mean is what do programmers do while programming besides programming. I myself write the codes (duh) and hang out on Twitter and listen to podcasts, watch movies, listen to music, and sometimes I just concentrate so hard I forget to eat. I was curious to see what everybody else did while hacking; twtpoll to the rescue!
So I made a poll, and of course nobody read it, because nobody in the software community follows me (okay that's a lie, @defunkt follows me, as well as a couple friends), so I nicely asked Scott Hanselman and that fixed the problem. Overnight there were just over 500 responses. Alright, now we're in business! On to the results!
Pretty straightforward, and I think it the fact that half list listening to music makes perfect sense.
The extra stuff I pulled out and revised a bit for easier reading:
- Listen to talk radio/audio books
- Reddit/Slashdot
- Watch TV
- Answer TwtPolls
- Spend time with the kid(s)
- Spend time with the pet(s)
- Prepare food
- Eat
- Wash dishes
- Do the laundry
- Answer coworkers questions
- Chat/IRC
- Play video games
- Random web browsing
- Download and try new software
- Respond to fellow programmers
- Check stackoverflow/serverfault/superuser
- Get interrupted by other people
- Drink coffee/alcohol/coke
- More programming…
- Read RSS feeds
- Read blogs
- Read books
- Answer email
- Compile
- Drum along the desk
- Dodge co-worker distractions
- Online browser games (chess)
- Try to ignore everything else
The really interesting ones were:
- Have sex
- Work on plans to sing a new song to Steve Ballmer
So that's it. That's what programmers do.