Do you think that sw engineers at startups aren't largely writing code for most of their job?

I think sw engineers at startups very often write way too much code rather than spending time thinking about, and talking about, what to write.

As the old saying goes, "you can save hours of planning by doing weeks of coding."

Most discussions at large corporations are bikeshedding. Huge issues are ignored, but some minor detail which can be changed easily later gets talked about for weeks. It's often because its a detail middle management can understand, but the huge issue isn't.

You then have to spend a significant amount of time trying to guide people to focus on the right things. And that is draining.

But there are different roles that come into play when it comes to writing production software:

- the code, obviously

- infrastructure

- documentation

- wireframes, mock ups

- user manuals?

- monitoring

- ...

Software engineers shouldn't be the ones who address all the points above (otherwise that leads to burned out developers like the author).