Yeah, this totally feels like an overzealous manager definition of coding - i.e. you're only working when you're hammering the keyboard - whereas 90% of the actual software development cycle is done while typing nothing (or at least no code) on the keyboard.
agree; notion of "code time" is almost equivalent to that other shitty metric the industry (used to?) use to evaluate dev productivity -- lines of code. It's usually meaningless, and promotes "garbage-in, garbage-out", leading to a decline in code quality. There's also the reality that engineers of differing seniority spend varying amounts of time writing code, and that the time spent thinking/reading typically adds more value (ex., less code-review churn, etc.).
But more seriously, a lot of time is eaten up by meetings, coordinating what we're going to code, thinking or discussing how we're going to code it, testing the result, reproducing bugs found, etc.
But it seems this survey also doesn't consider reading code to be coding, which makes me wonder: if having the IDE open and focusing on the code in it is not enough, and they're only interested in the actual typing, how do they count the time around the typing? If I start writing `if (` and think a moment about the condition I'm going to put in there, does that thinking not count as coding? Because if that's the case, 52 minutes sounds high.
Coding is not just typing code. Thinking is the more important part of it.