Product stand-up, agile stand-up, team fika, cross-team fika, town hall, team activity, tribe activity, one-on-one, backlog grooming, team retro, incident post-mortem, ping pong, live music.
If you do scrape together a few minutes to get part of the codebase into your head (despite the open-floor-plan chatter), you've got no way to trigger that bug you think you saw.
But persevere anyway and diagnose it. Oh it looks like it's happening in someone else's microservice. File a JIRA? Bring it up at the next meeting? Try a different fix anyway. Happy with the fix? Wait in pull-request limbo until it's sorted. Release it straight into prod? You could bring down prod... Maybe you didn't really see that bug after all. Coffee time!
Except it's not just that, is it? They have more than one product. They have the desktop app, the web app, iOS app, Android app, apps for smart TVs, apps for smart speakers, internal admin apps, apps for artists, apps for venues, apps for labels.
Even if you narrow down to focusing on just one of those like the desktop app. There are so many sub-features. Playlist management, playback management, search, audiobooks, podcasts, merch, event ticketing, groups, collaborative playlists, local files, upsells from free to paid, notifications. I could go on.
I think your representation of a software engineer's work is made in bad faith. There may be some like this, but from anywhere I've worked and anyone I've spoken to in the industry, it's a small minority. I haven't worked at Spotify but I have worked with an ex-Spotify engineer who was very productive and one of the best engineers I've worked with.
The representation is in bad faith because it overstates the balance of non-coding tasks, but also because it assumes these are "not work" or worth less than coding.
Product stand-up, agile stand-up, team fika, cross-team fika, town hall, team activity, tribe activity, one-on-one, backlog grooming, team retro, incident post-mortem, ping pong, live music.
If you do scrape together a few minutes to get part of the codebase into your head (despite the open-floor-plan chatter), you've got no way to trigger that bug you think you saw.
But persevere anyway and diagnose it. Oh it looks like it's happening in someone else's microservice. File a JIRA? Bring it up at the next meeting? Try a different fix anyway. Happy with the fix? Wait in pull-request limbo until it's sorted. Release it straight into prod? You could bring down prod... Maybe you didn't really see that bug after all. Coffee time!