Unfortunately, often that’s a complex idea so it can be somewhere on the order of an hour before they stop coding and try compiling.
Maybe I’ve been lucky with the people I got to work with so far (and I definitely am), but I know of no professional software engineer that would voluntarily subject themselves to such a long feedback loop. I guess some of the juniors try to work this way sometimes, but they learn fairly quickly not to. The best ones I know work incrementally. Small change, run, small change run, and so on.
Maybe I’ve been lucky with the people I got to work with so far (and I definitely am), but I know of no professional software engineer that would voluntarily subject themselves to such a long feedback loop. I guess some of the juniors try to work this way sometimes, but they learn fairly quickly not to. The best ones I know work incrementally. Small change, run, small change run, and so on.
Small change and run works for small ideas. Sometimes you have a big idea that’s hard to break down into small chunks.