Yep. Turns out you can write better code faster when you aren't drooling on your keyboard or buzzed on fifteen espressos.
The problems come when people compare real engineering work with programming. I studied mechanical engineering. Real engineering is a very, very old art, and 99% of what you do is plugging numbers and adding margins, and physical constraints mostly dictate what you can do. Programming is mostly navigating blind in an infinite sea of possibility, and the only constraints are time and space. It's much more by-feel than real engineering, and I expect it to be that way for another half-millennium at least.
All that is to say, you can push a real engineer harder and get ok results still. A programmer will just die under the whip.
The problems come when people compare real engineering work with programming. I studied mechanical engineering. Real engineering is a very, very old art, and 99% of what you do is plugging numbers and adding margins, and physical constraints mostly dictate what you can do. Programming is mostly navigating blind in an infinite sea of possibility, and the only constraints are time and space. It's much more by-feel than real engineering, and I expect it to be that way for another half-millennium at least.
All that is to say, you can push a real engineer harder and get ok results still. A programmer will just die under the whip.