One thing this essay doesn't weave together, despite bringing up a lot of the threads, is that timelines for upcoming work are often estimated based on the (unrealistic) assumption that "you're going to leave me alone for long enough to get it done", which never happens.
Instead, days get filled with discussions about future work, rehashes of previous discussions, identifying the bugs that junior developers have written, trying to convince management that the latest customer complaint has more to do with the fundamental laws of physics (e.g., network bandwidth limitations) rather than any actual issues with the software, etc...
All of these are part of the job, but the conception of developers as "builders" worsens the issue because management does fundamentally believe that we spend most of our time "coding" when that couldn't be farther from the truth. And since we also want to imagine our days as filled with productive programming, we feed right back into the lie.
Instead, days get filled with discussions about future work, rehashes of previous discussions, identifying the bugs that junior developers have written, trying to convince management that the latest customer complaint has more to do with the fundamental laws of physics (e.g., network bandwidth limitations) rather than any actual issues with the software, etc...
All of these are part of the job, but the conception of developers as "builders" worsens the issue because management does fundamentally believe that we spend most of our time "coding" when that couldn't be farther from the truth. And since we also want to imagine our days as filled with productive programming, we feed right back into the lie.