> Software development isn't a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable... The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn't actually "unproductive" though.
All true statements, but that's not what we're talking about. OP recognizes that he works 5-10 hours a week, and effectively blows the rest of the day off.
Reminds me a bit of an engineer who reported to me a few years ago. He would describe every week in our 1:1s and during team meetings how he was solving this tough thread-synchronization problem. Because we trusted each other, we trusted that the problem was difficult. Then when he finally submitted his code, it was a single line. A single trivial line (as in, read the python `multiprocessing` docs for 5 minutes and the solution is right there). OK... sometimes it can take a long time to find that one-line fix, I get it. But then I looked into his commit history, and it turns out he was averaging a few lines of code a week -- on a good week, and sometimes even zero. When I confronted him, he said "You can't measure my productivity by lines of code!!!" OK, sure, but how far am I supposed to excuse an engineer who has committed 100 lines of code in 10 months? What a statistical oddity, that every single task he took on turned out to be a single-line-fix dragon!
All true statements, but that's not what we're talking about. OP recognizes that he works 5-10 hours a week, and effectively blows the rest of the day off.
Reminds me a bit of an engineer who reported to me a few years ago. He would describe every week in our 1:1s and during team meetings how he was solving this tough thread-synchronization problem. Because we trusted each other, we trusted that the problem was difficult. Then when he finally submitted his code, it was a single line. A single trivial line (as in, read the python `multiprocessing` docs for 5 minutes and the solution is right there). OK... sometimes it can take a long time to find that one-line fix, I get it. But then I looked into his commit history, and it turns out he was averaging a few lines of code a week -- on a good week, and sometimes even zero. When I confronted him, he said "You can't measure my productivity by lines of code!!!" OK, sure, but how far am I supposed to excuse an engineer who has committed 100 lines of code in 10 months? What a statistical oddity, that every single task he took on turned out to be a single-line-fix dragon!