In the 90's I went from working at a factory stacking 100 pound boxes on pallets 8 hours a day to writing code for money.
At my first corporate programming job, there was a guy in the cube (we still had cubicles at least) next to mine who would spend most of the day doing anything but writing code. He would be on the phone with his wife arguing about some random thing or on the phone yelling at his kids or whatever.
I was astonished. In the factory, there was nothing like that. The machines ran, and you did your part that they hadn't figured out how to automate yet, and if the machines were down, the boss came through and told you to pick up a broom or something like that.
The guy worked an hour a day at most and spent most of the rest of the day on the phone.
He was irreplaceable. In the tiny bit of time that he actually spent working, he wrote Monte Carlo interest rate simulations in C that apparently worked since the financial company I worked for is still solvent given what happened in 2000 and 2008.
I mean it is also the case that as a dev I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff, but in a way where I can sort of be doing something else at the same time. Often doing something else at the same time helps because if I'm not I get bored and stop doing it altogether.
So I'm goofing off on HN while background processing the design of a thing. Sure I could be staring at an IDE window when doing it, but instead I just open it to check things when needed.
I'm sure I'm less productive per minute than if it is all I was thinking about but I'm more productive on the scale of a full day if I am only half focusing on certain things. I have ADHD though so I'm probably not typical, but my point is that for intellectual work just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't happening
At my first corporate programming job, there was a guy in the cube (we still had cubicles at least) next to mine who would spend most of the day doing anything but writing code. He would be on the phone with his wife arguing about some random thing or on the phone yelling at his kids or whatever.
I was astonished. In the factory, there was nothing like that. The machines ran, and you did your part that they hadn't figured out how to automate yet, and if the machines were down, the boss came through and told you to pick up a broom or something like that.
The guy worked an hour a day at most and spent most of the rest of the day on the phone.
He was irreplaceable. In the tiny bit of time that he actually spent working, he wrote Monte Carlo interest rate simulations in C that apparently worked since the financial company I worked for is still solvent given what happened in 2000 and 2008.
I'm like that now. Not the irreplaceable part.