> Engineering is creative work, and you're paid to think - code is just the end product.
No you aren't. No one cares if you think. They care about what thinking is (supposed to be) getting them. It just so happens, though, that whatever that is requires thinking. So you do charge for that. But no one is paying you "to think".
> If you are a manager, an architect or a scientist, all you do is think. You literally don't do anything else.
First of all, no; it's not true that, "You literally don't do anything else". Even if we were to accept that, though, it's besides the point, because what you're saying right now is a change of subject.
What I said was that you don't get paid to think. You're getting paid for what the customer (hopes) they'll get from you. (And yes, that's true even if they never get anything from you.)
To say it again: nobody cares if you're thinking. The exercise of thinking has no intrinsic value to the people who people who are paying you. All of the value is consequential. Ergo, even if you are thinking over the course of your work day, you are not really getting paid to think. If you could somehow manage to deliver the same results without thinking, you'd still get paid--because you're not actually getting paid "to think".
> If you could somehow manage to deliver the same results without thinking, you'd still get paid--because you're not actually getting paid "to think".
Reductio Ad absurdum:
If you are a miner, you are not being paid to dig, you are being paid to find coal. If you could deliver coal without digging, you would still get paid.
But wait, you are not being paid for coal, you are being paid for keeping house warm. Id you could keep their house warm without them burning coal, you'd still get paid.
But wait, they don't actually want to keep the house warm, they want to not feel cold. If they could achieve that without heating the house, you would still get paid.
So no matter what you job is, I couls always say 'you are not getting paid to code/trade/do X, instead people want results of X' and you could repeat that process for X,Y and Z ad infinum. So the argument has no value
I'll rephrase: they're not paying you to mindlessly churn out lines of code. The end product matters. But the bulk of that time is spent thinking, whether you realise it or not, and frankly that's a much more useful perspective for the OP to take, as they're trying to reconcile their comfort with charging for time in meetings and lunch, because they think they're not being "productive".
> Engineering is creative work, and you're paid to think - code is just the end product.
No you aren't. No one cares if you think. They care about what thinking is (supposed to be) getting them. It just so happens, though, that whatever that is requires thinking. So you do charge for that. But no one is paying you "to think".