Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?
Software development isn&#x27;t a matter of sitting down and generating a fixed amount of code per hour. The rate of writing code is hugely variable. It&#x27;s not unusual for most of my &quot;productive&quot; (as in typing actual code) time to be concentrated in a few particular days in a month. The time not spent typing (or being in meetings, doing admin, etc) isn&#x27;t actually &quot;unproductive&quot; though. It&#x27;s mostly spent solving problems, and a lot of that effort happens below the level of consciousness. A lot of it actually happens during sleep. It&#x27;s effort, though, and it costs. You can&#x27;t do an infinite amount of it in infinitesimal time.<p>I suggest 2 tests to see if you&#x27;re lazy or dumb:<p>1. Try to be more productive by sheer effort of will. Just say to yourself &quot;this month I will write more code than usual&quot; and set to it with a positive attitude. If you succeed you were being lazy and now you know how to not be lazy. If, as is more likely from what you&#x27;ve said, you fail, then you&#x27;re not lazy. You&#x27;re working at your maximum capacity but you have a poor understanding of what constitutes &quot;work&quot; in the job you do.<p>2. If, by the above test, you are not lazy, then look at how well you do relative to your peers. If you&#x27;re holding your own (as you say you are), you&#x27;re not dumb either.