Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?

I've never heard of any colleagues doing it either. I would never snitch if it happened, but I would certainly consider that person untrustworthy or think that they have an undisclosed condition that is between them and HR.

As you covered in your post, we don't write code 8 hours a day. This is normal. Meetings, context switch and times when focus is unachievable are expected and mostly understood by my experienced management. So are times when we are monitoring technology advancement and keeping an eye on the industry and community (e.g. lurking at HN but not overly posting and commenting) and times of social activity between workers (e.g. talking about the weekend).

Most of us take mental health breaks between meetings and need to take time to think through issues. Many also need to periodically break focus to think about personal life issues or hobbies. As long as you generally strive to work, this is not a problem either.

But walking into a stand-up and then lying about your day? To me, that's unethical.

The real question to me is:

Do you do that on purpose or is this something that happens even if you are trying to focus? There are many conditions, from stress and anxiety to diagnosed mental health issues that can prevent you from focusing. Burn-outs and bore-outs also come to mind.

In my eyes, the fact that you asked the community about it shows that you have some form of concern towards that behavior. Would you say it is negatively impacting your life?

I’m in that state right now, so I’m making an elastic search database and flapping grafana on top of it to injest and visualize all our logs. It’s been a pain point for a long time so I think it’ll go over well. I’m also compiling a c++ qt app to emscripten so we can host the app and connect with a smartphone instead of lugging a tablet around.

It could just be what you are doing isn't fundamentally that difficult and doesn't require a 40 hour work week and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If people think you're worth the money you are getting paid, then you are worth that money. They pay you to get things done, not to sit in a desk for 40 hours a week or be stressed for performance reasons.

We have the ability to "work" this little and still be valuable because writing code has a very high barrier to entry. That 5-10 hrs of work took years of learning.

So I have been called out and punished for it.