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

The problem is that software work is very similar to being a novelist. And very few successful novelists are able to crank out lines of content for 8/hours a day. It is draining, but it is also work that can be leveraged by a huge amount. If a million people use my code or buy my novel, I have generated huge amounts of value. It doesn't matter if it took me 2 years to write the book or 1 month. I'm still able to make a living off of the revenue from that book. Same thing with code. If a software company is generating 5M a year you can afford to hire a team of developers to maintain it. Even if they are all not working 40 hours a week.

What an incredibly odd moral distinction, if you step back and think about it from an objective perspective. As long as there exists an idle class that lives off of previously accumulated capital (including intellectual or social capital), 5-10 hours a week will be a commendable contribution to society in my book.

Why does owning a business exempt you from contributing to society? That's an extraordinarily value-laden judgement.

So. If we're going to moralize like this, I'll flip the tables and assert that receiving stock dividends from companies at which you've never worked is theft that should be criminalized ;-)

Morality is no guide here because we immediately happen upon deep issues of political-economy. It's more productive to focus on the law. OP's employer carefully chose their corporate structure and hired devs into exempt salaried roles FOR A REASON. If they want him to work a certain number of hours and have recourse if he doesn't, then they can switch the role to hourly non-exempt. They won't. For a reason.

Excusing all the ways in which corporations short-change tech workers while moralizing about watercooler talk or reddit time or whatever is textbook master-slave morality.

General hard agreement on the "is this really how you want to spend your life?" comments, though.

My suspicion (and the way I read your post) is that you're meeting expectations, so sometimes at standup you have to diplomatically say, "Yeah I didn't really do much but I'm still on track".

If that's the case, I honestly see nothing wrong. I do this myself from time-to-time, and it's usually due to poorly defined requirements. It's always a phase and eventually I'll have moments of brilliance—churning out days of code in just a few hours. But honestly, that's normal for me. I know nothing different if that's wrong or bad.