[bogle]

Best: in my first role, shadowing an experienced contractor, after I quietly suggested the company was a little disorganized, "Don't worry, they're all like that."

Also memorable was in one of my first contract roles from another, excellent, contractor, "Spend half the day on their stuff, and half the day on your own work. You don't want to raise their expectations."

To clarify that last bit of advice: a contractor should be capable of getting all of the day's work done in half the day (they are good at the job and they don't have to deal with the permanent employees' extra duties). The other half of the day may well be speculative work that the contractor wants to try out that will benefit the company but the management would never be able to say yes to if you asked for permission. Or it may just be real programming.

[sombremesa]

In my first team at a certain FAANG company, we would never schedule for more than 4 hours a day of coding per dev. Realistically that’s about the time you have thanks to meetings, code reviews, planning, other administrative activities, and working on automating parts of your job.

[rramadass]

>we would never schedule for more than 4 hours a day of coding per dev

Exactly right; And that is on a good day!

I like to read about how the "Great Scientists/Engineers/etc." approached their work and have come to the conclusion that they all avoided "busyness" like the plague. Instead they spent a lot of time thinking about What to do and How to do it before embarking on the job itself. Dijkstra famously did everything using Pen and Paper. I am trying to cultivate similar discipline given that the amount of distractions available on a Computer is orders of magnitude more now.

[bogle]

I particularly like, "automating parts of your job". I wish more organisations made that effort. Especially in large financial enterprises I frequently see the same manual jobs being performed every week because they won't take the time to script it. They'll write up the manual steps, sometimes, but they won't script it, and often it's not even written up.