[kranzky]

For sure, we need to collectively recognise how much real work takes place in this mode.

I once collaborated with a colleague to design and implement a data sync framework. For six weeks we chatted about it during our lunch break, while walking from the office to a Japanese takeaway and back again. We'd propose ideas and find weaknesses and flaws in them, and would spend our evenings thinking hard to come up with solutions to get around these issues.

Our boss saw none of this, but it easily consumed about three weeks of person-hours (i.e. around 120 hours).

One day, walking back from lunch, neither of us could find any problems with our proposed solution. We walked into the office straight into a meeting room, spend 30 minutes drawing diagrams on a whiteboard, then returned to our desks and coded up a working proof-of-concept in a couple of hours.

From our boss's perspective, we had implemented a new technology in an afternoon. He's the kind of non-technical person who equates productivity with typing code into a computer. But I think more places need to equate productivity with sitting on a sofa staring into space, or going for long walks, or whatever it happens to be that works for the developer in question.

[kranzky]

Just read an article about employers increasingly monitoring their WFH employees with software installed on their computers. This is the "sitting at a desk and typing" measure of productivity. How do they propose monitoring the "solving problems by thinking hard" measure of productivity?

[omarfarooq]

They can't. They have to capitulate to the idea that thinking is work. Especially in knowledge work.

But then again, since thoughts are words, thinking can be translated into typing that is monitored: notes instead of code.