[wizofaus]

"If you are actually doing 40 hours a week you are productive as hell."

That's assuming that the work you've been set to do is productive, and you're doing it in a productive manner. For instance, I've spent weeks grinding away on features that never get used by customers. Is that productive? I've also spent hours trying to fix a bug because of infrastructure/platform/tooling constraints that means the code/compile/debug cycle is stupidly slow. Is that productive?

I don't have the slightest doubt I could be a lot more productive than I am now while working less hours. But it's often down to factors that are more or less out of my control.

[scaramanga]

Only weeks? Jesus. I feel like I've spent a good decade or two of my best years doing that.

"No better options" is a hell of a drug, haha.

[wizofaus]

Well, sure, the total amount of time I've spent working on features that never ended up getting used by customers over the last two decades or so is something I wouldn't want to think about. A certain amount of it is inevitable with software development (or probably any sort of product design and development), and you'd like to think you're at least learning something from the experience, but undoubtedly you could be doing better things with your time...