[hga]

I read about a study done some time ago that said pretty much everyone starts "lying" when they report above 45 hours per week. Like your example, they start scoring things as work that one might not otherwise.

E.g. I found my max "death march" rate of work, which I can sustain for a number of months, is 6 7 hour days. That's 7 hours of real, at the keyboard work, not counting formal meetings, lunch, breaks, etc.

More than once I suffered because bad management measured apparent work effort, e.g. vs. people who put in a lot more hours including debugging for some inexplicable reason vs. useful results.

[mahyarm]

Debugging is work, I don't understand.

[hga]

Should have been clearer; my usage of inexplicable is generally sarcastic, which doesn't always come across in text:

There's a class of programmers who spend a dispropriate amount of time debugging the very buggy code they just wrote.

That's certainly work in some sense, but most of us prefer to write less buggy code to begin with. With me, that means I spend what some view as a dispropriate amount of time thinking problems, where that amount of time is often measured in minutes, but the point is that I'm not typing anything, hence in their eyes I'm not working.

There's a great anecdote about a Bell Labs mathematician who e.g. worked on hard problems that directly applied to building and running Bell's systems and networks. A boss type once complained that he wasn't working because he spent a lot of time sitting and thinking (his real/direct bosses were very happy with that, though).