[ilyt]

Pretty much. Near-everything aside from "one man project hacking" will have some amount of "office hours" just used to coordinate with co-workers, plan, code review, or frankly just doing stuff like reading the docs or specs.

Even assuming "you can only do 3 productive hours a day" (which is a lie with appeal to authority mixed in. "Look that guy that made shitty web framework did it, it must be good!"), that does apply only to coding, there is more to being developer than just programming

> Especially the advice that you must stop after three hours even when you're "in the zone" seems hard to justify. Instead of insisting on a hard and fixed number of hours everyday, I think it's much more fruitful to follow a flexible time model (which is actually implemented in many work places today): if you happen to have a very productive day, just keep milking it and put in some extra time. In return, you can take that time off on some other day.

I'd even call that advice outright idiotic. You wasted time to get in the zone only to throw it away

I feel like any recommendation of "do X hours of this" is a delusion. We're not robots, we have better or worse days and more or less engaging tasks. If task is "here are API docs, make a bunch of code and tests for it" I can do it whole day without much slowdown.

[bfung]

Being in the zone def is a thing.

The longest lasting and easiest to extend software I’ve cobbled together (and some still running in production after 20yrs) were me designing for 18+hrs straight, share general idea w/team, then furiously writing for 36hrs. Those spurts were always the most productive and setup future work to be easy to add on.