Is most of our work "passive" in tech?

Question

I noticed a post on here earlier about the hours you really work, and also an insightful comment about how we may not be actively working for very long, but passively, we're thinking about how to get that work done for a lot of the day. This comment thread from HN also resonated with very similar thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581475

I wonder how much of our work is actually passive, and how to measure the significance of our work when often times there aren't explicit ways to quantify the almost infinite creativity required to develop and ship a product. Curious to hear how other people see it as per the HN comment above: are we really only working 20-30 minutes a day or are we working way more considering our passive thought we've put in, or is it something in between?

Magic · Accepted Answer

I think some of my senior devs actively work a few hours per day (coding) and then there are just a lot of meetings.

73r4q · Answer

I wouldn’t say most tech roles are passive, but work/productivity definitely ebbs and flows. 
Doing the bare minimum is also a skill, it’s rare to be competent & efficient without effort.

A really good point was that some people manage to do negative work and after experience with co-workers who just complicate things, most people are generally fine with co-workers who at some point get the job done.

jinyung2 · Answer

definitely on and off, there are certainly more active days, and certainly more passive days. I know I experience that on a day to day and I really like the mix, keeps it interesting all the time!

linuxftw · Answer

Here's the post from earlier: https://www.levels.fyi/community/thread/crja1d/how-many-hours-do-you-guys-work

Is most of our work "passive" in tech?

I think there's also something to be said for passive processing. Sometimes I'll... | Hacker News

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