Studies have shown that people who keep time cards start ... fudging them when they (have to) report more than 45 hours per week. Not outright falsification, but they start applying more things they'd previously accounted for as personal overhead into the official hours.
I personally have never been able to work for an extended period more than 7 hours a day for 6 days. That's 7 hours of real work, head down on the display and keyboard and if I'm debugging something hard I'll mostly ignore all but the most NMIs from others ^_^ (vs. any meeting time, which could often be added to the time I worked). Add 20-60 minutes for lunch and that's it, but I could keep this up for months.
No matter how massively productive I am in this mode (I can provide an clean example or two if desired) this often got me into trouble with sub-par managers who measure input vs. useful output (avoid the D.C. area in particular if you don't like that sort of thing). E.g. I was purged from one company because I looked horribly unproductive compared to my peer programmer, who was furiously coding and debugging since he brand new to the field and not (yet) very good vs. my 7 years of experience by then (it was a Lisp implementation where I did my unit testing on the fly so my final work required little debugging).
Studies have shown that people who keep time cards start ... fudging them when they (have to) report more than 45 hours per week. Not outright falsification, but they start applying more things they'd previously accounted for as personal overhead into the official hours.
I personally have never been able to work for an extended period more than 7 hours a day for 6 days. That's 7 hours of real work, head down on the display and keyboard and if I'm debugging something hard I'll mostly ignore all but the most NMIs from others ^_^ (vs. any meeting time, which could often be added to the time I worked). Add 20-60 minutes for lunch and that's it, but I could keep this up for months.
No matter how massively productive I am in this mode (I can provide an clean example or two if desired) this often got me into trouble with sub-par managers who measure input vs. useful output (avoid the D.C. area in particular if you don't like that sort of thing). E.g. I was purged from one company because I looked horribly unproductive compared to my peer programmer, who was furiously coding and debugging since he brand new to the field and not (yet) very good vs. my 7 years of experience by then (it was a Lisp implementation where I did my unit testing on the fly so my final work required little debugging).