As a dumb 10x engineer, I once tried working 1/10th the hours of my colleagues and I still ended up outproducing them by an order of magnitude. I failed to account for the fact that they waste a lot of time doing unrelated tasks, like meetings, leaving only 1/10th of their day to get anything done.

how is that dumb of you? even as a salaried employee your time is ultimately what you’re selling to your employer. you just reduced your cost of goods by 10.

Well, I could have also put in 1/10th of the work, not just 1/10th of the hours, and matched their output. Also, I'm just naturally dumb.

lowering the quality effects the perception of the quality of your product. i don’t think it’s smart to do that.

i’m curious if you’re being facetious, though, due to a possible resentment of your co workers. IF you’re doing that, remember you’re just being paid to do YOUR job. management knows who the performers are.

Why would quality be reduced? Producing 1x output can still be of high quality.

What kind of resentment would there be towards my coworkers? I am not sure where feelings would be coming into play at all, let alone ill feelings.

For some of us meetings are 90% of the job.

I mostly integrate with other teams' services. Most of my time is talking with them (in "Meetings") about their API and reading through their documentation.

Code is like 10% of my week, maybe 20-25% if I'm starting with a fresh service.

Mine too these days. Further proof of my dumbness.

It's amusing that we can integrate with open source APIs without any trouble, even when there is often much more complexity involved, without ever talking to the person/people behind it, but as soon as its within a single organization it becomes a game to find pointless busy work to fill the hours.

It’s not pointless, look at all the cross functional work you can put on a few engineers’ perf reviews.

Or they would try to work as much as possible, earning 10-10000x more than everyone else does.