I'm not a fan of the sink-or-swim approach to gaining skills because when people advocate for it they discount the probability of sinking. I know some people who had kids and tried working from home, every one of them couldn't build the skill to be as or more productive as they were before kids. And some of these people have kids that are now entering middle school, it's not like they haven't had years of practice trying to do it. But it's fine, we don't need to be highly productive let alone super productive all the time like the catfish.
If you treat meetings, calls, socializing with your coworkers, etc., as part of "work" instead of distractions from "real work" (that you do best in "the zone"), then it's possible to be pretty productive like that too. My context switch time depends on what I'm switching to. I haven't figured out a good way to switch from deep coding -> meetings -> deep coding efficiently, but I can switch from code reviews -> meetings -> pinball -> meetings -> emails -> direction clarification... pretty well. It's improved with practice, sure. But what I find more useful is to plan around what type of day I'm expecting to have, then it's not that hard to be productive in the context of that day or week. Most days I don't even try doing any serious coding before the morning standup, so it's a great time to do other needed things, and depending on what the rest of the day is and what I need to prioritize right now I may or may not have some good coding sessions intermixed with other things. Days of pure zone are rare, which is why I cherish them (at least with positive usages, the bug-zone days are kind of bittersweet because things shouldn't be this hard and probably wouldn't be in a non-legacy system), but I don't need that to be productive. I don't even need to do serious coding as much as I want, a lot of work is just gluing things together and revisiting existing logic flows to make them work slightly different for some new feature. Overall my average day is productive enough that I'm overall happy enough (even if unhappy I can't code in anger as much as I want) and people in charge of judging my output seem happy enough.
I think about how careerism seems to work at a lot of places, most dev roles involve more than just programming, even if programming is the single most valuable thing you could do right now, the incentives don't align with that. It's rather annoying personally. But that's probably why the Lonesome Bottom Feeder catfish is at the bottom, and not even a salaried employee but a contractor. They can make really good money, but not always, or as much as those climbing the ladder. The incentives favor the type of "productive" that goes with broad multi-tasking, directing, and a few deep dives. Even a non-catfish non-ambitious dev can do this and advance, though of course the non-bottom-feeder invasive catfishes will do better. Do it for enough years and your average depth across a broad spectrum is deep enough that it would take a while for someone fresh to reach your level with intense focus, catfish productivity or not.
If you treat meetings, calls, socializing with your coworkers, etc., as part of "work" instead of distractions from "real work" (that you do best in "the zone"), then it's possible to be pretty productive like that too. My context switch time depends on what I'm switching to. I haven't figured out a good way to switch from deep coding -> meetings -> deep coding efficiently, but I can switch from code reviews -> meetings -> pinball -> meetings -> emails -> direction clarification... pretty well. It's improved with practice, sure. But what I find more useful is to plan around what type of day I'm expecting to have, then it's not that hard to be productive in the context of that day or week. Most days I don't even try doing any serious coding before the morning standup, so it's a great time to do other needed things, and depending on what the rest of the day is and what I need to prioritize right now I may or may not have some good coding sessions intermixed with other things. Days of pure zone are rare, which is why I cherish them (at least with positive usages, the bug-zone days are kind of bittersweet because things shouldn't be this hard and probably wouldn't be in a non-legacy system), but I don't need that to be productive. I don't even need to do serious coding as much as I want, a lot of work is just gluing things together and revisiting existing logic flows to make them work slightly different for some new feature. Overall my average day is productive enough that I'm overall happy enough (even if unhappy I can't code in anger as much as I want) and people in charge of judging my output seem happy enough.
I think about how careerism seems to work at a lot of places, most dev roles involve more than just programming, even if programming is the single most valuable thing you could do right now, the incentives don't align with that. It's rather annoying personally. But that's probably why the Lonesome Bottom Feeder catfish is at the bottom, and not even a salaried employee but a contractor. They can make really good money, but not always, or as much as those climbing the ladder. The incentives favor the type of "productive" that goes with broad multi-tasking, directing, and a few deep dives. Even a non-catfish non-ambitious dev can do this and advance, though of course the non-bottom-feeder invasive catfishes will do better. Do it for enough years and your average depth across a broad spectrum is deep enough that it would take a while for someone fresh to reach your level with intense focus, catfish productivity or not.