There is an extremely broad range of work and effort put in by software engineers, but there's also an equally broad range of necessary and important work in most orgs.
I was a sysadmin at a company that had things extremely well-tuned and within our team we averaged a couple of hours of work a day, tops.
I've been at companies where there were 50-hour weeks of nonstop which which were necessary, followed by downtimes where almost no work was necessary (it was a very seasonal business).
In my experience most engineers have no more than 4-5 hours of real work in them a day. After that, mental performance drops dramatically and while you can definitely respond to emails and attend meetings and do less intense work, deep thought is just a finite resource and heavily influenced by your mood, anxiety, and motivation. Keep it up for too long in an org that doesn't value clean code and good tests and your performance can definitely be negative.
It's also true that good organizations and teams know and work with these limits rather than push people into unrealistic goals. People can switch around between deep architecture work and planning, managing a sprint, writing reams of code based on well-understood specs, debugging, etc. You can take turns when your personal life gets intense or you feel drained.
I think that most works vastly underestimate the importance of deep work and being strategic about what gets done. The right product spec and the right amount of work researching solutions can easily save an order of magnitude of coding work. It's amazing how little you need to do if you know the happy path for implementing the right solution instead of iterating through multiple broken attempts.
I was a sysadmin at a company that had things extremely well-tuned and within our team we averaged a couple of hours of work a day, tops.
I've been at companies where there were 50-hour weeks of nonstop which which were necessary, followed by downtimes where almost no work was necessary (it was a very seasonal business).
In my experience most engineers have no more than 4-5 hours of real work in them a day. After that, mental performance drops dramatically and while you can definitely respond to emails and attend meetings and do less intense work, deep thought is just a finite resource and heavily influenced by your mood, anxiety, and motivation. Keep it up for too long in an org that doesn't value clean code and good tests and your performance can definitely be negative.
It's also true that good organizations and teams know and work with these limits rather than push people into unrealistic goals. People can switch around between deep architecture work and planning, managing a sprint, writing reams of code based on well-understood specs, debugging, etc. You can take turns when your personal life gets intense or you feel drained.
I think that most works vastly underestimate the importance of deep work and being strategic about what gets done. The right product spec and the right amount of work researching solutions can easily save an order of magnitude of coding work. It's amazing how little you need to do if you know the happy path for implementing the right solution instead of iterating through multiple broken attempts.