Our workflows and productivity metrics regularly ask knowledge workers for things that do not make good knowledge work.

Bloggers on reddit lament how much “meta-work” and “not-work” exists in tech. They kvetch about the conversations and the waiting. They consider the principal engineer’s calendar, packed with meetings, quod erat demonstratum that those roles are “easy” and “airware.” They insist that, if they could manage to not get caught, they could keep several such positions simultaneously and never under-deliver on any of them. None of these jobs, they claim, ask them for all that much code.