I am considered by many I've worked with to be a highly productive individual contributor. 40+ years of professional software development. 20+ years of managing

I am considered by many I've worked with to be a highly productive individual contributor. 40+ years of professional software development. 20+ years of managing people. That said, there are days when I don't touch the keyboard and spend longer thinking about the code than actually writing code. I've been in companies, mostly smaller ones, where I've "crushed it" and shipped consumer products with small, scrappy teams and been very proud of my team and the goals we all achieved. And there was no way to hide in the cracks, and people spoke up if someone tried too. I've also worked in soul crushingly terrible companies (Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Ericsson, eBay) that cannot get out of their own way where tasks and features are wildly mis-estimated or just take an interminable amount of time to actually deliver. Prior to my current position I was Lead developer for a big telecomms company, and I went from "highly productive" and delivering results with a small team -- we were small and we moved fast and we broke things. And it was glorious. Then I got "promoted" to a differnt team and regularly attended 19 scheduled, standing meetings per week, not including impromptu meetings with individuals of the team, and in a classic Office Space scenario, I had six different people I reported too. And I was still expected, by two of the people I reported too, to get 40+ hours of hands-on-keyboard time. I am now back to a small, scrappy start-up team of four individual contributors and we have done more in five months than the team of 40+ was able to achieve in over 18 months. A lot of the time, the environment will beat out of you any inclination to reach for the brass ring. It will actively beat you down. You either subsume yourself to it, or you find a different company. But then, there are also those individuals which you just know are phoning it in, no matter the environment.