"The software development job market doesn't really work that way either where a specific skill, like time on keyboard and programming, is an entire job by itse

"The software development job market doesn't really work that way either where a specific skill, like time on keyboard and programming, is an entire job by itself." I think this varies a lot. I can be as prolific I like to in my current role, but our team is a bit of a "special case" in the sense we are all acting as individual contributors in a number of mission critical core libraries. For me the dev cycle is mostly about programming, closing tickets, updating unit tests, and releasing. We deploy modules to products, but don't have production systems ourselves. If bugs emerge in production they return to our desk for fixing, but the interval between doing a release in project X does not stop me from progressing in project Y. I guess we are chugging quite a lot of added value for the org - it's not obvious from the paycheck, but the environment is surprisingly low pressure (we try to hire only high performers hence everyone is trusted). Low pressure from the point of view I can work at the exact velocity I like, that is, and have not heard complaints so far. The whole setup was "instigated" by a few high performing programmers in the org years ago and since it has produces continuous value ever since I suppose nobody wants to change it much. I presume this is quite atypical, though.