For the first quote maybe. But for the second ("I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings"), not really.
Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding.
Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it.
I think your description is sound, but only for people managers of some kind. I burnt out pretty hard trying to meet similar expectations as an IC twice though. The first I was just trying to get code written when I was constantly being dragged into bureaucratic agile planning meetings, or talking to the PM about why my thing isn't done yet, or joining an "all hands". The 2nd had very little of the former, but I was responsible for fixing customer reported bugs, communicating with them in a timely and asynchronous manner about those bugs, and then also delivering features. It didn't help that they put me on some incredibly mundane React project near the end, but I reached a point where I'd sit at my computer and just feel bad about the day. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in meetings all day, but I don't know that coding is what I'd want to be doing with the time in between, at least not to try and meet deadlines. To me, that'd be a recipe for deep depression.
Yeah, it really depends on the kind of management, kind of programming and the person. It's definitely not for everyone or for every situation. But when it works it's much better than the alternative.
It's an incredibly common one. Somehow, despite Peopleware being almost 35 years old, and pg's Maker Schedule, Manager's Schedule essay being twelve years old, we haven't learned anything and still have this incongruity that will not be reconciled in a direction which leads towards more productivity.
At times it feels like managers like to schedule meetings in such a way as to make it impossible to get any engineering work done on the clock. I particularly hate the the 10:00 AM, 2:30 PM meeting stack for it's ability to slice the day into chunks that are difficult to use productively for deeper work.
Another thing I don’t like is managers sending you a notification for a meeting in 30 minutes, which throws your concentration out of the windows. Then finding out the reason of the meeting was because they have not read your status report. Or something that could have been answered in a couple of slack messages. And then it’s already 4pm and your work day ends at 5pm.
Not necessarily. "delivering code" is not the same as "writing code" after all. It's very likely that half the meetings are with product, and higher ups, to discuss what the dev team can deliver, and the other half are with the dev team to discuss what they're going to deliver.
The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.
> I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings.
There's an organisational issue here.