Really well said. It has taken me a long time in my career to realize the things I wanted - to be left alone to code - weren't translating into the product getting done any faster when I actually was left alone.

I've watched other programmers fight for and get left alone, and then watched as they went off into the weeds coding things that solved problems we didn't have.

Sometimes being left alone even increases my stress and reduces my productivity in the long run because I choose to work on harder problems and try to solve things I think people want, only to discover after I deliver that it wasn't very helpful and I could have chosen something much simpler to do and finished faster. In the mean time, I've delivered more code and increased technical debt more than I should have, and I end up getting interrupted with more maintenance issues down the road.