I don't understand how some programmers can supposedly work for 8 hours straight. I often have to take breaks to think about how I want to best implement the next thing, or what exactly I should be working on.
In the described catfish role, you don't get to spend any meaningful amount of time thinking about how to best implement the next thing; sure, you do some of that, but almost all the time gets spent trying to understand how the heck that thing was implemented (and why) (and why??????), and that means that (a) you don't really get progress unless you're looking at or touching that artifact, and (b) you really want to avoid context switching; if you've spent three hours building up a vague picture in your mind about what something large and weird is supposed to mean, then you'll have to repeat half of that if you take a lunch break and talk about other matters. When you do figure that out, though, the fix or rewrite generally is quick, easy and routine.
So much of the work is browsing files and reading, which is different than creating. It's a different challenge: enjoyable in its own way.
Most days I don't have such long periods of continuous focus. The culprit is usually multitasking. Context switching carries a cost for me. Even if the context is justified (important meeting, hammock-time to figure something out, lunch break) there's a cost. I'm somewhat jealous of people who seem to have such a minimum cost and can go even more than 8 hours grinding away and working very productively indeed, since I can taste that focus on occasion, and it'd be cool to have it always. I probably wouldn't spend most of it on work-work though.
I mean, so you're super-productive in continuous 5 hour batches?? Great, we all are! But no business on Earth is like that. Are you also super-productive when your day is punctuated by meetings, phone calls, and open-office distractions? That environment seems to be more common in this day and age.
Most productive developers I know attend meetings and then disappear in the building to a random nook to write code. Or they show up at noon and stay till 8 so they get a few hours without interruptions.
If you treat meetings, calls, socializing with your coworkers, etc., as part of "work" instead of distractions from "real work" (that you do best in "the zone"), then it's possible to be pretty productive like that too. My context switch time depends on what I'm switching to. I haven't figured out a good way to switch from deep coding -> meetings -> deep coding efficiently, but I can switch from code reviews -> meetings -> pinball -> meetings -> emails -> direction clarification... pretty well. It's improved with practice, sure. But what I find more useful is to plan around what type of day I'm expecting to have, then it's not that hard to be productive in the context of that day or week. Most days I don't even try doing any serious coding before the morning standup, so it's a great time to do other needed things, and depending on what the rest of the day is and what I need to prioritize right now I may or may not have some good coding sessions intermixed with other things. Days of pure zone are rare, which is why I cherish them (at least with positive usages, the bug-zone days are kind of bittersweet because things shouldn't be this hard and probably wouldn't be in a non-legacy system), but I don't need that to be productive. I don't even need to do serious coding as much as I want, a lot of work is just gluing things together and revisiting existing logic flows to make them work slightly different for some new feature. Overall my average day is productive enough that I'm overall happy enough (even if unhappy I can't code in anger as much as I want) and people in charge of judging my output seem happy enough.
I think about how careerism seems to work at a lot of places, most dev roles involve more than just programming, even if programming is the single most valuable thing you could do right now, the incentives don't align with that. It's rather annoying personally. But that's probably why the Lonesome Bottom Feeder catfish is at the bottom, and not even a salaried employee but a contractor. They can make really good money, but not always, or as much as those climbing the ladder. The incentives favor the type of "productive" that goes with broad multi-tasking, directing, and a few deep dives. Even a non-catfish non-ambitious dev can do this and advance, though of course the non-bottom-feeder invasive catfishes will do better. Do it for enough years and your average depth across a broad spectrum is deep enough that it would take a while for someone fresh to reach your level with intense focus, catfish productivity or not.
This was the best position I ever held and was my first role as a lead. The CEO did not know much about technology but seemed to have an innate trust in me that I appreciated greatly. Granted this gave me the ability to use whatever technology I wanted so I was having a lot of fun with the day to day coding. I wouldn't even eat lunch some days just so I can finish up the task at hand before sundown. Sounds horrible but was (and still is) an incredibly exciting experience.
On the other side of town, however, where I worked for Fox Studios (yes I'm calling them out!) I and the rest of the Contractor Army would be critiqued and yelled at by executive management on a weekly basis, like clockwork. Even though they gave me all the money and resources in the world, I hated coding every second I spent at that job. Instead, I spend a lot of time walking around the lot in hopes of meeting movie stars or something.
I always figured it was the domain you worked in that made it fun or boring, but I'm starting to realize it's a lot more about the environment and people you are around that can make or break your work life.
Once I was playing foosball while the site was down. Someone walked in, quite unhappy about seeing the dev team playing when he thought we should have been fixing. Explaining that we couldn't do anything about it - ops had server issues that we could not help with. There is a time to work and a time to play. I find I'm best with 2-3 hours of work without distraction.
Also, going to the bathroom can do wonders if your mind is stuck on some problem. Seriously.