I would like to touch directly on the point made in the article that says -<p>"Everyone likes to see the fruits of their labors. If you spend a month building something, you want to see that thing go live for people to use it. You don’t want it to be shipped off into the void, never to be seen again."<p>Way back when (mid 90’s, aka the previous century) I did some agency work (eventually ending up at Arthur Anderson for those that are curious).<p>I learnt to measure my own productivity, both as a way to remind myself of my 'win days' when having an 'epic fail' day and also in order to feel comfortable and confident enough to justify my rates as I made my way up the food chain.<p>One of the ways I did that was to record the time taken to complete process X prior to my arrival vs. Time take to complete process after my tweaks to it. (I’m defining ‘Process’ as length of time from Thing ‘A’ happens and ‘Z’ needs to be the end result rather than CPU cycles).<p>Agency work is (can be?) a bit soul destroying but if you want to develop the soft skill-set of being able to hit the ground running it can be extremely educational with the added bonus of being able to either highlight the 'wins' on your c.v. or to brush the 'omg, did I really just hit "Y" to that prompt?' moments as 'Various temp positions including $corp).<p>As with all things in life, YMMV.