Post fact, there can be. But we are terrible at knowing one from the other ahead of time. More, we don't always have "meaningful" things to do at any given moment.
This is why we don't all work to type as fast as court reporters. It would not gain us much if any meaningful time.
More, you can give meaning to things. Puzzles and such.
But if I was managing a bunch of programmers (thankfully, I dont have to do that) I would be thinking about their productivity and which activities contributed to productivity. TDD seems like a bell curve, having some can really help with productivity and regression and bugs. But too much and it just starts to be counterproductive.
Oh, agreed there. I would question folks that don't build time tests. I do push against the unit/integration divide. Build time versus deploy time makes sense. Make sure to have both, where you can. With an early preference to build time with the expectation that deploy time will dominate later.
This is why we don't all work to type as fast as court reporters. It would not gain us much if any meaningful time.
More, you can give meaning to things. Puzzles and such.