In the old days, we didn't have to fake it. Well, some of us didn't. I had two programs that took 45 minutes to compile. I would normally compile them on my lunch break or upon leaving in the afternoon. When I left that job, my replacement I learned years later, would often put his feet up on the desk, with the paper and coffee, and just shrug throughout the day.

Ah yes, the infamous C++ compiler and linker slog.   While developing a particularly large C++ DLL, we had seven Software Engineering PC's networked together performing distributed compilation across all the connected PC's.   Each compilation took about four hours using the simultaneous processing power of all seven of those PC's.

I used to use Turbo C++ and then it turned into Borland C++. We're going back late 80s, early 90s now. I used to run a bulletin board system called the Dungeon BBS (of course Dungeons & Dragons themed). The software was WWIV (World War Four) and it was in C++. When you paid for the software, you got the source code so you could mod it yourself. I remember just making one little change on my slow little PC... it would take a good 20 minutes for the whole thing to compile. It was basically click... wait... go have lunch... OK it might be done now. No? Compile error. Damn. Got a { in the wrong place. OK. Click... wait.........

One of the perks that working in a software engineering department provided was the shared geekeness of your peers.   When our work was put on hold for lunch, we'd fire up a Quake Arena server and run a networked game, randomly in one of the many game level areas.   How did I do in those games?   I guess you could tell from the name I gave my player .... Dead Meat.

Oh, I can't tell you the joy that we had when I set up my first training room circa 1996. We had four PCs, so I set up a little network running Novell 3.1, I think, so we could play Doom, Duke Nukem, and the early versions of Warcraft and Starcraft. We lost many product hours of productivity to those games lol.

My 1st "PC" language was TurboPascal.  My office was replacing our one IBM microcomputer with 4 IBM PCs.  I was tasked with converting the Basic code to Pascal.  Of coarse, I couldn't just convert it...I had to give it "...more power".  I consolidated the programs into one set of code.  I added a main menu where the User could select which "calculation" they needed to perform.  I also added "save/load data" options so the Users didn't have to manually type in a data set each time they wanted to use the new program.  I think Tim Allen would have been proud of what I did!  LOL!!!

Richard Hmmm, funny anecdote, but I would share this with anyone in my work environment.  I like to see people staying productive.

Kind of related, but... years ago, a young man in IT, one of only two in the place, decided to play an April Fools' Day joke on a few of us, and it nearly got him fired.  He took screen shots of our desktops and moved all of our shortcuts to our user folders,  Then he replaced the normal 'desktop' with his screen shots.  They were so realistic, that the entire office was trying to figure out why no shortcuts were working on these particular machines.   What a kerfuffle.  And, of course, this particular IT worker was scheduled to come in late that morning.  Luckily, the other guy figured it out, but not before the company president heard about it.  That guy was in the doghouse for weeks for that prank.