High tech manufacturing employs a tiny minority of the population, and most of the physical labor is done by technicians while the designing and ideating is done by people who've studied for years to become experts in their field- and ideas and solutions vome to you in the strangest places. Ever heard the term "Having a shower thought"?? When a problem stumps someone whose job is to solve it, if they can solve it but can't figure it out right away, the issue is usually that they aren't in the right frame of mind to solve that problem. Doing something else for 4 hours and coming back when you're in the right frame of mind to vome up with a working solution in an hour isn't unheard of, and neither is doggedly brooding at your desk, wracking your brain to come up with something for 8 hours only to come back the next morning and realise it was a dumb mistake/ obvious solution all along. For jobs involving labors of the mind, 8 hour workdays and 40 hour weeks are usually referring to your service call hours, i.e. "something small came up, fix it by this afternoon" while you spend the day working on long term projects or learning new skills.