I'm not talking about what the developer is doing - I'm talking about what the company is doing in terms of initiating new development work. Again, startups and one-man shops are different because you control your own pace, but in many large corporations you may sit around just minding shop until the next big product development comes along (I would use this time to start my own initiatives to build tools and libraries to help the team), and that company pace is not being determined by how long development takes.

This is especially true if like most developers you are not working at a company where software is the product, but rather where software is part of the product, or where you are part of IT working on internal systems, not part of product development at all.