My worst boss was an ex-programmer who thought he would outsmart everybody in a 10 miles radius. Not just programmers, everybody. He is a smart guy, but he failed two projects missing the deadlines by months and blowing his budget with 300%.

He's gone now and I'm now looking through his code, trying to figure out where to start fixing things. For one thing, when this guy had to choose between simple and complicated he always went incredibly complicated. Sad, because he is indeed a very smart guy. But he got overconfident and arrogant and thought that WHILE I WAS USELESSLY STARING AT THAT ONE BUG, HE WAS KEEPING THE ORGANIZATION MOVING ...

Now here's the punch line. I had no idea what this guy was doing all day. I mean what he was doing useful. It came out that he was doing exactly the same things as Rands: meetings, technology checks, bug assignment, one on ones ... but not in a useful way.

Therefore "What exactly do you do?" is a legitimate question because it may mean "What exactly do you do that is useful and keeps this organization going?" As a developer I know exactly what I'm doing to keep my company going: I'm fixing bugs and code problems.