A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract.
Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes.
It totally depends. Most corporate programming is CRUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delet...), so not much arithmetic involved. But a lot of 'book keeping', and organising your information. Not rocket science, but more listening to your stakeholders.
> Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes.
See also Carmack etc. But I was talking about the typical programming tasks.