I'm going to stay away from the tire fire of accusations between you and the former NCC boss. But I do want to say that having run a pen testing firm for many, many years these claims aren't hard to believe. It does depend on what you consider to be time spent working on a report, however.

50% time actually hacking even sounds kinda high depending on how the organization is structured. We had some engineers that just absolutely sucked at writing documentation but were wizzes at hacking so they got away with passing some of the documentation off on others (dramatically increasing the other engineers workloads, but sometimes that's ok). We also had some folks that were just great at formatting and dealing with client requests for docs and they could take workload off of engineers and make everyone happy.

An engagement ranged from 3 days to 6 weeks, with the average around 3 weeks. A typical internal pen test would be 2 weeks onsite followed by a week for writing the report and handling feedback (and travel and meetings and blah blah blah). It wasn't unusual for a client to request that all references to X be changed to Y or the word "should" be changed to "shall" or whatever other thing client management cared about. That time can add up quickly and make your job miserable.

Every single pen testing firm goes through a phase where they realize they are "wasting" weeks of effort on writing their reports. And they all decide they're going to automate as much as they can to improve their profit margins and employee happiness. They all usually come up with a snarky name for the new tool that does this automation. Most of the time the generation tool saves pain when it comes to formatting tables, table of contents, glossaries, etc., but wastes time wrestling with client expectations that their report be unique or focus on unusual areas. Then the engineer has to figure out how to modify the auto generated report without breaking any future changes to finding severity or writeup.

Some people would also consider time spent presenting the report to a board of directors as time spent "working on a report" and I wouldn't really disagree. It's not unusual to send an engineer and a manager to do a presentation at a remote site after the engagement finishes. That'll include 1-2 days of travel time and the time the group spends trying to "up sell" the client on further engagements.

It's been some years since I've been in that field but back in my day a break down of a 3 week engagement could look something like this:

First week is the fun part. You probably spend 30-40 billable hours on actual discovery, scanning, testing, hacking. And if you're smart you spend 3-5 hours on the early design of the report. The client might want a focus on the API or on WiFi or whatever and you arrange things so the report is organized properly early on and the team can input their findings as needed (or input them to the automated system which might not have a dedicated category for this focus area).

Much of the second week could be considered part of writing the report. You've ideally root'd most of the infra in the first week and now you're using tools and manual inspection to find every single vuln you can in the networks. You're using automated tools to find common mis-configurations and missing patches. Those tools are (hopefully) connected to your automated report generating system somehow so you don't need to format them manually. But there's always new stuff on each engagement that'll need some custom write-ups and severity determination will need to be adjusted depending on the client's security posture and risk profile.

The third week is 1-2 days getting the report ready, though that can extend further for unique engagements. Then there's submitting it to a tech editor, submitting it to management, submitting it to the client and dealing with corrections from all of them. It's extremely rare for a client not to have comments and changes that need to be addressed and that's another 2-8 hours.

Pen testing is difficult -- the travel, the presentations, the sales, the report writing. I'm not saying what this commenter is claiming is true, but the job is not how most people imagine it to be. I'll also say that that's not a criticism of NCC at all. All firms I've worked for, managed, or talked with are like this.