If you're attending the meetings you're required to attend, are completing the work you're required to complete by the agreed-upon deadlines, and are not working for a competitor, it is no business of my employer's what I'm doing at any given hour of the day.
This paternalistic bullshit will be the downfall of companies who care more about micromanaging and controlling their underpaid employees than they do about actually delivering something to the market. If someone isn't producing, fire them. If someone is only being given 10 hours a week of work, and they have enough free time to get another W2 job and earn another full-time salary, that's 100% a company/management problem.
At most companies, part of what they're paying you for is to be engaged during business hours. You're not just a contracting service who accepts requirements and tosses results back over the wall; you're a human resource, meant to be available for your coworkers as needed.
In a hypothetical case where someone only has 10 hours of stuff to do a week, I'm sympathetic, I'd be pretty bored by that too. But when I see a SWE describe a scenario like that, most of the time they end up meaning that they have 10 hours of coding tasks a week, because they don't consider anything else to be a real part of their job.
Except in your example, did the employee turn in the the work that was assigned Monday morning on Tuesday morning, and say “I’m done what’s next”, or did they lie and turn it in Friday and say it took all week?
If you want to get paid by the hour or unit rate, be a consultant.
Are there incentives in place for the employee to turn in work early and ask "what's next?"
Most people won't lie about it when they turn it in on Friday, they'll just turn it in when it is due and not explain. Why turn it in early if there is no reward for doing so other than more work?
As I've said elsewhere, this is a management problem, not an employee problem. As a manager I made sure people knew that there was a path to promotion, to advance within the corporation. I checked and tracked their progress and their work, and worked myself to make an environment where contributions were noted and rewarded. If a company or manager doesn't do that, they won't have people outperforming the base expectations for long, and they don't deserve to.
This doesn't make any sense. Most people are salaried and their time isn't tracked that way anyway.
To a certain point I agree with you, but how much an employee actually outputs is a constant negotiation between the business and the employee - this is where expectation comes into play.
If you are performing beyond the baseline, you can negotiate to be compensated for exceeding it, or you can take a break.
There is no expectation that an employee should perform more work "for free" just because they can.
I believe in fairness between both sides - there is no free lunch in either direction.
You have to dedicate those those 37.5 hours, of course. But personal capability determines how those 37.5 hours play out. If I can hypothetically output three times the amount of work in the same time as one other person, it's a raw deal to output max - you burn out for one. As well, that means you're good and you neogiate.
I don't know if anyone was advocating for going as far as you're suggesting (break doesn't mean paid vacation) - merely pointing out that an employee is granted the right to negotiate their labor at any point. If they get declined, that's fine. But the idea that you are a literal slave for 37.5 hours regardless of your capability is very flawed and you'll never convince the person that actually creates value of that.
The funny part for me is that I have grown up - I used to share your position but time and time again I was proved wrong, so I changed my mind.
This whole thread started, when an employer found someone working two other full time jobs.
There is zero defense for this. None.
There is no way to work 22.5 hrs per day, 5 days a week, and not be a thief, a crook, scum.
This is who you have aligned yourself with. This is the behaviour you have defended.
Into this conversation walked the spoiled, the entitled, the scam artist. People advocated working multiple full time jobs, and equated doing normal work as "slavery".
Above, you do so again. You liken working diligently, to slavery. Good grief.
Ultimately it comes down to deception. If an employee can do everything requested without lying, then maybe there is a defense.
This position collapses the first time someone's boss asks about workload and the employee has to lie or admit they have tons of free time.
Im sure there are unicorn cases where employees are never asked how long a task will take, or about their bandwidth for new tasks. However, in reality, the vast majority of situations require constant deception.
Most of the time the lying starts at the beginning with false employment history.
The point of a salaried position is that you're a professional filling a role for an organization. That role is not "do tasks assigned". It's spend your working time to make stuff better. With "working time" either explicitly laid out or implicitly, for the US, roughly 40 hours a week M-F.
Working beyond explicitly assigned tasks is not "performing more work for free". It's doing your job.
>The point of a salaried position is that you're a professional filling a role for an organization. That role is not "do tasks assigned".
That's funny because if I hire a company to do some work on my house, they do strictly the tasks assigned and even try to charge me more than agreed. They don't try to make my house better.
Wrong analogy - you hired a contractor, with a specified scope of work.
The right analogy is you hire a full-time handyman (whatever go with it), and you come home to find them on your couch in the middle of the day, their excuse is I fixed the dishwasher, and your response is likely to be “I’m not paying you to sit on the couch, go change the ac filters, fix the garage door, and re-seal the deck”
I've never read a contract that outlines job duties as "spend time working to make stuff better." Mostly they have a list and then 'tasks as needed/assigned.'
If you want people to work beyond the bounds of their contract, then renegotiate the contract.
Yep, and part of that as needed/as assigned is to notify your supervisor that you are done with your assigned tasks and are ready for a new one, if they don’t have one for you great, play minesweeper, but if you’re done with your assignments (seriously who is ever in that position), and don’t say so, now you’re acting deceptively.
I don't see 'notify your supervisor when tasks are complete' as part of most contracts either; it wouldn't be there, really, because beyond really basic stuff that actually creates way too much information for the supervisor to go through.
Without it being in the terms, it's not a duty you have to fulfill. It's not deceptive not to do favors for your supervisor.
This paternalistic bullshit will be the downfall of companies who care more about micromanaging and controlling their underpaid employees than they do about actually delivering something to the market. If someone isn't producing, fire them. If someone is only being given 10 hours a week of work, and they have enough free time to get another W2 job and earn another full-time salary, that's 100% a company/management problem.