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Comment by smegger001 | Hacker News Reader

It is not "divine right of king" by any stretch of the imagination. It is a contract for exchange of service between to parties. Because you agreed to exchange their money for your labor. During that time you are obligated to do what you are agreed to be paid to do under the conditions agreed to at time of hire.

And yes they are owed your skills because they are paying you for them, that is how any exchange of services work. If you don't provide them you are not giving them what they are paying you for.

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You are right, we are selling our labour. But the idea that that means that we are selling our _time_ is a recent development in human history. Most societies in the past would have a hard time even understanding the idea that one's time could belong to your employer, es explained by David Graeber in "bullshit jobs"

Time is easy to measure. It could well be line of code or Completion of work, but that will quickly become highly subjective. If someone finds a better way to measure and pay for the software engineers, it could open plethora of possibilities.

I honestly don't think this would be a problem if people spent their time advocating on internet message boards vs internal corporate message boards - even on the clock. This isn't about selling time, it's about what's the appropriate place and audience for certain types of discussion.

In practically every job I've ever had, some of the conversations that folks are advocating to continue would have gotten me first warned and then fired. But I've never worked for a 'tech' company per se, just in technology. I guess it could be different in SV but then that's probably the issue. Most of the country just doesn't operate this way and finds this kinda weird.

It seems to me that past societies would have a very good understanding about the idea that one's time could belong to your employer as many of them were (and some had) full-time live-in servants, or season-long farm labor contracts for landless laborers, or serfdom/rent situations with a duty to work x days/season to cultivate the landlord's land instead of theirs, or indentured servitude or even slavery, or any other such relationships. Before industrial age it might be weird for the time of a free middle-class man to belong to an employer, but there weren't that many such men.

This is what Graeber writes:

"Historically, human work patterns have taken the form of intense bursts of energy followed by rest. Farming, for instance, is generally an all-hands-on-deck mobilization around planting and harvest, with the off-seasons occupied by minor projects. Large projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast tend to take the same form. This is typical of how human beings have always worked. There is no reason to believe that acting otherwise would result in greater efficiency or productivity. Often it has precisely the opposite effect.

One reason that work was historically irregular is because it was largely unsupervised. This is true of medieval feudalism and of most labor arrangements until relatively recent times, even if the relationship between worker and boss was strikingly unequal. If those at the bottom produced what was required of them, those at the top couldn’t be bothered to know how the time was spent."

> And yes they are owed your skills because they are paying you for them

I'm unaware of any typical employer ever paying wages/salary in advance, it's always in arrears, so on that basis there's no point at which the employee owes the employer their skills.

A cunning entrepreneur should include that their employees vote a certain way on their contracts, or to not vote at all.

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