Meeting productivity targets is an important aspect of your job, but so is being available during business hours, meetings/collaborations, etc.
Moonlighting is working another job outside of business hours - which I agree, employers have less of a right to object to.
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.
If you want to get paid by the hour or unit rate, be a consultant.
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.
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.
Most employment contracts, even for salaried workers, list things such as "37.5hrs per week".
If this is the understanding, and you aren't working diligently for those hours, you're a thief and fraudster, a scam artist, and should be fired.
If you get done a task early, ask for more work!
The attitude of people in this thread is laughable. People in this field are some of the most privileged, well paid members of our society.
To hear such persons moan and bleet over their lot is laughable. Grow up people. Just disgusting.
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.
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.
Working beyond explicitly assigned tasks is not "performing more work for free". It's doing your job.
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.
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”
If you want people to work beyond the bounds of their contract, then renegotiate the contract.
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.
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.
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.