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Comment by benjaminwootton | Hacker News Reader

You could write a million words trying to justify this.

However, if you are selling the same hour of effort to two or more people then you are lying to, stealing from and defrauding them. That is totally black and white.

People are entitled to respond to the unfair state of the world in many ways, but it doesn’t justify theft.

As an aside, I am amazed at how sites like HN can virtue signal with the best of them, then conduct mental gymnastics to claim that double billing isn’t fraudulent. Cmon guys surely anyone can see this isn’t right?

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I am not selling one hour of effort, I am selling the result of what an average employee could accomplish with one hour of effort. If I can accomplish in half an hour what someone expects to take a full hour, then I have another half hour left to sell and by all rights should do so.

What does your contract say?

If it says hours, selling the same hour to someone else without their express knowledge and agreement is theft.

If the hours are important, then why would CEOs care if their employees work at 50% or 100% of effort?

Unless, the whole point of employment is to own the person for the time being?

The employment contract is an outdated relic from factory work, when it was actually reasonable to measure work in hours and an 8 hour shift made sense.

There are no ethical obligations for employees to follow employment contacts because there is a massive power imbalance. Workers are forced to accept humiliating and ridiculous terms, like peeing in a cup to pass a drug test, just so that they can survive.

2-3 hours a day of productive work is standard for office jobs. There's no reason to work more than that; you won't get paid more, they will just take advantage of you. There is nothing wrong with working another job in that case, so that you are paid proportionally to your output.

If you can convince your employer to write that into your contract, then absolutely. (If you're at the $200k dev salary skill level, you absolutely should be able to get paid very well as a contractor based on milestones, not for hours, and have a lot more lifestyle flexibility if you're productive)

But of course one reason for preferring regular salaried employment instead is actually not being able to accomplish the work in double the time but having a certain amount of skill in persuading people you're just ramping up or other people are holding up your productivity...

Theft is justified when the playing field is not fair, and when one party has vastly more leverage. You can't say the hungry are not justified in stealing when the rulers take their labor by force.

I think this sort of argumentation stops working with a starving $200K earner being forced to fraud to earn a meager livable $440K.

That 200K earner likely produces much more than 200K in value. They are a victim of theft from their employers, who steal their excess value.

Livability has nothing to do with it.

It's not "theft" to pay someone the compensation they agreed to receive, any more than it's theft to buy an item for what the shop agrees to sell it at (which will also be less than you actually value it at, unless you're very bad at purchasing decisions...)

There are situations where people accepting a certain job at a certain wage might do so with somewhat less than free choice (that's where livability comes in), but that doesn't include ones where they've got another job paying $200k.

> That 200K earner likely produces much more than 200K in value.

Of course, the business has to live from something, accept the risks.

The point is that these are not people driven to the corner who have no other option to survive than to steal. These people have enough funds to start their own businesses, but I guess defrauding is easier.

At what point do we stop cheering on businesses that find ways to extract more value from their employees?

Are you selling hours or outcomes? If you're meeting all your assigned deliverables on time then you're satisfying your employment outcomes.

If you're stalling or failing on your deliverables, then it becomes unethical.

Merely warming a chair is not ethical.

IT is not so clearly "hours in = work getting done" type of job, most of the time you are paid to have your knowledge and skills available for when it is required, but day to day work is a big cruise.

I totally agree, but most people sign a contract for hours and get paid per hour or per day. They are therefore selling hours.

If you are contracted and paid on outcomes then of course take as many jobs as you can fit in to your day.

Everyone knows the difference so this is no justification whatsoever.

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