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Comment by KeplerBoy | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of people employed at a single job who only pretend to work. That's life.

Anecdotally I'd argue that it's not just "plenty", but the majority of people who only work one single job barely and/or pretend to work. I regularly see Principal+ engineers, VPs and Directors waddling around looking important or just staring at their monitors with a glazed over look.

Most corporations don't need nearly as many employees as they actually have, so if you can deliver exceptional results in 20 hours, why not dedicate the remaining 20 hours to another corp, and double your comp? Everyone wins.

HackerNews dudes claiming they do a true minimum 40 hours per week, every week, forever, of heads-down hard-work are deluding themselves. I really don't understand the overemployment hatred this forum has. There are plenty of folks who really do solid work at 2+ jobs, not half-assing and politicking.

Disclaimer: I am not OE.

This is why there’s a push to the four day workweek. People get just as much done, they just use their time more efficiently.

When people with no integrity or ethics defraud their employers, "it's life"?

Yes. It's the same with wage theft.

Wage theft vastly outstrips other forms of theft[0] and it's considered a complete non priority by law enforcement, politicians, and the media.

These kinds of things just aren't a priority for one reason for another. Let's brainstorm some solutions to wage theft and overemployment.

I suggest a synergistic approach -- fix wage theft and it'll have a knock-on effective with things like overemployment or people pretending to work a single job.

What do you think?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft#/media/File:Wage_th...

How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.

We pretend to work, they pretend to pay.

but these people attend too many meetings; the OE ones miss everything.

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