Probably not, but instead they get to bill their working hours in 6 minute increments. And they have to bill a high number of hours a day. Praise yourself lucky if you don't have to do that!

because EVERYONE is as productive as you are? give me a break.

And why would I be doing that? Configuring and learning your work tools is part of work, it should be done in work time.

But you're also expected to meet your weekly "commitments" in JIRA - which means you're going to be working nights and weekends to do the work you're supposed to be doing since you were interrupted all day to do the work other people were supposed to be doing.

But you're right, this _is_ the tradeoff, and it's by design, since you're "exempt".

When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same.

Isn't it about setting priorities? What stops you from for example spending less time on your side business and more time reading? Please don't take it as judgemental, I am really curious.

Does it, though? I get paid for my time, not my productivity

But this is what you are paid for. Do you not feel that this is what you should be doing in the time you are contracted to work?

In most jobs, you don't have to work all the time while you're on the job - and most people take copious advantage of that.

It's a rare privilege to be able to rebalance your own workload like that. As a consultant, I have some ability to do this, but if I accomplish one focused task that takes an hour one day, I only get paid for one hour that day. I cannot make myself less busy without literally lowering my pay.

Come in early, skip lunch, dinner at your desk, take your computer home, work while watching Netflix, take your computer to bed, sleep with it next to you.

I did this for a year.

Sure you have, albeit by another name likely.

GitHub/Gitlab as a service easily saves more than 5hrs a week.

I have custom slack bots that easily save me a couple hours a week in aggregate.

Then there’s services such as managed CI or, heck even things like the “search” function on a wiki, those are all things that can be provided by a service.

But a tool like this will show you much much it might be worth investing in a service vs hiring someone dedicated and running something yourself.

> Work expands to fill available time. Will my employee use that time to the company’s advantage?

There’s two points to this argument;

1) if I save an employee time, what value does that give me?

2) if I’m an employee, and efficiency is improved; I still have to be in the office 9hrs per day.

The first argument is at odds with the notion that most knowledge worker jobs tend to only be around 40% productive.[0]

There’s no evidence that it goes lower than that; most of the reasons that percentage is so low, though, is friction. Friction can take many forms such as a bureaucratic process for approvals to change things- all the way to “needing to talk to that one guy who knows the thing, and teams is having an outage”. It’s hard to quantify, but there are so many frictions and there is evidence to suggest that removing these frictions increases productivity, not lessens it. (To a value of 80% which represents a significant increase).

(I will supply citations when I get to my pc, this comment is from a phone)

Problem 2 goes into the expectation that if you’re in the office you must be busy- there’s no value to you the employee of the company gets more efficient! Except obviously that’s not true in a more macro sense; I wouldn’t argue that. I would instead argue that the feeling of empowerment that comes with doing actual work and not busywork will make people more engaged and not less.

You wouldn’t feel motivated in your job if you had to assemble your chair each time you wanted to sit in it, it would be tedious and not challenging and certainly cause you to mentally check out.

[0]: https://talentculture.com/how-knowledge-workers-really-spend...

This is a fantasy. Imagine if I decide to become a human calculator, and that my job is going to be solving algebra problems. People will mail me simple problems (5+7) and I'll mail them back a solution.

You might say "thats ridiculous! We have computers that can do that much more efficiently". Can I then argue "well, I work 8 hours a day! therefore I deserve a living wage"?.

Well, yeah. But it's way more authentic.

You're definitely right about this for folks who are barely scraping by, working multiple jobs, etc.

But for folks in IT, taking the time to read and comment on HN... we make the time for what we choose to make the time for.

You know how I work my full time job? Like your part time job. Only 50% of the time.

> The problem with 40 hour jobs is that you're anyways only productive for like 50% of that and then the rest of the day you're stuck in a prison.

You mean the prison that is my own home? Remote job and a laptop eliminate this problem. If I run errands I bring my laptop in case someone needs me to jump on a terminal real quick, but when I’m not actively working I’m just living my life, not stuck in an office prison.

not in my experience. there are often people around that only do 25-35hours per week... at least in the places I've worked at 'till now.

> Open source might be the right avenue for this type of freedom

with open source, you're always an outside contributor. That might be enough for some - but I doubt that my motivation could keep up long term in that setting.

At the moment, no. My shifts are 6am to midnight, six days a week. Day 7 is for laundry, exercise, phoning home and catching up on sleep. Lots of us have jobs that require long hours at least temporarily. For me (military) we will keep this pace until at least mid-January but this is a norm in many industries. Talk to anyone working on any sort of ship, resource extraction, farming, or remote locations. The hours are long, the rooms are small, but the pay is high. Time for reading is a privilege. Only those with "normal" jobs have the stability and time to associate rituals with reading.

This argument is absolutely insane to me. You weren't paid for your commuting time before - if work now fills that slot it's because you're choosing to work earlier/more.

I 100% agree with this. I'd much rather have actual work to do. My workaround has been to find 35 hours a week on something meaningful to me that won't upset the company if they find me doing it. So when I need to kill some hours looking productive, I find a way to use that time on a side project or hobby work.