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Comment by libeclipse | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, and I'm speaking as an outsider here since I'm relatively young and haven't had any experience in your industry, employees are paid per hour, which means that your firm has bought your time for that hour. You can't really use that time to do your own stuff.

That's just the way I see it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong and this sort of thing is normal.

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True if you are packing peanuts, but in reality there is so much downtime that you often don't have job responsibilities 100% of the time.

If you doing creative work or any work that requires thinking you also need mental breaks.

Reddit and YouTube also have plenty of work related material.

And lastly most people in the tech sector are not hourly employees we have global contracts where they are legal for a reason; if I'm staying an extra hour or opening my laptop over the weekend because that's when I got some inspiration or finally cam up with a solution I see no problem if I want to read the news for 15 min at 10am in the morning.

Lots of people, especially in engineering and similar professions, are salaried. We are paid weekly to accomplish whatever amount of work our boss expects of us that week. That doesn't necessarily mean any specific number of hours, or that the work be done continuously without breaks.

The trade off of course is that sometimes the work takes more than the nominal 40 hours, or has to be done at odd hours, and you don't get paid more for that.

You pay hundreds per month for your car, why do you let it sit unused in your driveway most of the time? (Hint: You're paying for it to be available the instant you need it).

People even get paid for "on call" hours where they're sitting at home watching TV.

If you're the kind of manager that employees constantly feel the need to "look busy" around, you're probably getting less real work out of them, not more.

Your employer wants to get best value for their money.

Some bad employers think this means arse-on-chair for that hour. They may go as far to time loo breaks.

Some better employers recognise that employees, and thus the work they produce benefit from some flexibility.

But, I think obviously, employers can't allow completely free use of their computer network. They need to defend against malware and they need to protect their data. They also need to stop people watching porn in open plan offices.

If you are employing someone who is watching porn in an open plan office the problem isn't with your internet filtering system. It is with your employee so just fire them! If someone is dumb enough to think watching porn in the office is a "good idea" then they are too dumb to be working for you. Just my 2c.

I caught a group of employees watching porn in an open plan office. I told them to be more careful and dismissed them. I was at that time only an intern anyway.

Coding isn't that type of job. Very few people can concentrate on coding problems uninterrupted from 9am until 5pm and it's usually very unproductive to try. Any boss that expects that is unrealistic. Most of the time when I'm up against a difficult problem the time I get most breakthroughs is on lunch or a loo break. Sometimes you need to lose focus to gain inspiration. Coding isn't just about numbers, it's creative problem solving.

We're also an industry of constant learning. Although I can't really say HN is a learning material I'd be willing to try to justify to my boss, staying connected and up to date on the latest happenings has gotten me out of several jams in work.

That's how the company would like to see it, I agree. I don't understand however why you'd throw your own life under the bus. You're arguing like a gazelle saying "we shouldn't run from the lions, they're hunting us because they're hungry and want to eat us". The only ones who stand to gain from such behaviour are the lions themselves. That's what puzzles me each time I see an argument like that from someone who isn't a C-level person that directly benefits from the labour of those he/she employs. You stand to gain nothing from such treatment - your life won't improve, your salary won't improve, your benefits won't improve, you'll just have to work harder. The corporation already works under the assumption that every single millisecond you spend on-premises produces value for them to exploit. Your best self-interest is in minimizing the control the corporation has over your life, while maximizing the appearance of doing useful work. That's just business. On the morality side of it, you do have an obligation towards the actual users and clients, so you should try to actually do your job and make things better for them. I just don't understand why you'd feel a moral obligation towards a non-human business entity.

You can't program from second 1, you need to concentrate and sometimes there are problems. Doing something else and then returning to where you left actually helps in doing it different/better

I agree. I was contributing to a project on GitHub and after trying continuosly for two days I was stuck. I then came back to the issue after a week and fixed it almost instantly. It was just a stupid mistake that slipped my mind the first few times around.

I'm still relatively young but I think people (bosses) quickly forget that line that the company bought your work hours. Your performance on tasks is what matters in long term.

Sometimes you need a break. That's all. It would be more ideal if companies recognised that and we can stop all the pretence.

"your firm has bought your time for that hour." Tech workers have unusual amounts of wageslave mentality.

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