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Comment by waynesonfire | Hacker News Reader

TLDR, you're stealing and thanks for sharing your justification that I presume allows you to sleep at night.

No the employer is choosing to pay for him not to work.

If a company pays me $200 an hour to write children's stories and then at the end of the day burns all the stories in front of me it isn't me who is stealing from the company, nor is it necessary that I write high quality stories for them.

As long as I don't talk about Bruno I'll be fine.

"As long as I don't talk about Bruno I'll be fine."

Is that a reference to something known?

Apparently a song from the new Disney movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvWRMAU6V-c

Haven't seen the actual movie though, so don't know exactly what the deal is with Bruno.

I believe it's reference to new Disney movie Encanto - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvWRMAU6V-c

Always focus on punching up, not down.

An individual employee can rarely abuse a large corporation more than the corporation can abuse the employee.

If OP is in this situation, then the corporation is fine with what's happening, presumably for other reasons (could be even to keep him from a competitor's payroll).

A corporation has deeper pockets and less awareness, so you can abuse it pretty far -- stealing triple your salary, obstructing a whole department to make your life easy. When a corporation abuses me they find there is only so much juice to squeeze, since I can't possibly produce more than twice as much as they pay me for.

You might be forgetting about abuses which don't involve productivity, but go beyond and affect your physical and even worse, mental health.

As a (somewhat lowly) individual contributor the worst case scenario of an individual abusing a large enterprise was probably Jérome Kerviel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel ) and I personally kind of believe in a conspiracy where he wasn't actually working alone, considering the amount of things he managed to do, so he was most likely a scapegoat. And even that worse case scenario lost Société Générale "only" €4.9 billion, for a company with a yearly revenue of €24 billion.

Meanwhile the worst case scenario for abuse the other way... is death. There are many, many documented cases of suicide due to overwork and similar abuses. Foxconn was literally installing nets around their office buildings to catch people jumping from the windows.

OP is doing the job assigned to them. Sure, the higher-ups might not have SAID "do the minimum required", but that's what they expressed through the corporate culture they set forth. Personally I could never work somewhere where I'm expected to effectively not work, no matter how much they pay. But people have bills, and family to support, so I can't fault someone else for taking a mind-numbing "fake work" job. They tend to pay well.

No one is forcing anybody to employ the OP. If their employer is happy with their output then they'll keep paying them.

He's not stealing from anyone. Stealing means taking something that isn't yours. He's engaged in a willful transaction with an employer, it's just that it leaves him enough time and capacity to do side work. I'll believe in good faith that his employment is constantly monitored and evaluated.

From the employer side there are sometimes considerations why to keep someone around. Could be morale, regulations, keeping resources for something legacy or something in the future, etc.

Not exactly what I got out of reading that.

Your response sounds slightly like the one professor in my department who screamed out pirating your overpriced books is stealing while every other professor in the dept. told us to pirate our books or simply handed out flash drives with the pirated books on them.

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