I see two ways to think about this:
1. The company is getting what they want out of the employee, so why does hours worked matter? It's about outcome, not output. If the company is none the wiser, that's their problem.
2. The company and the employee entered into a contract that often explicitly states hours-per-week worked. The employee is being dishonest by intentionally misleading the employer that this is how much work they can accomplish in a week.
The common arguments for (1) that I hear are:
A. It's not possible to do more than 4 hours of mentally intensive work a day on average (everyone is different). That's fine but 4 hours a day is a far cry from having 2 fully remote jobs, or working only a few hours a week.
B. Devs only did 1-2 hours a day of real work in an office environment anyways. The rest was interruptions. This might be correct, but you were still "working" - ie. using mental cycles, having discussions, and guiding others, as pedantic or seemingly useless it may have seemed. Now that you have mental cycles freed up, shouldn't those go towards your work?
I want to hear HNs thoughts on:
* How common is this scenario?
* Do you think this is a growing problem in the industry?
* How are employers handling these situations?
