When you have your wife sending proof of life texts and posing as you, pretending to have technical difficulties in meetings, not only are you not doing anything, you’re like a disease that saps the productivity of your colleagues.

With respect to kids and other “life”, we set clear expectations - you’re not paid to babysit. Personally, my expectation is that our folks are professionals and we all deal with incidental things. I was stuck waiting for a gas meter change all afternoon last week. My admin’s son had a snow day. But if your car breaks down every Friday, or your 6th grandmother has passed, that’s a problem.

What you are saying is this: how an employee spends their time is 100% the responsibility of their manager. That's extremely infantilizing - strong teams I have worked on expect employees to self-manage their time productively and deliver about "full time" bandwidth (minus time off, maintenance work, etc) on a consistent basis so we can effectively plan and execute.

I'm speaking from experience: I had to deal with a new hire whom I was assigned to mentor who tried to juggle just one other job and it was super obvious they weren't working when they said they were. It took a long time to work through the PIP process, and effectively that person stole not only the company's time and money, but wasted a good deal my own time and patience. Fuck them and their entitled mentality. If they had gotten their shit done on time and without sketchy meeting aversion, they might have continued enjoying the second paycheck. Frankly if they had done good work and in a timely fashion it might not have mattered if they had another job - but if you're employed (not contracted) ethically speaking that employer and those coworkers are correct to expect that job to be your first priority during the work week.

Because that's the execs' privilege. Just like how the old feudal aristocracy was free to engage in as many economic activities as they wanted for self gain but the feudal serfs were supposed to tend to their lords' fields all the time and be loyal and honest and not steal from their lords.

Who are you, the lowly pleb, to think that you can have the same privilege with your modern technolords... Know your place.