>Perhaps the biggest sink on the economy and environment is perfomative work that David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs". Commuting 100 miles to sit in an office to be seen to perform is tragic and borne of insecurity of both manager and worker colluding in a game.
For years (5+), at my job there's often nothing to do, so after lunch I just go home, and declare 4 hours worked that day (8-12, instead of normal 8) at the end of a month. Of 5 of us employees I am the only one doing that. Never once has my boss confronted me about it, neither subtracted from my full salary. I feel kinda blessed.
Man I wish everyone did that. I managed a team of twenty with a layer of managers and it was just impossible to get a pulse on workload. The truth is there is always work to be done. It doesn’t have to be feature work but it could be product health, process health, or pie in the sky thinking work. Some employees were great about utilizing downtime to tackle these but many were not. I loved the ones who were confident to tell me “hey boss I got some time. What do you want me to focus on ?”
In many companies, there are systems into which you enter how many hours you worked each day. (often you also need to break down the work per department/budget, so that you as an expense can be tracked across multiple company budgets).
For years (5+), at my job there's often nothing to do, so after lunch I just go home, and declare 4 hours worked that day (8-12, instead of normal 8) at the end of a month. Of 5 of us employees I am the only one doing that. Never once has my boss confronted me about it, neither subtracted from my full salary. I feel kinda blessed.