[ph0rque]

Thats just how salary works. I've never looked at it as "You're getting paid to do N hours of work", but rather, "You're getting paid get X work done."

At my previous company, the assumption was, "You're getting paid to get X work done, and if you can finish it in 40 hours/week, then we need to keep adding to X until it takes you 60 hours/week to get it done." How is that different than "You're getting paid to do N hours of work per week", with N > 60?

[rdtsc]

That's the farcical part of it. You are getting payed to get X done. Then can you go home after you do X if you did in 30 hours? Can you just tell your boss: you tasked me with doing X, it is done. I am taking a half Thursday and Friday off?

Of course not. That will be met with a look of disbelief and shock. They will probably quickly assign your another thing Y that takes another 40 hours to complete so now you have 10 hours to complete the new 40 hour job.

Because there is no payed overtime everyone is relying bonuses. And guess what happens with bonuses? "Sorry this was a tough year so we had to reduce bonuses this year, but thanks for your great work".

[robryan]

What's to stop them though giving you tasks in which 40 hours would the expected amount of time it would take in a perfect world then especially in software it will tend towards 60 because of unexpected bugs conflicts, waiting on others work etc.