[simonh]

An awful lot of jobs are about being available to do that 2 days fo work as and when it has to be done, and that work is split up into random chunks of a few minutes to a few hours throughout the week and aren't compactable. Any job that provides an available service to others is like that.

There may be some jobs that are slugging away at a big block of work and you could do it any time during the week. Part of some of my jobs have been like that, in fact that was software development which was part of the role, but not all of the job.

[wastedhours]

Was coming here to say exactly this - you're not really being paid for the work itself, but to have access to you for a certain amount of time. Sometimes there's as much value to the company in your 2 minute Slack response to a query at 17:58 on a Friday evening as there is for a 6 hour coding block.

Not saying it's valuable in a world sense, but for the objectives of the machine you're working in, it often is.