[egypturnash]

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while.” The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

[spacechild1]

FYI: this is a variation of a story by Heinrich Böll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...). The original story is set on the west coast of Europe and the tourist is of unknown nationality.

[CRConrad]

First sentence of that WP article:

> "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" ("Anecdote concerning the Lowering of Productivity" in Leila Vennewitz' translation) is a short story by Heinrich Böll about an encounter between an enterprising tourist and a small fisherman, in which the tourist suggests how the fisherman can improve his life.

I don't know Leila Vennewitz, but her translation of at least the title isn't all that great: "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" means not "Anecdote concerning the Lowering of Productivity", but "Anecdote for the Lowering of Productivity".

[spacechild1]

Actually, "zur" can mean both and I think the ambiguity is intentional. It's maybe just not possible to translate it into English without removing one of the two meanings.

[CRConrad]

Yes, the other usage occurred to me later. But it's secondary, significantly rarer, isn't it? So I'd still say the translator chose the wrong alternative in English. Or maybe they were equally prevalent back in the day, or I've got the current relationship wrong.

[greggman3]

This parable is completely unrelated to the topic at hand unless you add in some catch like

> The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

> I don't catch them. I just go to one of the other fisherman's boats from my company and take a few of their tuna. That way they get up at 5am and work there asses off and all I have to do is carry a couple of their tuna in to earn a living.

Note: I didn't say he stole the tuna. All the tuna needs to be carried in. He just didn't do as much work as the others. He did the minimal work, "carrying in a few tuna", instead of the full work, "spending hours catching tuna and also carrying them all in".

The OP isn't running their own business. If they were sure, they could decide to only work enough to pay the bills and enjoy the extra time. Instead the OP is at a company. If they're not doing the work then others are probably picking up the slack and the OP's possibly effectively riding off their work. I get that's harder to account the larger the company but it becomes very clear on small team or small company.

[throwawaygh]

> The OP isn't running their own business. If they were sure, they could decide to only work enough to pay the bills and enjoy the extra time.

What an incredibly odd moral distinction, if you step back and think about it from an objective perspective. As long as there exists an idle class that lives off of previously accumulated capital (including intellectual or social capital), 5-10 hours a week will be a commendable contribution to society in my book.

Why does owning a business exempt you from contributing to society? That's an extraordinarily value-laden judgement.

So. If we're going to moralize like this, I'll flip the tables and assert that receiving stock dividends from companies at which you've never worked is theft that should be criminalized ;-)

Morality is no guide here because we immediately happen upon deep issues of political-economy. It's more productive to focus on the law. OP's employer carefully chose their corporate structure and hired devs into exempt salaried roles FOR A REASON. If they want him to work a certain number of hours and have recourse if he doesn't, then they can switch the role to hourly non-exempt. They won't. For a reason.

Excusing all the ways in which corporations short-change tech workers while moralizing about watercooler talk or reddit time or whatever is textbook master-slave morality.

General hard agreement on the "is this really how you want to spend your life?" comments, though.

[tylerhou]

> …receiving stock dividends from companies at which you've never worked is theft that should be criminalized

No, because when you receive dividends, you have provided something of value to the company (capital). Without your money, the company wouldn’t be able to generate that revenue.

When you steal fish, you are providing absolutely no value.

[CRConrad]

> when you receive dividends, you have provided something of value to the company (capital). Without your money, the company wouldn’t be able to generate that revenue.

No, for the absolute majority of stock and stockholders that's not true. You only provide capital to the company when you buy stock in an IPO. Otherwise, the money you paid -- usually much more than the company received in the IPO, which could have been a century or more ago -- went to the previous owner of the stock, who sold it to you.

> When you steal fish, you are providing absolutely no value.

As I understood the parable, carrying fish to market for the more hard-working fishermen was the protagonist's cushy sinecure of a job.

[throwawaygh]

There's no shortage of moral critiques of financial capitalism. But my point was not to spark a moral debate about political economy.

My point was simple: the moral question here is far from obvious. Whole books have been written, whole wars have been fought. We will not resolve this issue in an HN thread. But it is an issue on which people disagree.

So. Focus instead on legality.

And, in a legal sense, you are absolutely 100% dead wrong. Even in the US, which is extremely friendly to capital and has very lax labor laws, OP is NOT stealing. Not in a legal sense.

There is nothing illegal about a salaried employee sitting at his desk and twiddling his thumbs. To the extent that you could build a case, it would be PR suicide to actually prosecute.

If the company OP works for wants to count unproductive time as theft, then they would make their devs hourly non-exempt employees. They choose not to do so for good reasons.

But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If the company is constrained only by law, then labor should be constrained only by law. Don't impose moral boundaries on yourself when your employer insists on at-will contracts, non-competes, NDAs, and exempt status.

Again, I think working 5-10 hours a week at a job where you're nominally expected to work 40 hours is probably not the ticket to a good life. But the issue isn't one of morality or even shop ethics. OP's employer almost certainly doesn't give two shits about any sort of morality or ethics that aren't enforced by the law or the marketplace. So imposing a moral expectation on OP is gross asymmetry.

Should OP think of this as a problem and fix it? Yes. But sure as fuck not because some trust fund kid's dividend is slightly smaller than it could've been.

[tylerhou]

My point is your analogy is not comparable, not that OP is acting morally or not morally. When a company issues dividends, it voluntarily (consensually) gives to those who have provided it value.

When you steal from other fisherman and call it your own, that's different because there is not necessarily consent from the other fishermen. So the two are different scenarios.

I'm not saying that OP is in the right or in the wrong. In OP's case, it seems like the company usually consents. And it's unclear whether OP is actually plagiarizing others' work. Maybe the company is just happy with their "low" output.

To be 100% clear, I'm not making a statement about whether it's ethical/moral/legal to twiddle your thumbs on the job or not. I'm pointing out that your analogy is not a good one.

[throwawaygh]

(Another way to understand this, from the perspective of the company, is that it's often advantageous to have an excess of trained labor in stock. Not saying that's true in OP's case, necessarily, but having a "back bench" is definitely something some engineering orgs intentionally plan for.)

[dvdhnt]

Truly appreciate your ability to articulate these moral grey areas.

I’ll definitely be referring back to your comments when I need to convey my similar thoughts.

[ConfessionTime]

People are taking the one extreme example I gave of a day of not working as my typical day. That isn't the case. I do put in work. Maybe not as much as my coworkers, but I ship features, I close tickets, I do everything that everyone else does. I never try to pass anyone's work off as my own. The only dishonest part is that I'm not truthful about how much time it takes me to do the work that I do.

I don't take fish off other people's boats. I tell people I was fishing for 8 hours when I was really fishing for 2 and maybe blame the weather for why I didn't catch more.

[egypturnash]

Lemme just qualify my general point of "fuck working hard for The Man for some vague promises of happiness much, much later in life when you can just do whatever the fuck you like to do right now" here with another quote:

----

Take an electric pencil sharpener

Take a case of white-out; you might need it one day

Take stuff from work

It's your duty as an oppressed worker to steal from your exploiters

It's gonna be an outstanding day

- King Missile, Take Stuff From Work, emphasis mine.

[raldi]

The next week the fisherman got a toothache.

[dchapp]

Exactly one of the characters in that story can weather disasters.

[engineeringwoke]

Why would an individual have to defend themselves against disasters when they are so simple to mitigate against collectively?

[dchapp]

First, I claim there exist disasters that are not simple to mitigate against collectively. Civil unrest (the full spectrum, from vigorous protest to outright governmental collapse) being the big one I have in mind.

Second, I claim that the wealthy character in the story above has significantly greater ability than the non-wealthy character to: (1) have accurate situational awareness about disasters (e.g., can distinguish shit actually hitting the fan from shit narrowly missing the fan (possibly via superior sensing apparati, more likely, just by delegating the task)); and (2) have well-equipped (read: expensive) bug-in/out plans in place. Thus, even in cases where disasters are mitigated against collectively as you claim is possible, the wealthy character will be in a better position to maintain their pre-disaster quality of life than the non-wealthy character.

That said, this is all a little too removed from a concrete comparison for my liking. Maybe you have one in mind? Ideally, an example where collective efforts at disaster mitigation basically made outcomes for individuals insensitive to the wealth of those individuals.

[jkepler]

So he would retire once his kids were grown & out of the house.