[paxys]

You are missing the core part of the question. You say it is fraud when you aren't delivering what was agreed upon – fine, that could be the case. But what were you hired to deliver exactly? Is that written down somewhere? Forget management, can you yourself judge in some objective way whether you are committing fraud at work or not?

[ojilles]

Yes, your employment contract has likely a minimum number of hours of work stipulated (otherwise PTO etc becomes hard).

Look, i’m not saying it is a valuable way of looking at productivity at all, but the fraud aspect is reasonably clear.

So if it states 40 hours, you put in 40 hours. If you do nothing during those 40 hours, we can have a moral/ethics discussion about if and how you should change the situation etc, but at that point we’re outside of the fraud scenario in my opinion.

[paxys]

At will salaried (non-hourly) exempt employment contracts in the US do not generally state the number of hours you must work in a day or week (mine does not). And even if they do, how do you measure "working" hours? Are you committing fraud if you sit in the office and browse the internet for an hour every day? And how does that translate to working from home?

I will say from experience that someone who does 10 hours of good, productive work a week is still adding more value to the company than someone who works 80 but writes terrible code, ships bugs and causes outages. If you want to accuse someone of fraud for not being valuable, go after the latter.

[ojilles]

In that case, paxys, I stand corrected and can see where the questions in this thread are coming from, indeed.

In my experience in Europe, an employment contract will state number of hours (say 36, 40, etc) and you need to be present and available for that time. These are non-hourly contracts (e.g. salary is expressed by month not hour). None of that has anything to do with productivity, to your/mine point.