[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.