[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.