You always have to complete your work. Anything less will result in unemployment.
But the employment contract probably doesn’t say how fast you need to complete your work.
If you’re done early, take a break and scroll on your phone for a couple hours, then send in your completed work at the end of the day. No need to tell anyone you’re finished, just go about your day looking busy.
I slack off all the time at work. I just got my annual performance evaluation and found out. I am one of the top performers in my department. All that tells me is that I need to spend another hour or so a day playing games.
It doesn’t pay to be a hard worker.
It generally doesn’t pay any better than just scraping by with minimum effort.
Also, it really does pay to be a hard worker, it’s just someone else that is getting paid for your hard work.
Depends on the company… when you don’t have stupid management, they know that you can work faster because of your know how of processes in place at the company, that relearning that stuff to a new guy costs more money than pay you more salary.
That is way, in my country, it is normal that salaries go up the longer you stay and the older you get.
I guess our social structures helped to get here, like workers right laws and a unemployed “insurance” where you can register as soon as you hear that you get fired (you have multiple month (depending on how long you already worked at that employer) until the work contract is nullified). You will get about 80% in salary, but you have to proof that you are searching for a new job and you have to take one if you get one. Not doing that results in days without money from that “insurance”.
So this takes the pressure from the workers on how they talk with employers depending their salary.
If your wages don’t go up with at least the rate of inflation, there’s an effective paycut every year
Yes, this an important point as well that I forgot to mention
Oh but it does.
It’s just the same rate as being not a hard worker
you never forget the moment someone spells it out for you. i used to work in local newspaper - and it was always a wild goose chase type of thing. You work fast because there is always some shit happening. Then i switched into marketing and started doing copywriting jobs. One day i finished the assignment in like an hour and the lead came to me and shared some wisdom “nah, you need to make some revisions and the revisions are SEND THIS SHIT FIVE HOURS LATER, HAVE SOME DIGNITY”.
You can’t destroy the rainforest. There’s a careful balance to these things, no one benefits from it burning down long term
And more individually - if you can work fast, and you consistently save the day when the chips are down, you’re a magician. They will value you, and excuse any weirdness, because that’s just how magicians are
If you work fast consistently, you’re a workhorse. They’ll depend on you, but they won’t value you. Your successes will be normal, providing less than maximum output will be failure, and for some reason they’ll think you can be easily replaced
The reward for efficient work is more work.
And of course the expectations that you always work that fast.
Oh, and complaints if you don’t work that fast, even if the new task is something completely different and takes more time.
Real. Especially if we assume that reward(salary) usually doesn’t change.
The trick is doing the work quickly but making it seem like it took longer.
This. Right here.
I did that for a while. Then I got bored with loitering around the premises for 8 hours every day. It’s not much of a benefit. There’s only so much time I can spend doomsscrolling before starting to wonder if I’m getting paid enough to waste my life doing that.
The better approach is to ask for more pay. There’s a couple of steps to that.
At the next salary review ask your boss what you need to do to get paid more. Being in a position where it appears as if you’re already strung out on critical tasks isn’t the best setup for asking for more work, so at least have the decency to show some surplus energy. This is how you make sure you’re paid for taking on more tasks.
If they don’t have anything else to offer, you can still ask them why they don’t pay you more for your current tasks. They’ll have no clue, so it’s likely that they’ll come up with something stupid, like “you don’t keep the trashbin empty” or whatever. You can then proceed to empty the fucking trashbin daily and then go ask for more pay. You can plan this move in advance by not emptying the trashbin for a while.
So I know, “we don’t have salary reviews”. Well, duh, of course not. You need to ask for that first, but hear this: Don’t ask for a salary review. Ask them when is the next salary review. This is the question you need to know the answer to for you to evaluate if you even want to spend your life in that place at all.
Holy shit this post is like a neutron star of based
Subscribe.
Seriously, this comment is densely-packed with useful information.
The advantages of home office. Be quick and then just watch videos or play games lol
A Dutch writer coined a verb for that 'epibreren/to epibrate (loose translation).
It means ‘walking around looking busy’ but it sounds like something important, so when asked what you’ve been doing you can answer ‘i was busy epibrating’.
It makes the interlocutor feel like you’ve done something important, yet he’d feel silly about asking what it is exactly what you’ve been doing.
My old job was a bunch of… idiots? Class traitors? Cowards?
Management would make noises about arbitrary deadlines and they’d all be like “we better work late tonight and through the weekend!!”
Did all that work and got nothing for it. Most of them still got laid off. Management still owns the company.
There used to be loyalty in business. Then they realized what a mistake that was.
You owe your employer nothing more than what’s legally agreed upon in your employment contract.
If they ask for more, your response without hesitation should be “fuck you, pay me”.
Don’t do anything for these fucks, for free.
I had a boss who used to tell me “my job is to get the most out of you for the least amount of money”
I used to tell him “you’re paying me $12 hr, you get $12 hr of work out of me.”
When corporate doubled our workload and refused to let us hire more people he started getting up our asses about working harder, because the workload was piling up. I said “well, if the work doesn’t get done you and the other manager have to answer for it, not me, I’m still leaving at 5, figure it out.” My coworker and I were supposed to be doing the work that 5 people were doing at another location, and my coworker stood in solidarity with my open rebellion.
My boss had to do his job plus help me and my coworker with ours to keep corporate off his back :)
That’s nice. Corporate told us we’d need to do overtime every week to justify them employing another person. Our department leader told us to please do it. I just continue to do my contract hours and silently judge them for working too much, knowing their family isn’t happy about it. Instead of unionising and pushing for raises and shorter work hours, they’re letting the company treat them like slaves. I guess they all enjoy wasting their single life kissing the boot?
Most people will avoid confrontation no matter what.
Hierarchical work environments or “employeeism” teach you to not commit to more than what is expected of you - the likelihood of your own engagement being turned against you is always higher than the opposite.
Agile! Or is that scrum…
Yes!!
And if agile is done right, it combines the powers, the worst of all worlds!
You get criticised if you overestimate and if you underestimate so better to overestimate and then just fill out the time with nothing if it turns out to be a 10 minutes fix.
You forgot to add an hour to check and update the documentation
Absolutely!
And also: if the projected path doesn’t work it’s a huge issue (who was wrong?) and bother so instead it’s easier to just work and keep up the ticket front, hence it might be different altogether leading to agile for the sake of agile without any connection to the facts.
Classic. The only reward for good work is more work. Then management is surprised people deliver mediocre work and mediocre effort after they don’t get a raise (again).
Management can only do this, if the mentality of a society is, that workers work against each other rather than with each other. The fear that they easily find someone doing your work better or cheaper.
They don’t. Because if they did, they already would have.And that workers think that they are easy exchangeable, not seeing that onboarding a new guy costs the management efficiency, that what you learn while working makes you more efficient and makes you worth earning more.
Just remember that work sets you free.
Work: freeing you from freedom
I miss our company being small when hard work was rewarded.
Now we’ve got over 50 people and more management layers and it’s just… I’m not being compensated for that effort anymore, so why bother
life is much better with more personal time and less stress! although I do miss some of the overtime pay. easy decision when we’re supposed to be avoiding OT because of the market conditions though
Only do enough work to not get fired. Nothing more, nothing less.
FR.
You don’t get rewarded for good, fast, or high impact work anymore.
Why do it at all them?
Underperform but be nice and hope for a promotion
Always tell managers what they wanna hear, even when it’s bullshit

The image says not viewable in my region! Please be my eyes
Image of Scotty from Star Trek. Caption is saying “Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is only to give them what they need, not what they want.”
Does cutting and pasting work?

It does thank you!
Presumably gotta be a different host. Our instance blocking the UK maybe? Cuz laws
Thank you very kind
It’s because it’s Imgur falling foul of UK’s silly online laws
Oh only checked source of the second comment, never expected Imgur on the first! Thanks :)
I’m very productive but never deliver too early. if i do something too fast i take my timw delivering… I don’t want people to expect much of me
I’m an independent contractor and I honestly don’t have many of the issues I read in this thread. I’m my own boss, deadlines are prescribed by state law, things are pretty nice.
But one thing I don’t do is deliver the work early. That’s a laid service in my line of work; you want it sooner, I’ll work nights and weekends to get it to you, and you’ll pay me extra money. When you start giving work early, people start to expect it, and the same people will always ask for an extra day or two here and there.
One more reason I love working for myself. I got my shit done and dont have to be anywhere else? See you clowns im going to the house
Oh. So you’ve become the enemy.
It’s nice that you outed yourself like that.
I gave my oldest son (12-yo) this talk the other day. Hopefully he took it to heart.
That’s why everyone quit when I quit. Greatest grift I’ve ever pulled. Didn’t help me at all, though.
It’s Tom Servo!!!
The purpose is obviously what benefits them. Don’t you know you exist as a production machine to maximize your bosses profits?
I am always seeking to maximize shareholder value!














