Something I've thought about is, how do you quantify work? What are the units of measure? Joules? JIRA tasks? Hours?

The problem is, that it's really hard to figure out. The only answer that seems to make sense is that work is measured in the same way that other kinds of value are measured: In dollars. The value of a dollar's worth of work is one dollar.

Or it could be measured according to the value added per unit of factor input, which in an efficient labor market, is equal to your salary. But we don't live in an efficient market, and nobody has a foolproof way to measure your work.

So your boss measures your work by the extent that you seem to be fully occupied. It's not a great measure, but is something that he can at least wrap his head around, and more or less keep track of.

TLDR: I don't have a good answer to this puzzle.

At my day job, my own productivity comes in bursts, and so I would also be in a predicament if my boss noticed that I was idle a lot of the time.

We already have a lot of very comprehensive understandings of what work is. It's labor that produces capital. The workers doing so should be owning that capital.

Hey, it's high-school again! :)

For some magical reason, I stopped being a disruptive student when I moved to a school where the approach was that if I finished my work I could read a book, rather than being given more work...

Ideally, a manager will see that you worked more efficiently and give you a raise in return for giving you more work.

It's not so much punishment, as the employer is trying to increase profit by maximizing their employee's throughput.

My point is: whats in it for the employee if that throughput increase takes more energy/effort on the employees part?

I usually hear that you get rewarded with more responsibility and such, but the increase in responsibility is rarely matched with a fair increase in compensation given that more responsibility usually means some combination of greater workload, more effort, longer hours, more stress.

I would see it this way: I would offer to give that person more responsibility and more and perhaps more complex work. He could decide to perform as before and keep browsing reddit but if they choose to take more work that's likely the best path upward in the organization. Eventually the one who chooses no. 2 gets a promotion and gets paid more.

I hear this argument often but I wonder in which percentage of cases the extra work actually translates into a net benefit for the employee. Promotions are linked to how you are perceived, and this is turn linked to factors that do not necessarily include the amount of work you put in.

I think extra work and productivity translating into reward is one of the best indicators that you are in a good company.

If you see work* as punishment, I wouldn't want you working for me anyway. Bye.

*assuming you're being paid a decent wage and we're not talking about work being done to extraordinarily tight deadlines for no reason, in unusually poor working conditions, or something like that.

You can't retain the best workers with that attitude. Most workers don't see work as punishment but the time it takes is an impediment to other aspects of their lives that generate more personal value that their job.

If you take a worker who operates efficiently to increase their own personal time and increase their workload without providing some offsetting "carrot." The worker has two rational responses in a liquid employment market:

1) Reduce their efficiency to median company levels and only use their efficiency "secretly." Congratulations, you've broken their spirit!

2) Find another job because they're an above average employee.

I would argue they 1) leads to lower performance over time due to its demoralising effect and stress.

It was a rhetorical question to make you think. In reality, if I finish my task, I take a new task from the task list.

My point is just that there's no real incentive to work more efficiently (eg by automating or by smartly planning ahead) and my employer is happy as long as I stay ahead of milestones and generally work well, and its somewhat demoralising knowing that there's an infinite stream of work and no matter how hard I push myself, this doesn't get smaller, I don't get to leave earlier etc. This can be especially frustrating when other people on my team who are being compensated roughly the same as me are not pushing as hard. Why should I?

(In case someone who knows me is reading: this isn't actually the case, I'm asking hypothetically for the sake of this discussion)