I'll note that even if you are, your not putting in the same quality 40 hours at either job you'd be capable if you were just working a single job. There are plenty of people who think they are capable of this pace, I've yet to meet someone who actually is.

Of course if you have good management in place this is detected via the poor performance rather than needing to worry about butt-in-seat time.

He would go hide into some office in Company A for a couple hours during the work day doing some kind of meeting, hoping that no one would notice him behind the glass walls.

Meanwhile his performance sucked for Company A, and he couldn't handle apparently simple tasks either. The github check-ins were flagged by the firewall, and they summarily let him go as soon as they saw it.

I would not hire him if his resume crossed my path again.

I’m not sure where this idea came from. If you want to do that, sure, go for it. But no one is meant to volunteer for more work than they’re given.

It’s practically a recipe for burnout.

To use your own words, I'm not sure where this idea came from. Any manager will absolutely expect you to tell them when you've completed your assigned tasks. No one wants the employee they have to keep checking in with to make sure they haven't completed their current assignment and are now sitting around staring at their cubicle wall instead of telling anyone.

If you complete it sooner, your estimates were off. It’s fine to slow down if you sense you don’t need to work quite as hard as you thought to meet your deadlines.

In general, estimation is a system of shared deadlines. If you give your manager the ability to think of you as always meeting your deadlines, I guarantee they’ll be happy.

Sure, as long as they never find out that you've been padding your estimates or that the project everyone thought was going to take a week turned out to be much simpler than anticipated and you got in done on Monday and just played video games the rest of the week they'll be happy. There's even plenty of bad management out there, so in some places this might hold true for a long period of time (even a career!), but it's not because that's what your employer expected you to do, or what they think they are paying you for. And a good manager is going to figure out pretty quick when the end result of your 1-week tasks is a two line PR that's something is fishy.

* Disclaimer: I have absolutely had the tasks the boiled down to two lines, but finding the right two lines took a week. A good manager is going to have sufficient understanding of the work to tell the difference.

I don't think employees believe it either. After all, I notice your not asserting that you wrap up your work for the sprint, then tell your manager your knocking off for the next week since your work is done. If the expectation is just that you get your assigned work done, why wouldn't you? Why would you instead keep your manager in the dark?

Because you're already providing enough value to justify your wage even with padded estimates and slacking off (otherwise your manager wouldn't have been happy to begin with). They just want to get more out of you via the expectation of "reasonable best effort".

In other words, your 50% effort was already good enough to provide the company the value it needed (was willing to pay for), but some managers feel entitled to 100% if you demonstrate that capacity to them. So just don't.

And the reality is that many places don't genuinely need people's best. What they actually need is "good enough", and that's already reflected in the wage via profitable business outcomes that role contributes to. Time and effort have nothing to do with it.

That's absurd, unless it's accompanied with a raise. If the employer is content with the worker's output, why should the worker volunteer to perform more work without additional compensation?

There’s nothing wrong with taking a contractor mentality to a full time gig. In fact, it’s one definition of professionalism.

It’s interesting we came to different conclusions on this one — I think there’s something here worth comparing notes on, but I’m not quite sure what it is. In my experience, working a consistent 7 hours every day will quite rapidly burn me out.

I think it’s the definition we’re using for “work.” When I work, I work hard, and I dedicate my entire mental focus on the task. Doing that for seven hours straight sometimes feels like a small marathon in itself. Perhaps you’re just more effective.

“Hey, I pay you to work on my team and build something with the team” is a much healthier and happier system. It also gives people agency about how to tackle problems and the ability to propose work or even experiment. The alternative is a joyless factory line.

If youre not keeping yourself busy, it becomes pretty obvious, very quickly.