Except that they also take advantage of the flexibility of agile. If a story is pointed for 2 days and it takes 3 it's better to take that as a missed estimate than a developer not producing as much as they should. Hammering them because they let a deadline slip leads to all sorts of bad things. But, again, even as a fellow team member I can't tell if they worked for 2 days and fucked off for one or it legitimately just took longer than expected.

And "results are there" is just hand waving away the problem. Nobody can measure developer results in any sort of systematic fashion. If you've got a way then by all means share with the world.

Time does matter because the agreement between companies and workers is money for time/effort. I'm not giving back salary if my project flops and they're not giving me (much) more money if it makes the company millions.

When people were in the office, were you able to tell the difference between someone staring blankly at a screen vs actually doing work for six hours?

I'd think so, but either way staring blankly at a screen for six hours a day is way worse than writing code. A much smaller temptation than all the entertainment options in your house and abound.

I think for most people, procrastination isn't actually about doing the more fun option.

To me this reads as wanting to crunch developers out of more value than one is paying them.

Expecting people to pay attention during meetings and not be a ghost during a day is crunching developers? Give me a break. We're all highly paid professionals. It's not unreasonable to be expected to act like it.

I swear the entitlement in this industry is off charts.

Yeah I really doubt many people here would be happy about being grilled constantly about their output. I'd rather work in a high trust environment, but this requires actually having trust which is pretty hard remote.

Our solution here to quickly manage out the folks who don’t build trust. Using a simple “yes/maybe/no” framework and have maybe converge with no in a month, you quickly get to a team with high trust.

This is an interesting problem. The counter problem is how do we avoid companies making too much profit? Because that is free money the company got lazily without the shareholders working extra hours.

Contractors get to set their hours. Employees are expected to be performing services for their employers for a minimum of 30 hours per week: https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin....

If you're signed into Teams but playing a game or watching a movie, it could probably be challenged in court whether you're performing a service for your employer.

Ever read "Thinking fast and slow"? You can more effectively problem-solve when not actively trying to solve them, so it seems completely reasonable to me to distract your conscious mind while pondering a problem.