How much do you really work?

I recently became a salaried programmer after a long stint as a self-employed consultant. The change is doing a number on my motivation and output, and I need help understanding the change.

In a word, I was extremely productive as a consultant and I'm far less productive as an employee.

As a consultant I was vividly aware that my income was directly related to short-term productivity. My contracts were usually of a limited duration and renewal hinged on showing clearly outstanding performance. In my particular situation I also had a revenue sharing arrangement. I knew that if a product did well I would receive a cut of that revenue that would directly benefit my bottom line. There was also an odd benefit, hard to pinpoint, arising from the fact that I was largely detached from the employer itself. On a social level this meant that my job was all about the programming, all about the results; nobody was in a position to regret losing me as a friend or comrade; the political game was all but removed.

Before I was a consultant I had worked salaried positions for years and I remember finding that my productivity went up when I went on contract, but I was never quite sure why. Now that I'm back in a salaried role I'm realizing that many of the boons to productivity that came with the contracting arrangement are undermined by full-time employment.

My income is no longer directly related to daily, weekly, or even monthly output. As a salaried employee, having come through an expensive (for the employer) hiring process, I have a certain amount of stickiness in my job. My employer wants to believe I'm doing well. They see me as an investment, a team-member, a potential long-term friend, and so there's less cold scrutiny in how much value I generate each day or week. And evaluating software productivity is hard; a manager's perception of an employee's productivity has a lot to do with personality and sheer trust. Productivity is in the eye of the beholder. The result is that I know that I could "talk a good game" for several weeks, giving reasonably convincing progress reports, without really generating much value, and yet no one would bat an eye. Now if I accomplished nothing substantial for several months, suspicions would eventually rise. But the overall scrutiny of my productivity feels much more abstract and indirect than it did as a contractor.

The odd thing about being salaried is that *supposedly* your job is to serve the company, and yet *really* your job is to maintain a high enough reputation with your boss and peers to maintain your job. There's a level of indirection between the company's goals and the employee's individual goals that serves as fertile ground for deception and laziness. And lest you feel guilty about this, you remind yourself that your income is likewise artificially locked *low*: if your work helps the company make trillions, your bonus, if it comes at all, will be measly by comparison. You're pressured to be loyal to the company and to serve dutifully, yet you know that the company would fire you in an instant, without warning or compensation, if their financial situation got "tight". There is a gross mismatch the Salary Story ("We're all friends working hard to serve the customer for our shared benefit.") and the reality ("We work as much as necessary not to reveal blatant exploitation because only the company will clearly financially benefit from the customers being served.") The whole situation is peculiarly vague and dishonest, and I don't like what it's doing to the relationship with my work.

The Prisoner's Dilemma also puts in a dangerous appearance. Although I feel like I'm not getting much done, when I look around I find I'm not doing any worse than anyone else. This suggests to me that everyone on the team is wasting about as much time as I am. We all get away with it because—well, how are our managers to know? And even if they knew, what leverage could they use to expose our collective laziness and reverse it?

Well, food for thought. But it brings me to a question. If you're a salaried programmer, I'd love to have your thoughts.

How much do salaried programmers actually work? I don't mean "supposedly work" or "seem to work". I mean how many hours out of a given day do you actually do things that your employer wants you to do? And I'm not interested in rants about the wastefulness of meetings vs. actual coding, etc. Sure we all waste time in meetings and such, but our employers want us to. I'm talking about if you're paid to "work" an 8 hour day, how many of those hours do you spend actually working for your employer? Or contrariwise, how many of those hours do you spend emailing, Facebooking, browsing, working on personal projects or curiosities, grabbing coffee, chatting unrelated to work, etc.?

Don't lie. Answer anonymously if it helps. Sure we're all telling ourselves and our peers what we want to hear, but what's the truth?