This however, is probably not the case.

The common case is that due to lack of proper oversight and bloat, people just coast and do nothing.

It's incredibly hard to have 'true oversight' in software, which frankly is 'just fine' if everyone does their jobs properly.

But if the cost of 'little oversight' is that slowly but surely 'nobody is doing anything', it's not going to work out now, is it?

It's also a moral dilemma.

That's obviously for the company to judge. If they continue to pay him and promote him, why is the takeaway that he is committing fraud by not working an arbitrary 40 hours a week?

That's right profit. They provided me the thing I wanted for a price I agreed to, and they did so in a way that generated some extra $ for them.

Why is it Fraud then when a worker is asked to provide KPIs in exchange for $salary, and meets them in less than the expected time? Wouldn't that be profit also?

The OP indicated lying literally in the title indicating there is a lack of transparency and oversight, probably at a systematic level.

So adjust the analogy:

You are buying 'Medical Grade' widgets for $100 a pop for the last 5 years for your projects.

Turns out, the Widgets you were buying were cheaply made and not up to specification.

Because it's difficult for you to check the integrity of the widgets (i.e. there is a lot of trust in the system), you 'trusted' the source only to be defrauded.

And FYI even at $100 a pop, I'm sure you could care less how much or little profit they were making, so long as the terms were clear. Much like nobody cares if an employee is only working 2 hours a week, if everyone thinks that value is provided.

But that's almost assuredly not the case.

The problem arises when there's little ability for oversight, which implies a high degree of trust in the system and the mechanism for verification can't be there.

Put another way:

If someone pays you $50 to fill their tires up with air, it's Fraud if you don't do it - irrespective of your customer's ability or willingness to verify.

If your customer was busy on the phone, or with their children, would it be 'Perfect Contractually Acceptable' to not fill their tires up with air 'Because You Can?'?

Either legally or morally - no - it's fraud.

Fortunately, most tasks involve a kind of implicit oversight - i.e. 'you know when your tires were not filled'.

In software, the mechanisms for oversight aren't so great - but that should be fine with all of us to the extent that we're professionals - we don't want Management breathing down our necks anyhow. But the inherent level of trust implies a higher degree of professional competence on the part of all of us.

FYI - this is assuming that there is a problem with oversight. If the OP is doing some 'genius 2 hours a week', the company knows it, is fine paying $150K for that bit of work, that's totally fine.

It's disturbing that this is even a discussion.

Look, i’m not saying it is a valuable way of looking at productivity at all, but the fraud aspect is reasonably clear.

So if it states 40 hours, you put in 40 hours. If you do nothing during those 40 hours, we can have a moral/ethics discussion about if and how you should change the situation etc, but at that point we’re outside of the fraud scenario in my opinion.

I will say from experience that someone who does 10 hours of good, productive work a week is still adding more value to the company than someone who works 80 but writes terrible code, ships bugs and causes outages. If you want to accuse someone of fraud for not being valuable, go after the latter.

In my experience in Europe, an employment contract will state number of hours (say 36, 40, etc) and you need to be present and available for that time. These are non-hourly contracts (e.g. salary is expressed by month not hour). None of that has anything to do with productivity, to your/mine point.

At-will cuts a lot harder both ways when it's remote work ;)

When payment is made for services not rendered, it's Fraud.

If the employer has expectations that the employee 'does nothing' then it's fine, but that's almost assuredly not the case.

This posture is not only toxic, but it's also unjust will spread into much greater malaise as others take up the mantle of 'doing nothing'.

Literally a colleague I had over for dinner last night left his job, and the primary reason was 'many of my higher paid colleagues are not doing anything'.

I'm not sure if he was more frustrated or jealous, and there were other issues, but he left just the same.

There's literally no fraud here for a typical American FTE at-will employment arrangement. The worst-case scenario is getting fired from the job with no additional repercussions.

Surely if this was actual Fraud he should be filling a police report or lawsuit?

Surely the all-knowing free market should punish companies that pay people to do nothing with its3 all powerfull invisible hand?

There's a difference between how effective the OP is at being a team player/contributor, and a worm who tries climbing the social ladder with as little risk to his/her self which I believe you allude to. It seems to me the OP is not the ambitious type and found his place in the industrial matrix.

> Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value

If the employers in question felt that they weren't getting what they were paying for, they would tell the original poster that they were performing below expectations. According to the original poster, that has not happened, and their employers have never expressed dissatisfaction with their productivity.

> This is unreasonable populism: "Pay me, trust me, but I'm going to do nothing, and if you lay me off over Zoom, you're going to see it on CNN!"

Nobody's "doing nothing"; as established above, the employee in question is doing more than enough work to satisfy their employers. What does "you're going to see it on CNN" mean — are you talking about "cancel culture"? How is populism involved with this, and what on Earth do you think populism is if you think that your bizarre strawman is representative of it?

I'm not one to argue that politics should be considered as separate from our personal lives, but you're throwing around emotionally- and politically-loaded ideas like populism, cancel culture, and "white collar first-world corruption" in a discussion where they bear no relevance.

Dear lord, is this The 'first world corruption'? With corporate profits at record high? Amidst *checks lists' rampant corporate tax avoidance, runaway climate change, balooning executive pay, unaccountable executives who's create Boeing Max or 2008-style events every few years Money in politics Survaliance capitalism, exploding house prices, (add whatever else bothers you)

Is this really the corruption that will destory the first world way of life?

Taking time from people with expectation of opportunity to build career by building things, while not providing that opportunity to build career by building things is Fraud.

fixed it for you. j/k

this is not constructive. if i join a company and their internal dysfunction gets in the way of me getting projects done that further my career and that comes at a steep opportunity cost, that doesn't mean they defrauded me (even though it may feel good to think that when letting off steam), it just means it didn't work out.

name-calling and accusations of bad faith don't really serve anyone in the end.

This is some serious gaslighting.

Dysfunction is normal. Teams that are unproductive because of problems, i.e. 'the vehicle is stuck in the mud' are expected. To the extent the problem is known, there's at least some attempt to redress the issue, then obviously people are going to be aware of the lack of productivity, and it is what it is - these things happen.

And it's understandable if someone doesn't want to stick around, that's a legit reason to move on.

But that's a very different thing than people who are expected to do things - who do not do them because they can obfuscate and lie about their situation.

"name-calling and accusations of bad faith don't really serve anyone in the end."

Fraud is Fraud. It's not 'name calling'.

The OP has put lying about how much he does literally in the title of the post.

It's not 'bad faith' to indicate that his lying is inappropriate, and it's frankly repulsive the lengths that people seem willing to go to support someone who wants to admittedly lie about their work and get away with it.

it reads to me like the op is doing some introspection and making use of self-deprecating hyperbole in the process while looking to recruit thoughts from others about general trends in the industry.

if i were to make the same sorts of bad faith assumptions that you are, i could come back with a very simple:

"what if this whole posting is just astroturf for someone looking to make a quick buck by instilling productivity fears in insecure leaders so that they may sell more remote worker monitoring creepware?"

but i don't honestly believe that, because assumptions of bad faith, straw man arguments and gotcha style microquoting are not constructive.

Taking money from people with expectation of value, while not providing that value is Fraud.

Woaaah there buddy!

Did you read the all of the OP's post? He's never been fired and gets middling to good performance reviews. Continuing to pay his salary implies that the company it's getting a fair deal. This is obviously not fraud in any legal sense.

Characterizing this dynamic as "White Collar corruption" is a totally warped, an in my view, offensive. If there is any corruption in this scenario, it's on the side of the employer. If the OP's situation is widespread within the company, failing to recognize and remedy it could very well be a breach of fiduciary duty owed to the shareholders. Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty positive that ignorance or incompetence is not a legally valid excuse.

In my view, the real issue here is that salaried employees are almost never compensated in proportion to actual value that they generate. A flat rate arrangement, assuming no significant bonuses, results in a zero-sum game with diametrically opposed incentives for the two parties. The employer maximizes value by trying to as much work as possible from the employee. And the employee maximizes his hourly rate by working as little as possible, with the ultimate goal of infinte dollars per hour at 0 hours worked.

The incentives become perfectly aligned if the pay is based on some objective measure of generated value. Moreover, I would would argue that it would be fairly straightforward to come up with a logical metric for every single position within a company that generates revenue. These can be proxies instead trying to estimate revenue growth or cost reduction to every single employee. Moreover, the dollars tied to a given position's reward metric would be subject to market rates the same way that salaries are today.

TL;DR - Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Yes and he clearly indicated he's lying about issues.

There's likely a major gap between what the company wants/thinks he is doing, and what he is actually doing, and this is facilitated by his misdirection (i.e. admitted lying), and probably the political incompetence of the situation overall.

One one hand - it's fraudulent to misrepresent your work.

On the other hard - it's still fraudulent even if the company is not able to properly assess the work.

I agree that it's likely not some kind of legal issue - that's not the point really, but it's still a form of fraud.

If you agree to provide a service and due to your customers inherent trust, and their inability to do proper oversight, you still need to provide that service.

But what is offensive is the Peanut Galleries Commenters acceptance of a person who is admittedly lying and misrepresenting themselves as somehow 'not a problem'.

It's shameful for someone to lie, misrepresent and take advantage of another group.

What is 'warped' is this bizarre gaslighting of the employer for somehow 'being corrupt' because they are being lied to by an employee?

In what upside down universe does an employee lying about their work make the employer corrupt?

"the real issue here is that salaried employees are almost never compensated in proportion to actual value that they generate"

That's mostly separate question.

"A flat rate arrangement, assuming no significant bonuses, results in a zero-sum game with diametrically opposed incentives for the two parties. T"

This is wrong, 90% of the world is paid for their time, that doesn't make incentives 'opposed'. They are aligned, just maybe not perfectly.

"The incentives become perfectly aligned if the pay is based on some objective measure of generated value. Moreover, I would would argue that it would be fairly straightforward to come up with a logical metric for every single position within a company that generates revenue. "

I'm going to gather you're new to this, and have never hired people, set salaries or worked on a large team?

The situation that the OP is in is common - precisely because measuring value and oversight is actually really hard, especially in software.

It's a bit glib to suggest that somone could come up with some magic metric relate to profit that aligned incentive, it's the Holy Grail of HR. There's too much ambiguity in the system.

"TL;DR - Don't hate the player, hate the game. "

Players that cheat, either employers or employees should be called out.

Having some reasonable degree of professional standards, which include trust (on all sides), is what makes the system work, along with intelligent management and oversight etc..