I’ve held salaried as well as hourly jobs and the expectation of the salaried jobs was that you would work 40 hours a week minimum and you were expected to report your time in hours on a timesheet. If you reported that you only worked 28 hours a week but it’s ok because you finished all the work you were given and have been receiving positive feedback from management about your performance, Accounting got really upset because even salaried employees are treated in the payroll system as hourly workers who bill 40 hours a week to the departments that they work for at an hourly rate of <your yearly salary>/2080 (there being 40 hours in a workweek and 52 weeks in a year). It was set up to not pay you more for 45 hours because an “exempt” flag was set, but it sure as hell wasn’t set up to pay you your weekly salary for just 35 hours. If you didn’t have 40 hours to bill then the rest of the money had to come out of someone’s budget and it was probably going to be your vacation time. If you were really done with everything, you were expected to look for more work or notify a manager and ask, “Please sir, can I have a little more work?”, not hang out and surf the net and drink coffee all afternoon and report all that as work time.
What kind of salaried jobs actually let you do this? Are there really jobs where they really and truly-o don’t care jack over how many hours you work as long as you get the work you were assigned at the beginning of the week (or the day, or the month, or the year, etc.) done and management is really ok with paying a full salary to people who work 8 hours Monday-Wednesday, 9-2 on Thursday and take Friday off because they are salaried employees who got all of their work done and they won’t be getting their new work assignments until Monday?
I work from home and I can set my own hours for the most part. Aside from being readily available during certain hours (and always available to deal with a crisis at any hour), I can spend a lot of the day dicking around and doing nothing productive, once in a while. I still have to get the work done, and while I can occasionally use my skills to make that much easier than it would seem, I still have to produce a full weeks work at some time or another, most of the time. I might produce only half a normal weeks work this week, but then I’ll be making it up with a lot of extra time next week. So in some ways it might appear that I’m not working all that much, but that’s because I just don’t happen to be doing a lot of work during normal working hours.
On the other hand, when I had my own business, at times I had to do very little work. I would be getting paid the same no matter how long it took me, so I was highly motivated to find ways to get the work completed with a minimal investment of my time. This allowed me to occasionally schedule a lot of time for non-work activities. But even then, when you have your own business, you can never get away from the hunt for new business, and keeping your current clients satisfied.
So based on my experience, if you want the most flexibility and freedom with your time, be an experienced systems programmer with an entrepreneurial bent.
My last job [forensic accountant] I had days when I barely had time to go pee, other days when I was stuck watching videos or mining in EVE Online, when I had to run certain reports there wasn’t anything I could do for anything from an hour to most of the day. One lovely day I was stuck all day with nothing to do because they had a small fire in the server room and the computers were down. When all your work is done VPN online, there isn’t anything you really can do. If I had been actually in the office, I could have pulled invoices and looked at them directly.
Strangely enough, I know some Lawyers that do this. Because they bill out hourly, they get the required paperwork done in 2 hours, but still bill the client for 6 hours. Then they take themselves out for lunch on the clients money or just flirt with their legal assistant.
Salesmen and traders who follow daily quotas and little else. But their basic salaries are likely just entry level. If you’re a hot trader, you can meet your quota for the month in just three days. Happy golfing!
I had a job like that once and I hated it! Finally quit after a few months to work at something more challenging. I was hired in the fall and expected to show up every day, was given little or no work to do with the expectation that I would move into high gear in spring when the “busy season” started. I spent my days finding busy work to do to save my sanity.
Manned a desk that had to be open 24 hours a day - I had the 11 pm till 8 am shift. During that time I had one report to run, and had to meet any planes that might come in - otherwise nothing to do.
At my old job, that’s how the project team worked. The team was responsible for implementing mainframe updates, software changes and providing support for those changes for 90 days or so after they were put in. You got the project, you got a target date, you were left alone, depending on who was managing the team. Part of the time I was there, we had a boss that wanted daily updates. He got so many complaints about micro-managing that he was removed and we got a boss who’d check in at around the half-way point and again maybe a month before it was due.
Note that we were all exempt - there was no overtime, no time sheets, no set schedule. We had one person on the team that preferred to work Sat-Wednesday, we had another who preferred to come in a 5 a.m. to beat Chicago traffic. If you wanted to work for home when there were no meetings scheduled, no problem (that changed, though - security concerns about remote access). Some parts of the project were simply reading vendor manuals, listening to sales pitches and cruising the net talking to other businesses running the software you were considering - that could be a short day. After implementation, you were first line support so you were getting people calling at 2 a.m. asking about a system glitch - those could be long days (one birthday I was there 22 hours).
The catch, of course, is you have to be responsible. It wasn’t a job for someone that needed a lot of direction, and blowing a couple of deadlines was enough to get you fired because the impact on the organization was huge. The other trap, which I fell into, is it’s high profile - you work with everyone, you’re seen solving problems, you end up recruited to management. It was more money, but so many more headaches.
I worked in quality control and technical writing for a Windows development shop. We supported field service technicians who used cellular enabled laptops to receive and record their calls and all the back office stuff that went with it (parts and inventory, time and attendance, etc.).
A large part of my day would be setting up test cases on three different laptops (cellular and PC technologies were changing daily, it seemed, in the 90s). Then running stress tests and documenting the quirks and reporting them to the programmers.
At home, one hour set up, six hours sitting around and one hour reporting.
Long boring days.
I’ve talked about my job before here but I’ll mention it again briefly because it fits your criteria. I am on salary and I do not have to report my hours in any way whatsoever.
I am an offshore data analyst, meaning I work on a research vessel. When we are in deployment phase, there is literally maybe only 15 minutes of work to do a day. And I work 12 hour shifts, for 28 days in a row. Then I get 28 days off doing no work whatsoever.
This means that if I get sent out to the boat during a deployment phase, I will be getting paid to keep a seat warm.
During retrieval, processing the data can be very time consuming and you solve lots of problems and it can be somewhat stressful. But even during retrieval I’m still not busy all 12 hours of my shifts, and some days I won’t have much of anything to do at all.
So, why is it that they pay us to come out here and do nothing during those periods? Well… because they can’t just hire people to be out here when they actually need us out here and not pay them to be out here when they don’t need to be out here, because no one would take a job like that.
So, I would say that if you averaged out all the time I work vs just sit and goof off or further my own knowledge on my own, I wouldn’t be surprised if it came out to 75% or more of the time I’m getting paid to work. You have to understand that some of the processing flows I run just take a long time to complete and there isn’t anything to do other than just wait for it to finish and monitor it every once in a while to make sure things aren’t blowing up.
The closest I’ve ever come to this was when I had a job where the parent company was purchased by another company. For about a 4 week period around Christmas, there was literally no work to do, as the higher-ups (who weren’t even on site, they were hundreds of miles away) got all the businessy stuff done. We were in between projects, and other than the occasional bug to fix, there wasn’t much to do. I remember asking my boss “well, what should I do today?” and he said “go get your Christmas shopping done.”
I also remember playing a lot of one of the Caesar games on my work computer. They more or less wanted us to be there, but we could take long lunches and screw around a lot.
Other than that, every salary job I had expected me to work a minimum of 40 hours, and often more.
I’m on hourly now, as a contract worker, and only get paid for what I actually work. Though my paychecks can vary, I prefer it that way - I felt sort of guilty getting paid for not working.
If you get into senior management and get your team running well, this can happen. It won’t be all the time though - you’ll bounce back and forth between a) running smooth and don’t have to do much besides generally keep abreast of the business; b) holy crap, I’ve had 30 hours of meetings this week, and c) there’s some kind of nightmare or reorg or new project and you can kiss your social life goodbye for the next few months.
Try this scenario on for size. I wasn’t on salary, but see if it rings the “didn’t do nothing for hours on end” bell for you:
I’m an analytical chemist. A product can be approved, or shipped once its components are verified analytically. I prepare samples of 198 components in tiny wells in two plates, and I put them into the analytical instrument I set up, and I start it. Each analysis takes 10 minutes. The instrument spits out a result each time. From my office desk, I grab the result, identify it pass/fail, add it to the growing PDF, log the result in the electronic laboratory notebook, and then … spend the next 9 minutes browsing the SDMB. Other people may chat with co-workers, or phone home, or perform another lab task. But some people do feel that any and all computer work is just “playing”, so you have no hope of impressing them in any case.
This is similar to my work. Sometimes we have alot of work and are busy 8 hours a day, sometimes I don’t have enough for my team to do so they sit and surf the net. At the end of the day, or the end of the project, the only important thing is that the job is done and done 100% correctly.
Not all work is equal. I see other teams where the people complain about having to work so hard, never having a break and even doing overtime. I think a lot of their work could be automated or improved so that they didn’t have to work so hard but they aren’t interested in that. They like working 8 their hours a day and then forgetting about it. My team has made the effort to improve our processes so that we always get good results without all the fuss and running around, the reward is that we can relax at work and they don’t have me breathing down their necks all day. I won’t say we only work 2 hours a day but if I had a staff member who worked 8 hours a day and couldn’t get his work done I would rate him far below the guy who did the same job in 2 hours.
I had a job very similar to the job quoted in the OP. I could be done in 2 hours but I had to wait around until 5 to run an evening task (that really could have been done remotely but I needed to be there in case there was a problem which happened exactly once ever). In fact, my manager gave me part of Customer Services’ work to as well which in addition to making me work 3 hours a day taught me a very important lesson in business:
Always look busy. Otherwise you will get other people’s work for no more pay.
I bought a UNIX book and an ANSI-C book and taught myself how to write shell scripts and taught myself C and wrote a database program. Then of course lay-offs happened. I don’t know that it means I’m unambitious although it 20 years later that I’m thinking of getting my Comp Sci degree and work in IT.
“Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can’t see me. After that I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”
-Peter Gibbons, Office Space
There are a lot of corporate jobs like that. Especially in middle management. I mean my job isn’t to sit around writing code all day or cranking out widgets or whatever for 8 hours a day. It’s mostly following up on people and making sure stuff gets done. Like today, my calendar consists of the following:
10:30 am - noon - Town hall webex with the CEO
1:30pm - 2:00pm - Status call with my project stakeholders. I don’t really have a “team” I’m managing. I just facilitate the interactions between various IT groups, sourcing, and our business partner. There’s still a tangible deliverable product, it’s just that each piece is delivered by another department. Sort of like planning a wedding. I’m not baking the cake, cooking the food or mixing the playlist. I’m just making sure the caterers, DJ and wedding reception all are where they should be when they should be there.
2:00pm - 4:00pm - Vendor Workshop - Basically sitting with the software vendor for 2 hours listening to their bullshit as they talk about the software they are implementing for us. In reality, I know all about it already. This is really just their sales and marketing folks trying to get some more face time with me and our management team.
That’s pretty much all I “have” to do today. The rest of my time, I’ll probably spend networking around the office, reading up on CMMI process improvement methodology and maybe get around to learning the R statistical modeling program.
If I wanted to, I could get all the work I have to do done in a couple of hours. I don’t, because (1) I’m a perfectionist, and (2) there’s an awful lot of work I can do which makes us money but doesn’t absolutely have to be done. I’m salaried, but my boss’ practice is small enough that I can clearly see where my pay and the bottom line intesect.