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Nah, you're making things. That so doesn't count.
You may not have the slightest idea how far the depths of pointlessness can go. I have witnessed entire departments, nay, entire building floors, paid to pass around information that was completely useless to anybody.
And that's the best case scenario, some people's job is actually to actively make everybody else less productive. As sometimes required by law.
If you're actually producing anything concrete that isn't just emails and meetings where no decision that affects the bottom line is taken, you are far, far away from what the essence of the fake email job. Self doubt about the purpose of what you're doing notwithstanding.
Passing around information is what software engineers do. And more importantly, I'm under no impression that the value of my work is correlated to how long I work is correlated to how much I get paid. And yet it would be trivial accounting-wise to turn me into an hourly instead of salaried worker, and the same is true for the rest of the bullshit-email-job cadre. The business doesn't even need to pay me any more money on net; in fact they could pay me less and it would still be worth it looking at total post-tax compensation.
This kind of job is hard to fit in an hourly scheme, though. Do I go submit my time card with the random times I spent solving problems in my head while showering, walking my dog, etc.?
And if so, how do we prevent trivially easy abuses?
Maybe lawyers can provide an example? ChatGPT tells me they don’t typically bill for time spent purely in thought, but rather only for time spent drafting briefs, meeting clients, etc.
But for software engineers the time spent actually writing code is typically dwarfed by the time spent deciding what you actually need to write. This is how you can have an immensely productive hunt and peck typist on staff. WPM is not the bottleneck.
We bill for time thinking.
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This is a solved problem. If you're getting paid hourly and there's no good way to discriminate non-work time from work-time you just claim as much time as you think your bosses and a court of law would let you get away with because that's what you're incentivized to do. If they can't accurately correlate your level of output to your hours worked that's a them problem.
You don't. Abuse is the point. There's no possible way to segregate between "legitimate" hourly work and "illegitimate" hourly work without massively expanding the regulatory state... which of course would lead to regulatory capture that would favor all the people favored by the current system anyways.
"No tax on overtime" is transparently the sort of populist bullshit that succeeds as messaging but is is totally unworkable as a policy proposal. It's a way for trump to tell blue-collar workers that he's their guy without having to actually promise workable policy. When he tries to pass this and it fails his base will blame congress instead of him, and then content themselves despite a complete lack of further advancement. Just like his "build the wall" spiel.
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I have known a few white collar engineering types who have told me they're paid (well) hourly. I assume it's just a bookkeeping thing, but I believe they may have been in states that mandate overtime hourly pay anyway. I don't think it'd take a huge incentive to make that more universal.
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