computer use at work, and how many hours do people really work?

[Kaz]

An old manager of mine was fond of saying, "Don't mistake activity for accomplishment." Prloko basically said this.

I also think it is utterly dependent on the job, the reward system, etc. Obviously someone who is spending hours per day on the clock playing games on Facebook or what-have-you can't honestly justify that. But there are hordes of people in the world that equate "working" with either "moving around a lot" or looking like they are stressed out or exhausted. That is simply a mistake to do so. I've been blue-collar for years and white-collar for years and there is plenty of disrespect and griping on both sides to go around, but a clichà blue-collar complaint is that they are "really" working but not getting paid well while the white-collar employees don't "really" work and get lots more money. But the simple fact is that, for instance, an employee that excels at wining-and-dining clients (especially potential clients) simply makes more profit for their company than a random manual laborer at that company does so they get compensated better. Utterly simple, but hordes of people still complain.

In general, anyone whose job mainly consists of thinking can look like they aren't "really" working, and the more rarefied and exemplary that thinker is the less anyone can pin them down on not working because they aren't in a place to judge them. And by definition they are rarer and you can't just get any old person to replace them if you lose them, so they are more valuable and are treated as such, much to the chagrin of some other employees. As a math major, I can honestly say that a professor who lays on his couch staring at the ceiling for months is truly working ! (and if he's not the only people who can call him out on it are his peers because anyone else wouldn't understand his explanation of what he's been "doing" all this time)

I mentioned reward system above. I've worked at places where you hit your ceiling pretty quickly: no position to advance into and close to the maximum compensation you can expect, hitting that point in about 2 years time. At that point, most people quit, but all of the workers I knew who stayed years past that point only had one real goal: make their day as enjoyable as possible. There simply wasn't anything else to do at the place, so people honed their ability to do the 8 hours of work in 7, then 6, then 5, etc. Then the graybeards took it to another level: they still would only work the 5 hours in the 8 allotted, but they could evenly space it out so if anyone dropped in on them it looked like they were in the middle of working (which they technically were) but they could get much more done if they felt like it.