Only if you actually just browse baseball scores and play snake. Think about what kind of open source contributions you could make in this job.

> Think about what kind of open source contributions you could make in this job

Probably nothing important due to copyright issues, company time + company resources means the company owns the work.

I do wonder if this is the origin of a lot of fun projects like "HN command line client" though.

Not "nothing important", but nothing at all. All my work contracts around here clearly stated that what you write in your worktime is the company's intellectual property.

It doesn't matter that you are not writing a thing.

Ok, but that's a loyal employee's perspective.

If you're doing it on your private machine over which you have full control then how can anyone prove it was done during work hours?

Yes, that's possible, it still feels bad though (not to mention that most of the time sysadmins can still access my not exactly private machine) - why not work at a company that values me as a resource?

I can sit bored (with a couple of hours worth tracking in the timesheet software) for a month or two, but then I usually start looking for something interesting.

You're missing the point. If the rogue employee is already taking advantage, what's to stop them from doing so in a manner that also defrauds the company of any proof of ownership over a pet project?

Dude was a manager who reported to nobody. Pretty easy to authorize yourself to release your work.

And soul crushing.

Only if you let your soul be immovably coupled to a fragile and exogenous variable like your job.

You are sitting on your ass (conidering you are a dev) for eight friggin hours. If you include commuting, lunch break and the time you sleep, this is more time than you can spend with your family, hobbies, recreation etc.

You don't need to like or "couple your soul" to your job, it's part of your life and life shouldn't suck because there is a very good chance that there isn't another one.

If your soul isn’t in some sense coupled to the thing you spend most of your time doing, I simply do not understand what you tie your identity to...

If you have no scruples about getting free money, you can use the time to do whatever the heck you want. If you want to feel like you earned the money or you're not allowed to do anything outside of your scope, then yes, it's probably soul crushing.

I don't think the company would be able to take knowledge out of my head, though. Paid, uninterrupted training for anything I want? Sign me up!

I was thinking about this - going down to a random employee and over a couple weeks trying to get them to let me help them out with their job. Learning over a couple weeks the practical principles of say 3d modelling, Marketing, etc. Sounds like something I would be down for. I guess at the end of it you'd end up being relatively popular in the office too if you occasionally help out where teams are struggling.