> What’s not okay is signing up to a company as an employee

Oh no, someone dared to lie to a business, the horror! Only the reverse is acceptable.

You should not do this because you haven't found a unicorn that is both cheap and worthy of entrusting with your reputation. If you find such a magical unicorn, you should absolutely do this and nobody will notice since the unicorn is upholding your standards.

How much of a "unicorn" this is depends on your own reputation, the work quality you're expected to do, and so on. If you're that stupid to hand over credentials to a bottom-of-the-barrel gig worker website, you would've lost those credentials in the next phishing campaign anyway, so the outcome for the company isn't any different - they made a stupid hire (whether said stupidity is done by the employee or the subcontractor is of little consolation).

> pushing the limits of how much you can get away with

Again that's literally what every company does - with raising prices, reducing quality (doing their own outsourcing - which this place considers ok because the boss is pocketing the margin) all the time. Every A/B test is a test of how much they can get away with.

But again we seem to have this double-standard where businesses are given leeway (and even applauded for) for a lot of noxious behavior while individuals are punished. Of course businesses have an outsized ability to control the narrative so no surprise there.

> They’re generally not!

A company is never happy though. In their ideal desires you would work 24/7 for zero pay, and even then they would not be happy that you are human and physically limited in how much output you can produce.

I've seen all the behaviors you mention in people that are working in the office - and worse, some are actually working, but so bad at it it would be better if they were actually slacking off; at least they'd enjoy themselves.

> your job is only temporary anyway

In tech it kind of is though? See layoffs and such.

Again I'm not defending the practice and I'm the first one to loathe the enshittification of everything. But if shit behavior appears to be profitable and the local maximum the market has settled on, I don't think it's fair for individuals to be held at different standards.

Not who you were just speaking with, but I’ve never agreed with the emotional side of a comment so much whilst disagreeing with the actionable choices side so much.

In reality, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. I would draw the line before outsourcing my own job, but I’ve definitely sandbagged my own productivity after being poorly treated by a company in the past and still have no regrets about it.

If you’re looking for common ground with who you’re speaking with rather than trying to make your point so firmly, I think you’d also agree there is a level of meeting in the middle that is totally reasonable in how hard you should push such things, depending on who you work for and how they treat you.

> Oh no, someone dared to lie to a business, the horror! Only the reverse is acceptable.

I never said businesses lying to employees is acceptable. You seem to be arguing something else that I haven’t written: General class war content where everything is viewed through the lens of business versus employees, and since businesses are bad then anything employees do is fair game.

The reason I know so much about Tim Ferriss’ remote work garbage isn’t because I was on the business side of your simplified view. I was a coworker of someone trying to practice these techniques.

The fatal flaw in your line of logic is that it can only view interactions as 1:1 between employee and the business. What you’re missing is that these workplace games punish the team members most of all. When you’re on a team of 3-4 people and 1 of them is gallivanting around the world, responding to messages once a day if you’re lucky, and submitting PRs produced by the cheapest overseas “assistant” they can find (modern version being ChatGPT, obviously) then you start to realize the problem: When the team has an assignment and one person is playing games instead of doing work, the rest of the team has to do more work.

It’s outsourcing your work to your teammates, basically.

The obvious rebuttal is that managers need to stop this, and they do. It takes time, though. At some companies it takes 6-12 months to build a case to fire someone. The Tim Ferriss book also has defensive advice about working extra hard to impress your boss and taking steps to avoid having your lack of work discovered by your boss. Notably absent is content about being respectful of your coworkers.

So before you jump in and defend everything any employee might do to be selfish, remember that it’s not just the company they’re extracting from. It’s their coworkers. And being on the receiving end of this behavior as a coworker sucks.