> The thing I always heard is that if you are any hourly worker you are paid for your time. If you are a salaried worker you are paid to get the job done regard

> The thing I always heard is that if you are any hourly worker you are paid for your time. If you are a salaried worker you are paid to get the job done regardless of how much time it takes. Right, but this isn't some law of nature. It's something that some people have decided. So we can ask what are the consequences of this belief? What are the ways in which it can be abused? Who does it benefit? For a limiting case, consider a job that needs to be done by the end of the day. No one on Earth can do it in less than 25 hours. Is it reasonable to expect the work to be done in a day? In reality, the issue is that no one is exactly sure how long knowledge work will take, so employers and managers will tend to push for more work to be done in less time, and employees can't definitively say "no, that's unreasonable / impossible." The problem with this mentality is that it doesn't sufficiently penalize managers for being bad at project management. If I'm your manager, I can do a terrible job of managing you, the project, and/or the company but I still have this fantastic way out -- I can just demand that you do what's necessary to make it work. This is a huge moral hazard, and a broken feed-back loop. It's endemic in software and small owner-run companies.