A lot of companies, especially smaller ones (like mine) will have a clause like that not to be jerks, but to protect themselves. We have a clause like this in o

A lot of companies, especially smaller ones (like mine) will have a clause like that not to be jerks, but to protect themselves. We have a clause like this in our contract. Do I care if our devs spend time on Facebook, or whatever? Not really - I am interested in their output and productivity, and however they are comfortable in producing their output is fine by me. I did have an administrative employee recently that spent all her time on Facebook, and didn't produce any useful output at all, and clearly had to be let go - we tried to work with her to improve, but she just didn't care. Under the employment laws of the country where we operate, it is very hard to fire somebody. Performance related dismissals take forever, and are very expensive in terms of administrative, legal and opportunity costs. Larger companies can probably afford that, but small companies like ours cannot. Our choices are simple: Either spend a lot of time, money and effort in trying to get the person fired on the basis of insufficient performance, where the outcome isn't certain, and where we likely have to end up paying a few more months salary even if we are successful, or pull her up for provably excessive use of company computers during work time for private purposes, and fire her on the spot. Does that make us jerks? I don't think so.