As a practical matter, there are no legal jobs-not if you want to get paid-with “unlimited” time off.
But if you know of one-please supply specifics as to firm/company name, address, HR chief,etc as I-and doubtless thousands of others-would be happy to apply.
I don’t know specifically about legal, but there are many types of jobs that are on paper 40 hours, but most employees only are productive for a small fraction of that time. For example, the Reddit thread at Reddit - Dive into anything asks posters how much work they actually do in an average day? The median and modal value was 3-5 hours. The first and highest voted response reads as follows. If you have ~20 productive hours per job, it becomes more practical to hold down to 2 jobs.
I work from home, this is specifically why I value working from home so much more. 99% of people I work with probably only worked 20 hours a week or less. Why waste that in an office or on the road? Working from home allows me not only to use my free time more efficiently, but it also allows me to work those few hours a day whenever I feel like (for the most part).
Ironically, at all my past jobs, I was considered one of the best employees.
A related clip from Office Space is below:
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In many jobs, the value of your contributions is more important than the actual hours. For example, a super CS programmer may be able to crank out working code in a fraction of the time relative to a more typical programmer. While one could argue that they should just outperform everyone else in the group, that may cause issues with the rest of the team. The benefit of far outperforming your peers can be limited when it comes to team projects and overall team dynamics.
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I’d rather enjoy more of life than work two full time jobs. I’m glad we live in an area where we can financially do that.
Obviously I fail miserably on the “workaholic” scale.
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You do realize that Office Space was a comedic satire?
Office Space is my family’s mantra. It may be satire, but it’s not satirizing Peter’s point of view; more like celebrating it.
One of things that makes it a great comedic satire, is it takes elements of real life that people can relate to, then pushes them to extreme levels. One example is being productive for only small portion of the work day. I expect most tech employees would be productive more than 15 minutes per week, like Peter’s comments, but many would have productive hours similar to the linked Reddit survey with a good portion of pre-COVID office time spent surfing the Internet, texting friends, chatting with co-workers, etc.
I think I would be able to do something similar. I have been working at a high-end job in programming for almost a year now.
I’m in the tech industry as well with a Fortune 200 company and currently have true unlimited time off. In practice people tend to take around 3-4 weeks a year, and maybe a bigger, longer trip once in a while. With covid I haven’t taken any big vacations, but I usually add a couple days or a week here and there around holidays. Currently thinking about taking a few days in Nov to catch the Banksy exhibit in the SF, in fact. Unlimited PTO is nice for allowing those slightly frivolous random short breaks.
I had 5 weeks annual PTO at my previous employer, which was essentially unlimited as I never managed to take more than 3-4 weeks each year.
I did get an offer at a 40 person startup last year that also offered unlimited PTO. At a fast-growing company that small I’d expect to be on call for urgent stuff while out of office, though. That’s just par for the course at startups and everyone should know that going in.
At my current company everyone tries really hard never to disturb anyone on PTO, as they in turn would like not to be bugged while on the beach. But we have the headcount to fill in the gaps, that being the major difference vs a startup.
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Senior mgmt, at the company I work for, all have 2nd and 3rd jobs. Wedding photographer, llama farm, professional witness, boards of directors, horse breeder (a natural 2nd job for a pharmacist exec). All took Covid aid for their businesses despite being employed full time.
So, I think this article could have looked at the situation a number of ways but really created the story to get an emotional response.
And people who sell surveillance tech or employers who want to use it can point to it to justify their orwellian decisions:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/remote-work-from-home-surveillance/
Gotta ask. What’s this job? Sounds rather illegal.
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This isn’t surprising, a number of people that WFH have long put in fewer hours than us drones in the office. I once worked for a megaCorp that allowed some people to WFH, one fringe benefit being they were never around when managers had casual requests that would take a couple of hours or a few days to finish. One guy I worked with always got his assigned work done but whenever you called him he just so happened to have “stepped away”. Every single time. He’d be grocery shopping, at Home Depot, driving somewhere, etc. He was drawing a fulltime salary and benefits but effectively working as an on-call consultant, maybe 10 or so actual work hours per week. Often less. Didn’t really feel fair.
Now that working at home has become the standard it isn’t surprising that people take advantage of it to double their income as long as they can.
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Sounds like someone who provides opinions as an expert witness in court, for example, about the meaning of a term such as “DNA” or “photocopier.” 
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Ok, that would make sense. My mind envisioned someone who could be bought to say they saw whatever you wanted them to see.
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I think the answer depends. At this point, if I have a day when I am totally crushed with work to get done, I am better off at home. Far fewer distractions at home (just me and the dog and she pretty much sleeps all day). I can put in more hours in the office but in terms of work that gone done, I get more done at home per hour. And that isn’t even including time lost to commuting.
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There are businesses that are professional witnesses, often with doctors or engineers as the expert witnesses. The law firms hire them to review the evidence and then testify. Some no longer practice and just do this service.
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The head of our engineering firm is called as an expert witness sometimes. The rates we get to invoice at for his time are very lucrative!
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I definitely have been putting in more hours WFH than in the office. People can always see when I am online - busy, available, on a call, etc. They text me, both online and on my phone.
I am in a meeting from 7 or 8 am to at least 5. I do real work after that.
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H gets to be an expert witness at times too. I just never thought about that and “professional witness” being the same thing. I think I watch too many crime shows/movies. 
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