If you’re hitting all the metrics your employer is using to evaluate your performance, not missing deadlines, your employer is happy, and you’re working from home on a different computer than the one you use for WoW? Then sure, you can probably get away with it, but if the answer to any of those is no you’ll probably get caught and if they find out exactly what you’re doing you’ll almost certainly get in trouble.
Think of it like this:
By capitalism’s very nature, you are not paid what you are worth. Your employer cannot pay you what you are worth because then they wouldn’t profit off of you.
If you were paid exactly the value you bring your employer, they are breaking even on you, and therefore needn’t even keep you employed. If you were paid more than the value you bring your employer, they definitely would sack you.
So play WoW on company time. Steal pens and paper. Check your personal email. And all that jazz. Because I promise you that they’ve already stolen wages they owe you.
Just don’t get caught.
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This is maybe the last thing you should do.
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I am hourly and play while I’m working. I work on a Surface, and in downtime (I am doing online helpdesk stuff right now, waiting for chats) I move between mount farms and chat in LFG on my desktop. I only do passive gameplay like this, no dungeons or anything.
They might consider lowering your salary or not renewing your contract if you have one.
This right here. We don’t owe them a gd second of our time. Do what you can to take back what they steal from you daily.
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True. I feel this so much it is not even funny. Of course every company pays as low as possible. They pay so low they risk people leaving for other jobs, but don’t care because you worked for them at such a low price.
Screw it. I will proudly play wow once my work is completed for the day and continue to not feel bad about it.
I complete all my assigned duties AND more that aren’t anywhere near my job description or what I was hired for.
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I like being able to pay bills so I object to stupid risks.
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I mean, people that have true value in any job market don’t have to worry though. Even if laid off I would never be without work for more than a month or so of active searching. Nurses and Accountants, permanent job opportunities in almost ANY city, regardless the climate.
Salary has nothing to do with hours. You are paid to get a certain amount of workload done.
Hours are completely irrelevant.
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I would never try to do something like that because your not getting paid to do that, just being paid to your job during the time your on the clock. So better to take your time in this instance.
I always end up doing more than what is asked of me, it’s bitten me in the but before and sort of is right now actually. But it’s also how you gain experience, and earn promotions. Depends on the job maybe.
If you can do it, do it. Who cares if it’s ethical or not. Take the money and WoW away.
I play at work because I know I can do it without consequences. I don’t feel guilty about it because I know I do good work.
A few different thoughts/suggestions:
More honest thing to do would be negotiate a higher salary to reflect your true value, then ask for parttime work. Or switch to being a consultant. Consultants are like small business people who work for multiple companies. The ones in my line of work bill $120-$200/hour while I float along on an 80k salary. (I have zero travelling or transporation expenses or childcare expenses in my day plus more stability, decent benefits, and lots of free time. Salary works well for my halfblind single parent self.)
You should also be wary of running out of work to do. Stuff I built is doing the work of 15 people and counting, but I continuously seek and receive new projects and ways to automate things. If you get your current workload down to 30 minutes/day (as I have) without seeking new work or projects to take on, boss is likely to notice, let you go, and hand your work off to me. A good source of new projects is usually where someone on your team or an adjacent team just quit.
After you absorb enough of those, your boss will start trying to get you 20%and 50% payraises without prompting from you. Or the next time executives have to choose between you and your counterparts in a new acquisition, they’ll choose you.
Good luck!
Even for no extra pay? “Because the company will notice your hard work and commitment?” Yeah screw that. Corporate overworking and expectations are a messed up system that leads to workers being extremely unhappy.
OP, do the work required of you, that you agreed to do for the pay you receive, and then don’t get caught. If they want you to do more work, they can give you a raise.
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There are clauses about hours expected to work even for salaried workers, but maybe not all. Just like how salaried workers are alotted vacation and sick time, but maybe not all. (VP+ at our company have no specified vacation plan because it’s understood they have a hard time finding time to take off and are on call even when they’re on vacation.)
Even worse, ‘salary’ is often just a clever way of saying ‘no overtime’. Over in the retail industry, sales managers might get a 40k salary, but have 40 hour/week schedules most of the year, 50/hour week schedules at holiday time, have to work on weekends, nights, early morning inventories, holidays.
Anyway, my contract calls me a fulltime salaried worker, expects me to average at least 32 hours/week, spots me a few weeks of vacation and couple weeks of sick leave every year, various other benefits, purchase company stock at discount, etc. One time I didn’t notice my office skype hadn’t started up and had a nice quiet morning working on my own, then got a call from my boss asking if I’m okay because they hadn’t seen me online all morning.
Anyway, I dare you to tell your boss how many hours you work per day and see what they think of your theory about salary not tied to hours of work per day.
Peace!
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Just don’t get caught is all. Keep up the illusion and all that.
Don’t do this unless you live in some fantasy world where any of this reflects reality.
Personally I would not do the WoW during work bit - it is just not me, even if I did knock out everything in a fraction of the day. If others do and can do it, whatever but IMO they would still need to be “on call” as if they were still on the clock the entire scheduled 8 hours. In other words, wait until after hours before tanking mythic N’zoth or you might tick a lot of players off when the phone rings.
If you are using company resources, the answer is not only unethical, but probably a violation of your work agreement. If you are using company servers, company internet, and company computer to play a video game, you are violating all sorts of terms of your employment and, as an added bonus, probably infuriating IT because someone is using up all the friggin bandwidth for the company and employees are struggling to get real work done.
And, yes, I know people who have been fired for doing exactly for what you are suggesting. One of them WITH WOW.
I also am highly efficient and can complete tasks in a shorter time than others. So what I do is look for ways to bring more value to my company by taking on other tasks or helping my co-workers. Because maybe the problem is not that you are so awesome, but that your manager has not level-loaded the work in your department. And while you are twiddling your thumbs, some of your co-workers are forced to put in 12 hour days to get THEIR work done because even though you theoretically have the same job function, they have a more difficult client that is more labor intensive or they are in the middle of a product launch.
Maybe you could make yourself useful to others so they DON’T have to work unpaid OT (since salary gets paid the same regardless of hours).
That said, I have actually gone to my boss and said, “Hey, I checked with the team and everyone seems okay. I’m gonna work on some of my editing for now, but if you need me for a project let me know.” And my boss was totally cool with that because I have a good work ethic and a good reputation with my company.
There’s two trains of thoughts to have
A) If you work harder and do more you’ll get noticed and get more money/promotions. You are giving yourself the chance to get noticed.
“Look at Ochanokami, she is doing twice the work as everyone else. She deserves a bonus, a raise, or we could do something else with her”
If you decide not to apply yourself then you’ll never get noticed, and if you get caught playing WoW it will reflect poorly on you regardless of how much sense you think it makes.
But
B) Your work doesn’t seem to be employee focused and you believe you’ll never be noticed no matter how much effort you put in.
I mean if your work doesn’t feel like a place where you can excel in and make a career out have fun I suppose.