Remote employee only works 30 minutes per day after spending their 20s “working so so hard” – FAIL Blog

This person is speaking to a broader social issue here, and even though they feel a bit guilty about what they’re doing, they might not have much of a choice in the matter. 

After all, they’ve learned one of the more important workplaces lessons: your hard work doesn’t necessarily matter to your employer as much as your presence, personality, and reliability. You can work and work and work, exhausting yourself to the point of burnout, and still end up fired. Conversely, you can barely lift a finger, and still find you’re getting promoted and praised. There’s not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to it. 

Rule #2 they’ve probably learned, as least from the resigned tone of their confession: you might not be able to move up in your job. Unlike the job positions of old (aka the jobs our parents and grandparents held) a lot of employees get stuck in a minimum wage job, or one that pays slightly above that, for a long time. If there are 20 open employee slots but just one manager, the odds are so slim that any of those 20 workers will move up in the world. They’ll have to wait for their boss to retire, and even then, someone external might grab the job right from their grasp instead. 

And, as a remote worker, this person may struggle to find a mentor in the first place, so… what’s an employee to do but chill at home and bring in that paycheck?