150 years ago when the 40 hour workweek was created, there were no forklifts or bulldozers or trucks to make your workers more productive. You’ve got it a lot easier than back then. The workers deserve to take it easy too. If you can’t run a profitable business on 150 years of technological innovation, something is very wrong.

I had this coworker who was a sysadmin. My degree is in computer science. His was not even in tech. His code is bad. I taught him to code better. He thinks I taught him object oriented programming, but I didn’t, I taught him functional programming. I taught him to use functions instead of repeating his code a hundred times. He still doesn’t know what object oriented code is, but he thinks he’s doing it.

So naturally, the boss promoted him to my manager and had him review my code, while code he wrote at 1am on 5 espressos in his free time with zero oversight becomes part of the business’s core platform.

The moral of the story is do free work for your company in your free time, and the boss will let you run the business into the ground.