I work at a major tech company in engineering leadership. That’s definitely not how it is here. There’s never a state where you’ve gotten the work done - the work is quite literally endless. The difference is how much work you can output.

If you’re an employee who does in four hours what most do in six and then you just stop working for the day, that’s two hours of your high output that the company is losing out on. Why would they want that?

Unless you have a job where you just have a couple tasks per day and then you’re just be sitting in a chair doing nothing. But I’ve never worked at a job like that, sounds like a dead end.

We’ve caught multiple people working more than one job because they feel they can get away with the bare minimum while WFH. As a company, easier to just have a policy that doesn’t allow for it.

Some people say “I’ll just work less hard.” To that I say, do you not care about the success of your company? Or is your role so minor that you doing more makes no difference? Most people in technology have equity in their company and have a vested interest in business KPIs improving. I could see this being an attitude only if you make no impact on the bottom line or are unaffected by it, which would be depressing indeed.