AKA, please work harder for your corporate masters because poor people are suffering. What's that? You want your corporate masters to pay a fair share of tax so poor will suffer less? No, just work harder and that extra work won't benefit people who need it.
To be fair it’s the OP who’s implying he or she wants to do more. Its not about working harder to please your corporate masters but about taking action to improve your own happiness.
Yes, for OP they seem to have some kind of motivation to work. I was criticizing framing of the issue as not "doing right by your company", not the idea that working harder might be useful for OP. I think we've all been in the situation of having a reason to work harder but still feeling unmotivated. I don't know how "tough love" would help someone like this and the reasons given by khazhoux for working harder make no sense.
Yes, he should work harder -- he admits to working only one day a week, and then actively pretends (by "trickling out" work) that it took longer. Let's please not pretend that it's normal or OK to have 6-day weekends every single week.
He is being compensated (I infer) very well for a safe and comfortable job, except he doesn't like the tooling and he's realized that people trust him and he doesn't need to be honest to collect his paycheck.
You are misrepresenting this and spewing some garbage perspective about how work should operate.
Hours put in is completely pointless and an old win by unions to prevent companies from further exploitation of workers. If you can do 6x the work of the other devs on your team you have literally no obligation to work any harder.
The company does not have your interests at heart.
Reflectively pointing to imperatives like "normal or OK" when someone is having a moment of questioning imperatives that have got them this far is unhelpful. Why does it matter what's normal or OK? Maybe the thing that OP should be doing is something that's considered by many to be abnormal or not OK. If you want to convince OP that they should be working harder then fine. I'm not saying that's the wrong conclusion, but at least give a reason that's more useful than (a) other people are suffering therefore work (makes no sense) or (b) do what's normal or OK (why?) or even (c) you have a moral duty because you're being paid well (unconvincing as an argument and psychologically unmotivating).
It would be easier if he could just give this job to someone willing to work those all day, but let’s not pretend that most of these people will never get the job anyway.
I don’t see how being honest makes this world a better place.
What's with this moralizing? If you can get away with working only one day a week, there's nothing wrong with doing exactly that. Is this like some Protestant work ethic thing?
In general, I certainly wouldn't advocate trying to do the least work possible to get by in some job long-term. It doesn't sound fulfilling and likely isn't good for one's career long-term.
But I don't get this moralizing about cheating the company.
Especially since OP already indicated that they're feeling unmotivated.
If you're feeling unmotivated and force yourself to work harder on something that doesn't motivate you to fulfill some kind of a moral standard, that might end up being a fast track to burnout. (Depending on the exact circumstances, your personality etc. of course, but burnout doesn't only happen because of too much work but also because of bad matches between people and their jobs.)
The key is to see if there's some way OP can find the motivation, and then work harder on getting more things done because they have the motivation to. Or to find some other kind of a solution to the unsatisfying situation.
I don't really get the moralizing about other people having to work in objectively worse conditions either. It's not like OP's (or anybody else's) mental well-being and satisfaction with something that doesn't appear to suit their personality should magically become better because someone else has bigger trouble.
It's also possible that this one day of intense work is unsustainable for 5 days, and this is just their working style. There's nothing wrong with that as long as this isn't done out of laziness.
So what if it's done out of laziness? There's no law that says that a lazy person can't participate in the economy without giving up their laziness. There are jobs out there that are well suited for lazy people. Maybe OP has found one of them.
