When I was working there until late last year I was the definiton of rest&vest.
Like sometimes I would be so bored that I would solve challenges on leetcode and topcoder and stuff, which eventually lended me to a much better job in Silicon Valley. When I didn't feel like coding I would even YouTube and Netflix. Come in at 10 and left at 5 in most cases.
It didn't start this way tho. Like when I first joined I was actually working pretty hard and would grab stuff to do from all over my project and quickly became the goto guy for many things. But seeing that this only was being rewarded by oral praises and 1-2% merit increases eventually I got to a point where I would sit on tasks for a few days after getting them done. Still I was working much faster than my team. And my bonuses went up until the last review along with my ratings. You should have seen all the a**-kissing on my perf summaries.
I would never understand the people complaining about work&life imbalance. Like in my case it did exist bc I almost didn't have work to do.
And even more entertaining was that I didn't get SRPed, I left on my own without a package :(
Something is clearly wrong here. I'm wondering how many others are in a similar situation. And how the hell a private company can let this happen. I bet even DMV clerks were working harder than I did, especially towards the end.