Shit it’s a good thing all the people this person was ever in charge of chose to quit instead of following them, right? Otherwise your semi-though-out comeback would be worthless.
hey there, I suggest you do yourself a favor and stop talking to this skates person. you’ll live longer.
I cant tell if they are just trying to argue or they’re running interference for a system that actively harms their interests, but either way, you will not convince this person of anything and they will just make you feel disheartened regarding humanity in general
they aren’t “double dipping.” that phrase means “taking more than you are allowed.” having a second job is just having a second job. the person writing the title either is tone def or doesn’t agree with the article.
The double dipping is referring to doing both jobs simultaneously. Like two remote jobs and you have both work laptops open, so between two jobs you can work 40 hours per week but be paid for 80. It’s distinctly different from clocking in for one job, then clocking out and going to another job and clocking in for that job.
Are you being honest with your second job that you’re only going to do your job during the stretches of job #1 that require long compile times?
It’s like dating two people but pretending to be monogamous with each. It might work for a bit but at some point you will need to choose one over the other.
at some point you will need to choose one over the other.
Maybe, maybe not. I’ve heard of people doing this stuff for a LONG time.
But it doesn’t matter, does it? If you are forced to choose one over the other, you’ve still made a lot of extra money on all the double-dipped hours you’ve accrued up to that point.
The layoffs are a power grab against wage increases. Companies have been reporting record profits for years, inefficient my ass.
If you can do your allotted work in less time you’re just more productive, if a company gave a shit about this they could solve the problem by having a direct compensation increase for work load increase. After all, the employment negotiation happened in the interview. Responsibilities and compensation are already decided upon, it’s insane that you can just be handed more work because you’re too good to do the work they gave you slow enough. If the workers actually had power in the negotiation like free market morons think they do, they’d be able to adjust their own salary when the employer adjusts their workload. Since they can’t, the balance of power is obviously squarely in the employers court.
Want them to do more? Pay them more and then give them more responsibilities. It’s so easy to solve, but companies think they can just extract more effort for the same dollar they agreed upon when the employee was hired. Ludicrous.
But are they? Generally in tech, it’s really hard to gauge people’s performance and most companies are conservative with firing people for performance reasons. So you could coast by on mediocre performance. You team won’t be happy with you, but you probably will keep your job simply because you’re given the benefit of doubt. Tech is one of those areas where someone can actually be 10x as effective as another person, because so much of the job can be spent on stuff like debugging and dealing with weird issues, where one person might spend all day on an issue that another person can resolve in minutes.
There’s also something to be said about the fact that companies are usually paying for your time, not output. Contractors are the ones who are paid for output, not employees. It’s also straight up expected in tech that you’re looking for ways to automate some tasks so they don’t have to be done anymore. It’s not like some mindless office job where you’re expected to do X reports per day. There’s a never ending list of bugs to fix and features requested. You’re generally paid to find ways to increase productivity, not merely do the same thing over and over.
At any rate, tech is usually also paid well enough for it. There’s still massive income disparity between regular workers and C-suite, but at least the pay is always well, well above living wages, stock options are commonly given to regular workers, and high performers often are rewarded for doing better than average. IMO, tech jobs aren’t really an area to focus on the kinda mindset you have, since it does so much better than most (not perfect, but still far better). Most jobs don’t get anything close to what tech jobs offer to regular employees.
I have a buddy working for redacted ultra mega corpo company, he works remote and regularly places 1st in all metrics they measure. He also finishes his whole work day in about 45 minutes. Getting good at your job can 100% mean you’re doing the same amount of work as someone less skilled in half or less the time.
It is quite hard to get fired from a lot of corporate jobs. Mostly because they rely on metrics and don’t actually pay attention to the people. As long as you’re hitting the metrics they have no reason to look any deeper.
It’s kind of depressing that they treat you like that but also sort of relieving.
If you’re getting the work done you’re getting the work done.
Bottom line is that companies don’t pay you for being more productive, so you have to pay yourself by working two at the same time and getting both done. If you fail to perform, sure, get fired. As long as the product is there, it’s just a worker ensuring they are getting the money they deserve for their production capacity.
The company is paying you for your time, therefore that time is theirs. If you have two companies paying for the same 40 hours, whose time is it and which gets priority when there is an urgent matter? You’re stealing the time resource that they’re paying for it you’re double dipping. It’s greedy and unethical.
If you want to be paid for your production capacity, go independent and pick up jobs where they pay you on job completion.
The real question is why do people need 2 jobs? If its just ambition or wtv then ok, but if its out of the need to pay the bills and just get by, why is it happening? Or course its convenient for this mfers to say that. Better have people working multiple jobs to get by and keep their mouth shut then having them rebeling, joinin unions, protesting and so on.
He is specifically talking about people who are able to work from home who are generally employed full time. However he does point to workers who absolutely need to work two jobs to make ends meet as a reason why it should be viewed as okay. That is definitely problematic. Those people working two jobs just to live would definitely prefer to work just one.
I have a job where the unspoken agreement is they under pay you but you get to underwork proportionally to your favor. I’m more ambitious so I spend the free time on more work. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is more of a benefit to software people than most workers
Lol it’s the government. But to be honest, it’s a pretty good deal. If you’re not ambitious, you have an easy safe cushy life. If you are ambitious, you have time and security to try things your way
Most of these people are over paid actually. Making without stock over 150k and then around the same in RSUs or more.
The issue is many folks were only doing like 3 or 4 hr a day and then double dipped to collect another paycheck because they had the time to. I don’t necessarily fault them.
Friend of mine intentionally took a boring bank job making like 50k less than he was making (so around $125k a yr) so he could coast as a high performer there then planned and did find another gig in Pacific time (were east Coast) and then pulled two checks and still only worked like 42 hr a week.
This is the true reason there making work from home optional.
Huh? If the job can be done this fast and the contract says, you get this money for doing that, why should that be wrong, meaning why should anyone be unhappy?
Except companies are just in for the money and would rather pay you less … Hmmm
That’s the point of the clause; to fire people who tell them they’re working a second full-time job. When required to be in office everywhere it becomes quite obvious very quickly. They’re upset they can’t tell if you’re two-timing or not if you work from home, so they want to make sure you come in and work for them
Petty tactics from petty people. If someone is doing the job they are paid for, why bother? It’s like the employers are entitled to the 40 hours or something, even if all the work is done.
so they should just sit and stare if they’ve finished their work? don’t be absurd, please. the whole system is way past its due date. our society needs to scrap it and start over. and i mean human society. the world, our species. the one we have now if fast leading us to extinction, along with most of the other creatures on earth. what he says isn’t the way, but it’s better than harassing people for doing more work when they finish their first job.
It’s because the system is designed to keep us paid just enough to live and keep buying from companies, but not enough to have true independence. Working two jobs is cheating that system by giving you more money and freedom than they want you to have. Once you have financial security you can start to wonder about how fucked up this “system” truly is.
I don’t follow. If you’re claiming you’re putting 40 hours of work in a week, or that is what your contract says, and you’re really only doing 20 because you’re splitting it between two jobs…isn’t that obviously cheating the system?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a shit if people take advantage of a corporation to milk it for cash, but it seems to me to be pretty clearly cheating the system. If you want to get paid on what you produce, and not the time you put in, then you should structure your contracts that I way. I know a lot of my side work I don’t bill hourly precisely because I know it can be done quickly ( for me with experience) but it’s worth more to them.
If you’re salaried, you’re not usually obligated to work a certain number of hours, you’re just obligated to complete tasks on time. If someone holds two salaried positions and works fast enough that they get all obligations for both completed in 40 hours a week, they’re not cheating anyone.
I manage a decent sized team of salaried people and I am 100% behind this.
If I were to have a criticism it would be of management hiring more people than they really need, not paying good wages, and/or not recognizing when one of their people is ready for a bigger role.
It’s never happened on my team that I know of, but if I were to run into that case and my guy was getting his job done properly then zero fucks would be given.
Ive worked many salaried jobs in my life. I’ve never seen a work contract that simply defines your tasks you have to get done. Not saying that it doesn’t happen, but I would be hard pressed to believe it’s common. I don’t even know how you would do that because what tasks I do always shifts, especially in tech. On top of that, how long a task takes is extremely unpredictable. Sometimes I fly through something, sometimes that last 10% takes 90% of the time.
*edit: contract work is very common and definitionally does not define ‘time on the job’, and instead lays out specific metrics of performance related to production. Salaried work is definitely far more common, but to say that’s unusual or impossible is just wrong.
I think this helps elucidate the real issue here, which is the distinction between selling labor and selling your time. One of those is obviously more reasonable and the other shares a conceptual relationship with other types of indentured labor.
It used to be that the distinction didn’t matter since you had to be in a particular place to do a particular work anyway, selling your labor and selling your time looked basically the same and your employer could control and manage how you spent that time. But with remote work, the employer no longer has control over managing your time because they have no (reasonable) way to monitor your production; an employer utilizing monitoring software would (rightly) be seen as an abuse and invasion of privacy. So even though the contract hasn’t changed, people are more aware of how dehumanizing it is not to have sold their labor but control over a certain number of hours of their life.
I obviously have bias here, but I think defining labor by its measure of time is alienating and inhumane.
My point is more that salaried employees, by definition, are not required to put in a certain amount of hours. That would make them hourly employees. All salaried employees are required to do is to complete their work by a deadline. What that work is and what the deadline is are usually not defined specifically in their contract, because as you said, both those things constantly change, so it would be impossible to reflect that in some binding agreement.
This is how it works where I live from a legal point of view too. If you “show up” (in-person or remote doesn’t matter) to your full-time job and are “available” for work but they don’t have enough for you, legally you must be paid for your full number of hours (your entire salary). You are paid for your time, not your results. You keep your job by delivering good results, however, since that’s a different matter.
Mainly because I’m not naive, but more concretely because i have followed this movement because it interested me when I wanted to make more money.
But even if we want to pretend that all of these people are actually working 80 hour weeks, the article talks about juggling zoom meetings and falls, so it’s clearly talking about some kind of deception at least as to when you are working.
I get paid to do 40 hours of work a week and I feel like I’m cheating the system as I definitely don’t work anywhere close to that.
I think people just are comfortable screwing over companies as they will screw you as often as they can so they don’t see it as cheating in this case, but it’s a rare case where the worker gets more out of it than the business.
Why would they ever do that? Only reason they would even consider such thing if if they are forced or if it somehow directly benefits them short-term. Maybe not even short-term because not doing so helps keeping people suppressed and lessens any threats to them.
I mean, yes-ish? My friend has 5 and makes way more than any one job would ever be willing to pay.
More power to him. Is he burning bridges? Probably. Is he banking a ton of money? Yeah. Is anyone getting hurt? Not really, he gets his asks done and that’s that - I’m not about to feel bad for a megacorp grossing hundreds of millions to billions a year.
If someone is completing what you ask of them, the ONLY reason anyone would ever care about what they do with their time is ego. But muh underlings! But muh meeting attendees! But muh sense of power!
Dinosaur companies will continue to suffer as they should.
Reminds me of the CEO who said working for a company should be viewed as a team sport and you should not help out another team. All while he is on the board of another company. Can’t remember which CEO it was.
I would like it if Microsoft employees would do the absolute minimum. Every time they get an idea we end up with Cortana on desktop or moving the start button.
Working a second job outside of the hours or scope of tour main job is one thing, but many people double dipping are literally getting paid by two companies for the same hours. That’s different imo.
Like people who are the boards of multiple companies, in leadership roles in multiple companies, and pretty much anyone at the top of company structures?
All that should matter is if they are doing what they were hired to do.
No, not like your example. If a CEO is secretly serving on another companies board you may have a point, but we’re talking about people having two jobs with the clear implication that their employers don’t know it.
“Doing what they are hired to do” is very often defined in employment agreements as working x number of hours. You can’t really say you’re doing what you’re hired to do if you take a second job that you perform during the same hours when you’re not allowed to under your agreement.
If someone wants to work 9-5, then 5-1 and somehow can manage both that’s different. For liability sake alone it’s a problem.
Mm iono, kinda sounds like people finally using the concept of salaried exempt positions properly.
For too long, people let themselves get bullied into equating salaried positions with hourly positions, having their time micromanaged and scrutinized when it shouldn’t have been the case by definition.
That’s not really the same topic. Employers still have the right to set terms of employment. If they want you to work 9-5 and not 8-4, they have every right to set that expectation. If you’re hourly they can send you home at Noon on Friday and you just won’t be earning 40 hours of pay that week. Salary they really can’t.
That’s not to say that people aren’t miss classified as exempt or that some employers try to use it as an excuse to get over 40 hours of work out of someone. Different topic all together.
“Doing what they are hired to do” is very often defined in employment agreements as working x number of hours.
Not necessarily true anymore in white collar professions, especially nowadays with gig work. It really depends on the language and terms of your employment contract. I’ve worked for places that define the employment as 40 hours per week, and also for places that define it as specific tasks for a length of time, and also for places that define it as availability during set hours of the day. It’s very important to read the employment contract terms and the company’s employee handbook.
You can’t really say you’re doing what you’re hired to do if you take a second job that you perform during the same hours when you’re not allowed to under your agreement.
If your job explicitly defines your employment as being available and dedicated during set hours, or if your contract explicitly says you can’t take on additional employment, then you’re right. That would be “double-dipping”.
I also hated working for those types of places, because they’re usually run by micromanagers who failed up and measure their worth by how many emails they forward along. Which are probably the same type of people who are mad about overemployment to begin with.
The way I see it, it only becomes a problem if you have multiple jobs that have a problem with it. And I can’t imagine why anyone with the means to work two 6-figure jobs would choose to work for two of those companies.
Well yea. If you are staying in the lines of your employment agreement, you’re in the clear to do whatever else you want. I feel people are conflating all of these things into what this topic is really about. The problem here is when someone has two jobs as either reports the same time to both employers for payment, or agrees to certain availability and does work for the other company at the same time. It does not include hourly workers having a second job doing hourly work during different hours, or anything similar with Gig work. If you for example drove for Lyft and Uber, picked up 1 passenger for Uber and 1 for Lyft simultaneously, that would be an example of breaking the rules.
I’ve worked for a company that has been doing WFH for over three decades. It’s very clear when someone has two jobs. They are unresponsive, their work isn’t very good, and they take forever to do everything. This assumes they have two jobs in the same line of work. If they are going and getting a night job at Target or something no one cares if their work is fine.
I can’t think of anyone I know that doesn’t at least partially collaborate with their co-workers where their availability is key to their jobs. So doing work for another company during that time would never be ok. The exception to this would be subcontractors who are free to set their own schedules within reason. They are free to take other work, often required to do so, due to IRS rules, but individual contracts likely have the same sort of language where they’d need to be available during certain hours, or available for group meetings etc.
Not really. If they're fulfilling their contractual obligations to their employer(s), then who the hell cares?
It's long past time that we stop treating employees like they're chattel of the company that they work for. You hire someone to do a job, which they either do to your satisfaction or not, but you don't own them and you shouldn't get to control the parameters of their life.
They aren’t fulfilling their contractual obligations if they aren’t allowed to have a second job and are doing it anyway, so this notion is nonsense to begin with. If you get paid hourly you can’t be working for someone else while getting paid by the first company for the same time. For salaried, typically there are expectations of how long you’ll be working or even your availability.
The company I work for has more than three decades of experience with WFH, and it’s almost always clear when someone is trying to double dip. It’s impossible to keep it hidden for long. Eventually you will have conflicting schedules, and excuses start piling up. Even if the work is good, very few jobs are done in a vacuum where you never need to talk to anyone or work things through. Most situations like that are handled by subcontractors who have all the freedoms you’re talking about. In fact the only situation I can even think of that would fit the mold of how work is being framed here is through contractors.
It has nothing to do with double dipping or the way the article describes it which isn’t really what the word means. Having two jobs you work during different hours is usually fine. Working them during the same hours is the issue.
You can assert that it’s a “problem” all you want, it doesn’t make it true. Salaried exempt has a definition which is compatible, in abstract, with working two jobs in the same working day or week span. It has to do with being able to fill the key responsibilities of your job description on a given day or week. If you fulfill those, the rest of the time is yours to do whatever you want with. The expectation is that on the other hand you will work overtime if needed to complete those key aspects without additional pay. That’s the definition in a nutshell. You adding stipulations about time and “double dipping”, et cetera is fabrication. That’s just what companies eventually pushed into being normalized as unwritten law in an ever-present desire to squeeze every single imaginary accounting cent they can out of their most expensive assets. It’s high time people pushed back on this bullshit. Most people in office jobs can do their jobs effectively in well under 40 hours. One of the reasons there’s so much bureacracy and time wasting in corporate environments is so people can fill up that arbitrary amount of time without 😱 looking like they’re doing their jobs in less than 40 hours. Businesses heavily mismanage people (and their bottom line) by assuming every single minute spent on the job as recorded is linearly related to productivity. It’s not. You will lose out much more from the inefficiency begat by a toxic culture promoted by those wrong assumptions than the comparatively minuscule gains in imaginary labor value you put down on the accounting journals. There’s only so much you can squeeze from people, beyond that it’s delusion and negative gains. A good manager understands that the true resource is employee morale, trust, and loyalty; and you can’t get that without being realistic about what it means to treat employees like human beings. Jobs used to be 9 to 5, the 40-hour standard was based on half-baked quick math a clueless 10-year-old would’ve pulled out of their ass, and study after study after study shows nothing but positives both for employers and employees in more efficient and balanced work time structures than the current mass delusion standard.
But that right there is the issue. Why should a company be allowed to prohibit employees from having a second job if it doesn’t conflict with the first one? And if a company does have that right, does it apply to all jobs? What is the difference in that case between working two jobs in the same industry in different market sectors vs working two retail jobs?
Another POV: if I incorporated myself tomorrow and offered what I do for a living as a professional service, then I become the company and the companies that hire me for my services become the client. Do clients have the right to say I can’t take on other clients? (FWIW I have seen some clients try that and get shut down immediately, and I’ve also never heard of any company agreeing to those terms with a client.)
Why should a company be allowed to prohibit employees from having a second job
Different Topic IMO. If someone wants to work 9-5 at an office job, then go work at Target from 6-10 in theory that’s fine. I don’t support it as someone that’s read the studies about productivity of the 40 hour work week being poor, I know that doing so is not sustainable and it’s not a good idea. Should a company be able to stop you from doing it? I don’t know. I’m open to the idea. It’s a far more nuanced topic though. Along the same lines are how to treat outside of work drug use. I see no reason a person can’t smoke Pot off the clock, but I don’t want to extend that to hard drugs.
…f it doesn’t conflict with the first one?
That’s been my argument since the start. Working two jobs during the same hours is conflicting. The stories I’ve read of high paid tech workers double-dipping during Covid were working both jobs during the same hours. Every time they ignore something from Job 1 because they are working on Job 2, it’s conflicting. Same could be said for WFH users who treat it like they are home on a weekend doing chores, supervising children etc. It’s not the same thing.
What is the difference in that case between working two jobs in the same industry in different market sectors vs working two retail jobs?
Usually a high level of proprietary or non-public information to start. But you wouldn’t be working at Target and Walmart from 5-10 tonight walking back and forth between the two stores. So just at a base level they aren’t comparable.
if I incorporated myself tomorrow…Do clients have the right to say I can’t take on other clients?
Absolutely allowed, but not likely. You are entering into a private contract with a company and agreeing between you on what you are do to be doing. Your contract is going to be far more specific than an employment agreement, and it’s up to you to cover all the things they would have covered including: Health Insurance, Payroll taxes, Retirement, Liability Insurance, etc. Keep in mind creating your own LLC or Corp is different than being a 1099 subcontractor. There are certain IRS rules that you have to make sure are followed (well the employer side mostly) else they can get hit with penalties for misclassifying workers as non-employees.
We have some subcontractors on staff, but afaik they sign agreements on availability and are more or less treated like employees when it comes to work output. They may have specific clauses they’ve negotiated on availability or things like that, but that’s also true of some employees too.
It depends on the terms of employment. If they are salaried, then there are no real work hours and just work to do. In general, if someone is salaried, they’re paid to do a job not when they do it.
This is not true. Salaries only means your pay is decided on a yearly basis and divided into each paycheck and not calculated and tracked per hour. Other conditions of employment including working hours and specific job duties are all part of your employment agreement. If your agreement has no set hours of any sort or limitations for other work, then there’s no problem. If a company is going to agree to pay you a salary, they are going to set how many hours you should be working, and reasonably expect you not to be double dipping.
Maybe it is because I have worked in tech oriented roles (which this article is geared towards)but none of my jobs have stipulated number of hours I need to work.
There have been times in my career I wished it were more specific. I’ve found companies with loose employment agreements tend to make things your job by reclassification more often than not.
I don’t see anyone being offended by your statement.
And this “offended” comment if yours is just sophistry - yet more presumption (and accusation, a personal attack) in an attempt to “win” an argument, rather than a discussion in search of truth or understanding.
That being the case, it tells us all we need to know about you.
I don’t work, so there’s at least one job free :) And I also don’t need any more houses. So, someone must’nt work two jobs because he steals one job from someone more needy? He got the 2nd job despite the needier one also applying, right?
Australian Beauro of Statistics lists half a million Aussies are currently “Unemployed”.
Note in this context, “unemployed” doesn’t mean “not working”. It means half a million are currently “not working and actively searching for a job”.
The ABS doesn’t track it, but less reliable sources estimate about twice that many people are “Underemployed” which means the job they have doesn’t give them enough hours. For example maybe you’ve got a job delivering pizza on Friday and Saturday nights when they need extra staff - the ABS would classify you as “Employed” even though you’re only earning $300 per week.
The number of people “underemployed” varies a lot from source to source, in part because there isn’t a clear definition of what that means.
No offense, but if you have to ask this question, it’s not worth my time debating with you. If you’re genuinely curious, look up what an equilibrium quantity is in supply/demand economics.
In theory you’re right. But the best always gets the job. If the dipper gets a job he was the best. Can’t blame the winner for a system that is inherently flawed.
Most employers have verbiage against moonlighting, though not for any benevolent society serving reason of course. In practice the system is majority unaccepting of working multiple jobs.
If there were more jobs available than there were active job seekers, you’d be correct that no one gets hurt. In fact, it would be a net benefit! There are also highly skilled labor categories with thin applicant pools where an individual working a second job may be the only qualified candidate. There are certainly exceptions.
For the record, no one blames people for being people and looking out for their best interests. Just don’t ask me to defend the policies that allow it. The same policies that stagnate the economy and drive wealth inequality.
It’s preposterous to think you CAN simultaneously do so without impact either at all. All it takes is two meetings or two impromptu phone calls at once. You will choose one over the other, in which case the company you didn’t prioritize is hurt as well as the other employees that you’re collaborating with.
Become a contractor if you want to double dip. You set your own schedule, work as many jobs as you want, and even get to choose your own raises.
There will be impact for sure, but as long as you still perform your job to the satisfaction of both employers, then it does not matter.
Paying a wage doesn’t mean you own 100% of the concentration of a person. It means you want them to do a job, and as long as they do it well enough for your standards, then the contract is fulfilled. Whether they can do the job at 70% or 40% concentration does not matter. You still get what you have paid for.
If you want your employees to concentrate more on your job, then pay them more so they don’t have to get a second job.
There will be impact for sure, but as long as you still perform your job to the satisfaction of both employers, then it does not matter.
If both employers know you are doing it and are ok with it there’s no problem. Its when it’s being hidden from them that it’s a problem. I’ll give you an example:
So say I’m a lead collaborating on a project with two people under me. Bob does great work, needs little to no assistance, and I can trust that he gets it done not only right, but also takes ownership of it and will bring things up if he sees problems. He doesn’t just wait for me to find them as the lead. Jim on the other hand takes a lot longer to do his part. He doesn’t bring up anything like Bob does even though it should be pretty obvious that it’s wrong because it impacts his part of the work, he waits for me to review, find it, and then have to reach back out to him for it to be fixed or changed. He is also far less responsive than Bob to emails, IMs, and isn’t able to multitask nearly as well. So clearly in this situation Bob is a better employee than Jim, and Bob receives bonuses and perhaps higher pay depending on other factors than Jim. However that’s not to say Jim is a bad employee and should be fired does it? A lot of the work can be subjective. Maybe Bob found those errors because he has more experience in the job and has run into the problem in the past and Jim has not. I can’t put “find problems in documents” in their job description so vaguely and then dock them every time they miss something, that would be absurd. People are different. Bob will likely be promoted to a higher role shortly, while Jim won’t, even though they were hired at the same time for the same role. I’d like to see Jim take more ownership of his work and take it upon himself to not just wait to be told what to do on a micro-level but come to me with what he thinks needs to be fixed, and so on. These are things that can be covered at reviews, and often have, and for a little while he seems to get better at it.
So given this situation, am I wrong in keeping Jim as an employee? His work isn’t as good as his peer who was hired for the same job at the same time, and he hasn’t stepped up to take on the same responsibility in the work that I would expect someone being on the job as long as he does. Is the right thing to do to fire him outright?
But now what If It comes to my attention that during the time he was working on the project he was working a second job, and not focusing on the task he told me he was working on. Did he not find those errors because he wasn’t paying attention due to working on something else? Was he avoiding any added work from found errors so he could do work for that other company? Is his lack of multitasking ability not actually true and he’s doing work for someone else while ignoring me further delaying the project and taking my time up to help him?
“Well Enough for your standards” is entirely subjective. I don’t treat my people like robots who can be mathematically judged. There isn’t a binary existence of good or bad. I don’t fire people immediately upon feeling they are sub-standard. I feel I often bend over backwards trying to help people get better, I push for bonuses and promotion when I think they are deserved. I don’t at all believe that outcome that is all that matters. I truly believe that a person who puts in more effort and gets a worse result will be a better employee long term. I’ve seen it time and time again.
And to your last point about paying people enough; While that’s certainly true in some cases, the article cites tech workers pulling in $500,000 through it. Clearly it’s not about being under paid.
Full time employees might have core hours and then flexibility outside of that. Otherwise, you do your work as quickly as possible and then outside of that is free time. Unless they are reusing the same work at two jobs, they likely are not double dipping. If their metrics are fine, there is no reason for a manager to care other than wanting to micro manage someone’s life.
To be clear: If you Tell two employers that you are working for them from 1pm to 2pm, you are double dipping. The title of the article doesn’t line up with the content. Having a second job that you work outside of the hours / commitment of your first job is fine as long as you didn’t agree not to do so with your first employer. If you want to work 9-5 earning 6 figures in a WFH white collar job, then go out and get a night job at Target and are somehow able to succeed during your first job the vast majority of employers aren’t going to give a shit. The reason employers give a shit is this is a largely fake narrative. Studies have shown the 40 hour work week is too long. People working two jobs cannot keep it up for long and be as good at their jobs. Second, people are conflating having 2 separate jobs with working two jobs at the literal same time. Working 9-5 at two companies and juggling email and meetings between them. The article touches on this, but I completely disagree with the author. So much of business is based on collaboration that having to wait for a peer who is doing work for another company now costs the first company for every person that is waiting on them. Maybe 2% of my work can be done without a single other co-worker being involved in some way. During regular business hours the expectation is that you are being paid to work and collaborate with your co-workers on a regular basis outside of normal PTO etc.
If they can get their work done on time, and with appropriate quality, who cares? If they can’t keep up with the workload, then they can get in trouble for that.
It’s completely accepted when CEOs and other executives serve on multiple boards or even run more than one company. Companies demanding 100% of any employee are just abusing labor and embracing unequal labor practices, and those practices aren’t against any law, companies just make up their own ‘policies’ to try and make their own laws.
Because we aren’t people, we’re meat machines. We don’t deserve a living wage and it’s expected of us to be working every second we’re awake. Do you let your tools rest?
Hmm… Interesting analogy. What about breaking in an engine properly? Would that be considered rest? I have no point with this, I’m just noodling around with the analogy to see how apt it is.
Not sure about engines, but when you "break in" a horse that doesn't seem like much of a "rest" for the horse. More so indoctrination or submissive tactics.
It was more exasperation with how I feel like we’re treated. I mean ffs at my job we have different toilet paper for the “real people” who work in the office and 1ply sandpaper for us barbarians. :/
Nobody would complain about a freelancer with multiple clients, even at the same time, provided they got their work done on time and on budget. Why isn’t it the same for employees? Why do bosses get to treat them like clients from hell?
I’m not saying they’re justified in this, because frankly if someone is getting their work done, what they do outside of work hours isnt their boss’s business, but I can kinda imagine why a company might not like their employees to have a second job; people only have so much effort to give (consider all those stats people bring up whenever people talk about shortening the workweek, to the effect that working more hours diminishes productivity per hour and gives diminishing or even negative returns compared to fewer hours in many cases) and so a company might decide that an employee with a second job might not be as productive for them as they would be otherwise, due to being exhausted. Though really, if they do it’s honestly the company’s fault for paying so little as for someone to need a second job in the first place.
CEOs and executives do this regularly, so unless their jobs are a lot simpler than they're claiming the "attention" argument is moot. They pay me to do a thing. I do the thing. They pay me what they'd say they'd pay. That's it.
Frankly I don’t imagine CEOs and executives take a whole lot of effort, at least for sufficiently large companies (small business are a whole different animal of course). I can’t speak to how complicated it is to do those jobs, or how easy or difficult they are, but the mere fact that people who are so rich as to not need to work at all to live a lavish life, will often still take on jobs like that, speaks volumes I think.
Considering that it is apparently possible to be in charge of like 6 different companies at once and still spend your entire day shitposting on Twitter, corporate fatcats obviously aren’t actually supposed to do anything productive as part of their day-to-day tasks.
I think the main difference is the time scale for their responsibilities.
For your average worker, they generally have daily tasks or responsibilities. Your c-levels generally “solve” the larger problems. The timeline for those isn’t daily but probably quarterly or longer. This would allow them to take on another role because of how the deadlines work.
Not saying it’s right, but just trying to explain it.
Add comment