I'll take a stab at it, and predict... all of them. Or nearly so. There seems to be an ever-present fraction of employees at any large corporation that are essentially worthless. Just along for the ride, raking in a paycheck while someone else does the meaningful work.

We've had stories here on HN about people exploiting it. There's a moment, I think, in many developers' careers where it occurs to them that there is almost never any reward for hard work. And when you're a wage slave for a large corporation, it's easy to blur the morality until it feels okay to take advantage of the situation.

When I find myself starting to think such thoughts, I know that it's time for me to move on to another opportunity. And a smaller company, even though it pays less, because it's better for your soul.

Tons of people hiding at oracle from my experience :)

At IBM I worked 5 hours a week and still was in the top 20% of my team.

Onward and upward :)

Eventually the guy was promoted.

The Dilbert principle is real.

To my managers the work I do is a lot.

To me it’s about 4 hours a day. There’s no deceit in this. What I tell them I’m working on is what I’m working on, what I’ve declared as ‘finished’ is factually ‘finished’.

To the company, I’m still contributing the things I agreed to, responsive to the people who come to me for help (as a senior) and on track with the projects assigned to me.

When the wall comes and I just cannot will myself to stare at the same problem anymore, that’s it for the day. Sometimes that takes longer than others, sometimes it’s 5 hours instead of four. Sometimes it’s a whole 8 hour day.

So..matter of perspective, I guess. The agency and autonomy are nice, though. Some people want a shorter work day given. I’ve just decided to take it.

I've come to realize this isn't always a mistake on management's part. I work at a company where developers use the full day to get tasks done because there is so much on our road map. There is absolutely no slack, when something new comes up, something else needs to drop.

We are hiring, but now I spend some of my time training them. I've seen friends work for companies that keep some % of their experienced developers time idle so those devs tackle issues that might pop up.

People bitch about stack ranking, and it is terrible for moral and politics, but it solves exactly this problem.

Because there isn't enough manager gumption & attention time to address this systematically, manually.

1. Story pointing is not granular enough, i.e. one 2-point story is not necessarily the same as the next one. Freeloaders pick off the easy ones and pace themselves to keep their 'productivity' in the acceptable range.

2. I've seen a lot of teams, especially smaller ones, evolve into a situation where each member has an area they specialize in. Then stories start getting preassigned to them. Hard to compare two coders not pulling from the same pool of work.

3. As an IC becomes more senior, a larger fraction of their work happens outside of stories, and becomes more difficult to quantify. Some of the most effective freeloaders I've witnessed were mid/senior devs who could crank out a typical story very fast and craft plausible explanations for where the rest of their time went.

Overall, I'm someone who needs to prove everytime that I'm sincere and I'm intellectual while I'm known only for being a cheap resource.

I mean no disrespect, by this observation.

Eventually I found two. One of them was a really solid hire. Backbone of the team. Still not as vocal as any of the non-TCS devs (one of whom was also Indian, but very vocal about his opinion), but he got stuff done and did it well.

For the right bill rate, it could be a pretty entertaining role to play.

> Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests.

> our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to management if they feel something is wrong

Apparently the obvious and easy solution here is to only get US-born hires. So why don't you?

This seems to be an unnecessarily aggressive take on it.

If I (an American) were working for an Indian company, I would plan to learn and understand what the culture is like in Indian companies, and then do my best to conform to that. If I didn't believe I'd feel comfortable in that environment, then I wouldn't take the job. I would expect an Indian working at an American company to do the same.

I get that it can be difficult, and that some of these cultural things aren't just company culture, but are deeply ingrained, real cultural differences between people of different backgrounds.

Having said all that, I do think a US manager who hires reports from India (or from any other country with a different culture than the US) should be aware of what cultural differences exist, and try to meet their employees in the middle as much as they can.

I do agree with the grandparent, though, that I don't want to work with people who are "obedient", at least in the way I'm guessing the great-grandparent meant (perhaps I'm inferring the meaning incorrectly, though). I agree that I want people who won't just do what management says, and will instead apply critical thinking to the work they get assigned, and question things that don't make sense.

I've many times been hired in companies to say things employees didn't have the political clout to say out loud. If anything goes wrong, or someone isn't happy, I'm the fall guy.

I ended up quitting and they replaced me with a contractor who did the same at 4x the cost.

The funded startups in India are paying very good money to their staff. Even somewhat junior resources with 4-5 years of experience can get in excess of 50l inr per anum, which is roughly 65k usd in cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore & Gurgaon.

In the US, it's univerally 2 weeks.

My colleagues were shocked when I confirmed that offering more than two weeks’ notice in the US is super nice to your employer, and two weeks is not considered unprofessional.

A large part of the justification of using outsourced workers is that they live in an area with a lower cost of living than the company's headquarters, so they can be paid less while still having a good quality of life.

So comparing your salary to American workers doesn't really say anything about whether or not you're "underpaid", but it's how your salary compares to others in your area. If you just want to earn more money, you could move to the USA, but there's a cost associated with that (even ignoring the difficulty in getting a work visa) and you may find that your "1/4 salary" is worth more at home that it is in the USA.|

There are certainly a lot of employees that have moved away from the SF Bay Area to take a job in an area with a lower cost of living and even though they make significiantly less money, they still have a better quality of life (in particular, they can afford a house)

If two people are doing the same job and giving the company $X profit, it's only fair that they are being paid the same regardless of where they live. Think optimizing a marketing campaign that changes monthly revenue from $10M to $30M, both people should be compensated similarly since they are bringing the same profit to the company.

But also if two people are doing the same job, it's fair they are compensated the same amount of $, regardless of whether one produces $X and another $Y depending on the company situation or their cost of living. Think optimizing the same program to run in 0.1s instead of 1s, assuming everything is the same, for Google that's worth millions but for your neighbor it's worth hundreds of $, but both are gonna pay you 10h * your hourly rate.

Those two examples are vastly incompatible; companies will of course insist that they pay you based on your expenses, while workers based on how they help the company, but in the end there's a contradiction, and since they cannot both be right they must both be wrong. The "right" solution is that they'll pay you based on the market, how much they think you are worth, your experience, your negotiating abilities, etc.

Maybe a good quality of life compared to other people from the same area... but nowhere even close to that of an American worker.

No idea where you got that "1/4 salary is worth more at home" from, when in my experience I used to be able to feed myself with 10 GBP/week on average in UK, now I'm spending close to 15 GBP/week in Moldova. Tech/computers/phones are about twice as expensive here, used cars ~10 times more expensive at the lower-end, mid/high-end about the same (at least you don't have to spend crazy amounts of money on parts since getting the MOT equiv here is much easier, so you can fix your car with whatever hammer and lattice from your neighbor's garage..)

Utilites about the same. Rent is cheaper, since most people live with their families overcrowded in tiny appartments...

The cost of "living" is higher, most people just don't know how poor people live. Most people can't even imagine eating ten pounds a week...

If you want the same quality of life as an American worker, the best way to achieve it is to be an American worker since you can always pick and choose things that are objectively "worse" in any arbitrary country. For example, you cite the high cost of cars as an example of why a country has a worse quality of life, but others may point to American car dependence as worse for their quality of life.

No idea where you got that "1/4 salary is worth more at home" from

Probably because that's not what I said. I said "you may find that your "1/4 salary" is worth more at home that it is in the USA.", Obviously I didn't mean that to mean in all situations. I wouldn't expect that someone living on £10/week in the UK would be able to live comfortably on £2.50/week in any arbitrary country

I have a friend that took advantage of COVID work from home to move to Indonesia (where his wife is from) - he said they pay less for all costs of living than he did just on their apartment in the SF Bay Area. He's still drawing his Bay Area salary, but is not going back to the office, when return to office becomes mandatory, he'll just quit and retire where he is. He feels that he has a far superior quality of life there. It's not the same as Bay Area life, but far more relaxing.

It has nothing to do with CoL and everything to do with a company paying what they think is competitive with the other options you have.

I live somewhere with a higher CoL than the states. American companies open branches here, and pay much lower, local salaries.

Thinking it has anything to do with CoL is pure "Just World" fallacy.

Nope, the justification is just “they can be paid less”. The rest is irrelevant.

This is happening now too, as many high paying jobs are coming on India and other parts of the world through remote work. Eventually I believe your cost of living will have no impact on the salary you get.

(i.e., are other local companies offering worse or better benefits?)

So if OP says that they get 1/4th of the salary that people from US get for same role, then I feel that he is most likely underpaid.

I'm curious what you mean by illegal. Do you mean they won't pass emissions or safety?

Although 1/4th sounds a bit extreme for India. My understanding is that FAANG is paying more than half - and considering the cost of living - I know a lot of people that willingly took gigantic pay cuts to transfer back to India.

I mean - for one - ~45% of your income goes straight to tax in CA - in India IIUC it's 20%.

[0] https://overemployed.com/

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...

Well, assuming you have the skills and time to grind Leetcode, the two jobs might also be easier than big tech jobs, and having multiple jobs gives some security if you're ever fired.

Time to get creative with our time and careers, as long as the skill is transferable, and health is manageable. That said, 5 jobs sound too much, but who knows...

It's highly interesting but my one job keeps me more than busy enough, thankyouverymuch.

Edit: A few other thoughts I had since hitting submit:

1. It feels to me like the most challenging part of living a double working life is making sure your mandatory meetings at each job don't conflict. I wonder how people get around that?

2. Many (most?) employers already have a "no moonlighting" clause, I wonder how long before there will there be explicit legal language stating you cannot have this full time job plus another full time job?

3. I believe there are a few places in the tax code where there is a difference between having a full-time job and a part-time job, are there any areas where you would have to lie to the govt when you have multiple full-time jobs?

Gotta take the kid/spouse/mom to school/work/doctor? Schedule these essential appointments to best overlap with the other company's favorite meeting slot.

Additionally, I attend a number of meetings where I do not need to give any input. For many of those, who would know if I was simultaneously attending a similar meeting on a different laptop? You could even get fancy and have a pre-recorded version of yourself to play if you knew that you had to engage with company A but merely attend company B's meeting.

Without giving too many specifics away, the one case I discovered was with a person who claimed to be dealing with some personal/health related issues that required us to be flexible with their schedule. If I'm being honest, it worked on us for a while because we're sympathetic, but eventually the underperformance crosses the line into something that requires medical leave / short-term disability, at which point they gave up.

Assuming US-centric. The one that comes to mind is your W-4 for each employer. If you fill it out correctly, it will be a big red flag to your employer. If you pretend like you only have the one job, it could potentially land you in trouble with the IRS as there will be nowhere near enough tax withheld. You might get away with it, anyway, as long as you paid taxes in full and on time, but you might have to pay taxes in installments. They don't like you to owe too much at the end of the year.

Ironically, the hardest point would probably be post-detection cleanup.

I guess the company would sue the individual for back wages on the basis of breach of contract?

He thought he was pretty good at his job and took a second job. His coworkers (included me) felt like he was slimy and was not good at his job.

Everyone was suspicious of the dude and finally one day his boss’s boss called him for an emergency, and he said the company name while answering his phone… the other company he worked for.

Company fired him, told the other company, and threatened to sue him. He paid back a good chunk of his recent salary (they didn’t need the money I suspect wanted to make an example).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633539

Some companies will say no but it seems plausible someone could find a way to transition someone to a contract type situation if they really are valuable.

It’s not only remote people. I have seen multiple people at my company who are basically incompetent or lazy and produce nothing of value or even negative output. Some of them get let go after years and some of them get promoted into management.

Having a pleasant demeanor can get you very far without doing any work.

His argument is that at his current job he can get all of his assigned work done in 10-20 hours a week (though he doesn't share with them that he's basically only working part time) so he has plenty of time to take on a second job where he also expects to get his daily work done in just a few hours a day.

I don't have an issue with it IF both parties are aware that he's only working a few hours a day but are happy with what he's getting done. It's the inevitable lies when there are conflicting meetings, etc. that bother me.

I told him so and he was undeterred.

If both companies are happy with the guy's work output, then he is fulfilling the terms of his employment, at least in spirit and morally/ethically.

(I'm aware that some companies include in their employment papers a clause that states that employees won't take on other employment. I believe I've signed such a thing at my current job. But I personally consider such clauses to be unethical in the first place, and would feel no qualms violating that if I was in a position to want to do so. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure nearly all salaried jobs will stipulate something like that, so it's not like people can vote with their feet.)

I would personally find this sort of arrangement to be pretty stressful, and wouldn't do it, but if someone wants to give it a go, more power to them.

I strongly disagree. When you are hired as a full-time employee, the expectation is that you are giving your full 8 hours work day (or whatever) to the company in exchange for a paycheck. Otherwise, you are extracting full value from the company while they are getting half (or worse) value from you.

There are lots of people with a "screw everyone else, I got mine" attitude who don't see anything wrong with lying to your employer about how you are spending your time. I lump these people in with people who justify various forms of stealing with the rationale that it doesn't _really_ hurt the victim since some insurance comapany pays for the loss anyway. It demonstrates a severe lack of integrity. I would never want to work with or associate anyone like that.

I do however believe that "no moonlighting" clauses in employment contracts should be illegal. I ought to be able to use my skills to make extra money in my free time, as long is there is no apparent conflict of interest present (e.g. moonlighting for a competitor).

I don't think that's necessarily true. Another interpretation of being hired as a salaried employee might be "they get the work done that they were assigned, in a satisfactory manner, and are able to respond during regular work hours when needed". If someone can hold two jobs and fulfill that, then why is that a problem?

> There are lots of people with a "screw everyone else, I got mine" attitude

But if they're getting their assigned work done, doing a good job, and delivering on time, how are they screwing anyone else?

> ... who don't see anything wrong with lying to your employer about how you are spending your time.

Why are employers naturally entitled to a complete picture of how employees spend their time? Again, as long as the work gets done, and done well, and on time.

The thing that bothers me is that there's the implication here that the employee should voluntarily take on more and more work to fill those 40 hours a week. And in some orgs, where "work" isn't very well defined, that makes sense. You might just have a grab-bag of tickets that will take years to complete, and, sure, only working on those for 4 hours a day instead of 8 would be cheating. But in places where they say "here are the 10 work items we need you to complete, and they need to be done in 4 weeks"... if you can finish them in 2 weeks, why should you be obligated to say "hey, give me more work"?

Ultimately you should make sure the company is happy with your work product, and the pace at which it is delivered. A contracting arrangement may fit this whole situation better, but because we live in a stupid world, contractors (in the US) usually don't get basic things like health insurance. And it's usually a policy not to give contractors equity. At some places contractors don't even get invited to things like the company holiday party. It's weird to create these two different classes of workers like that. There's no reason to "punsish" workers for doing something different than the standard 9-to-5.

> It demonstrates a severe lack of integrity. I would never want to work with or associate anyone like that.

I'm sympathetic to this point of view, and mostly agree with it. But I think there's an inherent problem here: the employer-employee relationship will always have a huge power imbalance that favors the employer. I'm very torn. But I just don't think I see it as an issue of integrity to show loyalty to an entity that will not show you loyalty in return. Unfortunately, real people (manager, teammates, etc.) become extensions of that entity. You can't deal with them both as people (where I agree you should deal with integrity) and as extensions of the employer (where I think the obligation is weaker) at the same time. That is, you can't tell your manager "hey, I'm telling you the human being I respect that I'm violating my employment agreement and am taking a second full-time job, but I want you as an agent of our employer to pretend you didn't hear that".

> I do however believe that "no moonlighting" clauses in employment contracts should be illegal. I ought to be able to use my skills to make extra money in my free time, as long is there is no apparent conflict of interest present (e.g. moonlighting for a competitor).

Completely agreed here. Though this does make me question where the line is between "moonlighting" and "doing something bad". I think it's obvious to say that taking a contract job where hours aren't specified, and work is done outside of normal work hours, is moonlighting. But I'm not so sure that taking another full-time job and mixing work hours between the two companies is inherently different. It's not exactly the same thing, to be sure.

If that's true, then there shouldn't be any concern about sharing with them that you're working another job at the same time.

Like I said, I don't have a problem with it if each employer is aware and is fine with the situation. IMO the ethical question is if you are lying to one or both parties.

Probably the vast majority of companies! If you ever get an employee like this as a direct report and try to do something about it, the process is incredibly draining and shitty. Easily the worst I've felt about work in my career (so far!). I see why people try to ignore the issue, but it also feels pretty bad having your other team members constantly pick up the slack around a non-performing team member.

I’ve seen it work exactly once.

The guy was absolutely brilliant, however. And a great communicator. But everything had to be done asynchronously for the most part, except a few slots where he was guaranteed to have good network and be able to hop on a conference call. He was also a performance advocate, since everything had to work great on his laptop with poor network and contributed several patches to make the dev experience better. He was a stellar communicator with emails and knew the codebase really well and since he responded in batch he gave a lot of context in his responses (because he wouldn’t often know what the response would be for another day or two).

If someone wants to do something non-traditional and not inform the company about it, then the onus is on the employee to make sure their "odd" work habits don't impact others negatively.

I can't imagine it's much worse than it was in the before-times. Wally has always been able to skate along with a certain amount of meeting-attending.

So one day my boss (CTO) calls me up and says “Hey, we are hiring another Windows guy, can you do a quick interview and check him out?” (I was the only Windows dev at the time) So they send me the guy’s resume and he’s a PhD in Electrical Engineering. I feel really nervous about having to interview the guy because he had a PhD, but I figured other people had already checked him out so I meet with him and just have kind of a softball interview, not going into a technical deep dive or anything like that. He seems alright and has a ton of experience, so I figured what the hell.

Well about a month later my boss calls me again and he’s like “Hey, we’ve been having some concerns about John Doe, can you check in on him and see how he’s doing?”

So I go over to John Doe’s office and sit down with him and talk about what he’s been doing. He shows me that he’s having trouble with some things that are so basic that it’s almost like he’s never even seen a Windows machine, much less done any programming on one; and I’m not exaggerating, it was really that bad!

Long story short, they let him go. A few days after, I’m in the break room and one of the Unix guys walks in. He asks me how things are going and I’m like “Well, not so good, we’re back to just one Windows developer because they had to let the new guy go.” He says “Who was that?” So I tell him “this guy John Doe…” and before I can go any further he exclaims “Good God! Not THE John Doe?!?” Apparently this guy was a legend in the IT community in the city - he would fake resumes and get hired for as long as he could run the scam.

There are corporations that over-hire and often provide no work at all for weeks or months, but they require that worker is always on stand-by in case there is a surge. I know full-time workers who throughout an entire year maybe done one or two small PR-s, but when suddenly there is an issue needing solving and product teams have full capacity, these people save the day. They are sometimes also utilised for pairing, when given product team members have no spare capacity. From someone not knowing this, they indeed may seem like deadbeat employees, but the key is - they have to be always available during work hours even if no one contacts them for weeks.

You can't get two on-site jobs at the same time. One of them is going to notice that you're not there.

Bingo. That was my first thought in this. Especially given how quickly they gave the job up.

They paid someone to interview for them, collected wages for the period they were employed, and then went on to the next opportunity.

Sadly, there is nothing in the story to discourage the person from doing it again. And at most companies, there would be enough egg on HR's face for letting this happen that I'd imagine everyone would quietly sweep it under the rug.

Often extremely smart and talented. Working on own projects/business idea.

Their argument is that they can in 1h deliver often as much as you average Joe in a week.

“Put as little effort as possible, but I have expenses”

Can give example of such ppl in: - Samsung - TomTom - Oracle - Amazon

Too many of them tbh. Slowly choking the business.

Sometimes I've been able to fix in an afternoon, what someone has been trying to fix for days.

From and outsiders' perspective it may seem that I am working less

OR - I build a startup. But I hate the buisiness ethos.

Nearly all of them. And it's why managers who get burned just a single time hate the idea of remote work. It's not about office rent or anything else that gets bandied about here; it's the fact that a very small but significant number of remote workers are grifters and create a ton of negative emotion (out of sight out of mind) for co-workers and managers.

A ton of remote work is obviously the future, but every single negative case like this with legacy managers sets it back orders of magnitude more than the successes it generates. So it goes with everything new.

Even the "90-day probationary" periods are not really useful. I think the only thing that they do, is if the employee quits before the 90 days are up, then they have to pay the company back for all the expenses incurred by the company (I had this happen to someone we hired. They were not expecting that. Too bad. They were actually very good, and dumped us for a job in a location they preferred. I felt bad about that. I actually didn't hold any rancor towards them).

I suspect startups can be a lot more likely to be able to give someone the boot in an efficacious manner.

And I really don't appreciate being dinged for the actions of my corporation. I was not involved at all in that part of things, and only heard about it afterwards. I had many disagreements with our HR department, which could be rapacious. However, it was run by highly skilled and experienced lawyers, and everything they did was legal (if not always what I considered ethical; but I have high ethical standards).

I guess some folks are sociopaths, and do whatever it takes to live well.