Look up the overemployed subreddit.

It's my job to balance the workload such that they have enough work to make it worth it for me to employ them, and increase that workload where bearable so I can make more profit from their employment. If they are not underperforming and still doing two jobs, then I have failed my task because I have not effectively exploited their abilities for profit.

Ever had a medical claim by your over employed staff? Which insurance pays?

Do you pay for training?

In case of intellectual property theft from you or the other company, do you know what are your obligations? (Receiving company is can held liable.)

What amount of taxes do you withhold? What are the penalties for withholding significantly wrong taxes in your jurisdiction?

Of course you pay for training, why wouldn't you?

Working for competing companies is even stupid than being overinsured, and could potentially be illegal (for the employee).

Company withholdings don't change so this is not your concern.

1. The employee's insurance pays; in the US, they pay at least part of their insurance costs so it is unlikely for them to be covered by two services. If so, they can choose. If they were injured on the job, or in some capacity based on your work, then how is it different? Actually, how is this situation different from them purchasing outside insurance or being covered by their spouse? It's unlikely to be a problem and if it is it's not unique.

2. Sure, why not?

3. What does this have to do with them having multiple jobs? If they steal your intellectual property, that's a problem whether or not they are employed elsewhere. How does double employment compound this? If you hired someone from another job and they brought stolen property with them, is that different?

4. They are responsible for letting you know how much to deduct. You can do standard mandatory deductions based on expected salary and as long as you pay the required employment taxes based on the salary you pay them there isn't a difference in withholding on your end, only on theirs. If they owe more in tax, what do you care?

It's not like that. Since work is a market, you exchange a previously agreed amount of money for a previously agreed amount of work and knowledge.

Otherwise, the employees can also say they failed at their task if they wouldn't determine you to part with a large sum while putting in the minimum possible amount of work and working two jobs minimum.

That coin has two sides.

I have no idea why they would want to work two jobs minimum as a part of their task at my job specifically, but yes, part of being an employee is understanding how much money you can get paid in a negotiation with your employer and getting that amount is a success.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

It makes it easier to identify things like pointless ‘not invented here’ syndrome, or where a company is being very inefficient in an area because they don’t know of any alternatives.

It’s common for companies to hire in outside consulting firms or independent contractors who also work for a great many companies in an industry for the exact same reason. It’s a way of keeping on top of what the industry norms are.

Plenty of pros and cons there, but that is a big part of why.

The other reason is the board of directors works for the shareholders, and represents their interests. Institutional shareholders hold shares in a lot of different companies, and if they have someone they know and are comfortable with performance wise, most would prefer to have them on the boards of as many companies as they think they have the expertise to oversee.

That’s pretty much never what happens though if someone does it when applying for a full time salary position, and line managers know it, which is why you see people get worked up about it. People doing it try to convince themselves it’s not a scam, but it almost always is.

The folks doing this on boards, despite any hate and derision they are getting here, are often exceptionally talented, educated, and have a long list of references where they have been doing it before successfully. They were voted in with full visibility to their other board memberships, and while being open about it and any potential conflicts of interest. They’re just not software engineers. I have yet to meet one that didn’t work their asses off either, just not in the way you might recognize.

There can be (and is, of course) nepotism, cronyism, etc. that happens, same as anywhere, and the shareholders who vote that in get what they deserve as well in my experience. Sometimes it’s also as simple as ‘x owns this company, and wants y to takeover when they’re gone, so y sits on the board.’. Rare in public or widely held companies though.

Ownership has it’s privileges, and it’s costs after all.

Just because something is the status quo and it is happening without mass protests, doesn’t mean people are agreeing to it.

Too fucking bad they don't "like it". I don't give one bit of care to the centimillionaire and up club.

Oddly, that's the second time I've used that word today: talking about Rishi Sunak earlier.

If that's not "stealing" but regular people actually working multiple jobs with actual deliverables in a way you couldn't even tell is,

then "stealing" is good and I will help as many to do it as possible, especially from the HN poster companies coming out and countersignaling it so hard.

I've worked a full time w/ benefits job and freelanced on the side. The only aspect of that I would feel that would be unethical is if I were to mix IP from the firms that should remain private.

Otherwise, who the hell cares. If I'm doing task work and meeting expectations then I'm holding up my end of the bargain. I'm not a slave and my work does not own me. Standing around the proverbial water cooler wasting company time is acceptable, but doing something productive during my downtime is not?

If the people are actually delivering equivalently to other employees then there's no need to worry if they're working one or two extra jobs.

How does have more than 1 job change this logic?

If you can get the job done then I don't see why it matters, and if you can't I don't see why it matters if you can't and you only have 1 job or you can't and you have 2?

Especially since rescinded offers have suddenly become acceptable, I think most people going forward should at least have the two jobs overlap by 2 weeks.

Meeting productivity targets is an important aspect of your job, but so is being available during business hours, meetings/collaborations, etc.

Moonlighting is working another job outside of business hours - which I agree, employers have less of a right to object to.

This paternalistic bullshit will be the downfall of companies who care more about micromanaging and controlling their underpaid employees than they do about actually delivering something to the market. If someone isn't producing, fire them. If someone is only being given 10 hours a week of work, and they have enough free time to get another W2 job and earn another full-time salary, that's 100% a company/management problem.

If you want to get paid by the hour or unit rate, be a consultant.

To a certain point I agree with you, but how much an employee actually outputs is a constant negotiation between the business and the employee - this is where expectation comes into play.

If you are performing beyond the baseline, you can negotiate to be compensated for exceeding it, or you can take a break.

There is no expectation that an employee should perform more work "for free" just because they can.

I believe in fairness between both sides - there is no free lunch in either direction.

This position collapses the first time someone's boss asks about workload and the employee has to lie or admit they have tons of free time.

Im sure there are unicorn cases where employees are never asked how long a task will take, or about their bandwidth for new tasks. However, in reality, the vast majority of situations require constant deception.

Most of the time the lying starts at the beginning with false employment history.

Most employment contracts, even for salaried workers, list things such as "37.5hrs per week".

If this is the understanding, and you aren't working diligently for those hours, you're a thief and fraudster, a scam artist, and should be fired.

If you get done a task early, ask for more work!

The attitude of people in this thread is laughable. People in this field are some of the most privileged, well paid members of our society.

To hear such persons moan and bleet over their lot is laughable. Grow up people. Just disgusting.

I don't know if anyone was advocating for going as far as you're suggesting (break doesn't mean paid vacation) - merely pointing out that an employee is granted the right to negotiate their labor at any point. If they get declined, that's fine. But the idea that you are a literal slave for 37.5 hours regardless of your capability is very flawed and you'll never convince the person that actually creates value of that.

The funny part for me is that I have grown up - I used to share your position but time and time again I was proved wrong, so I changed my mind.

There is zero defense for this. None.

There is no way to work 22.5 hrs per day, 5 days a week, and not be a thief, a crook, scum.

This is who you have aligned yourself with. This is the behaviour you have defended.

Into this conversation walked the spoiled, the entitled, the scam artist. People advocated working multiple full time jobs, and equated doing normal work as "slavery".

Above, you do so again. You liken working diligently, to slavery. Good grief.

Working beyond explicitly assigned tasks is not "performing more work for free". It's doing your job.

That's funny because if I hire a company to do some work on my house, they do strictly the tasks assigned and even try to charge me more than agreed. They don't try to make my house better.

The right analogy is you hire a full-time handyman (whatever go with it), and you come home to find them on your couch in the middle of the day, their excuse is I fixed the dishwasher, and your response is likely to be “I’m not paying you to sit on the couch, go change the ac filters, fix the garage door, and re-seal the deck”

If you want people to work beyond the bounds of their contract, then renegotiate the contract.

Without it being in the terms, it's not a duty you have to fulfill. It's not deceptive not to do favors for your supervisor.

Most people won't lie about it when they turn it in on Friday, they'll just turn it in when it is due and not explain. Why turn it in early if there is no reward for doing so other than more work?

As I've said elsewhere, this is a management problem, not an employee problem. As a manager I made sure people knew that there was a path to promotion, to advance within the corporation. I checked and tracked their progress and their work, and worked myself to make an environment where contributions were noted and rewarded. If a company or manager doesn't do that, they won't have people outperforming the base expectations for long, and they don't deserve to.

In a hypothetical case where someone only has 10 hours of stuff to do a week, I'm sympathetic, I'd be pretty bored by that too. But when I see a SWE describe a scenario like that, most of the time they end up meaning that they have 10 hours of coding tasks a week, because they don't consider anything else to be a real part of their job.

On the other hand, speaking of "delivering," companies like Amazon and UPS have figured it out. Amazon wouldn't care if you were working a second job, because they know your output down to the nearest Joule at any given moment.

What the hell else are you even doing that you don’t have time to ensure your employees are doing their job? You’re really not that busy.

Wow. That's...astounding. If you're such a poor manager that....managing...is too hard. Perhaps you should go back to IC work.

Employees don't have to be continuously monitored to see if they're doing work, that's how you wind up with spyware and butts in seats mentality. Are they checking in their work? Are they completing their stories on time? Are they getting near the average number of story points done in a sprint? If so, leave them the fuck alone.

Story points are supposed to be a proxy for amount of work required, seems reasonable to track that. It's not like I'm saying you should be measured by the lines of code you add or something arbitrary.

So yes the kind of process that plans everything in two week sprints and tracks tasks lasting maybe just a few hours each via daily meetings is micromanagement. That's what it's called when managers are so incapable of setting a clear direction and then trusting their people to get the job done that they have to check up on progress several times every day and constantly meddle with the real work.

It's mostly for planning, though.

You won't be able to do that for knowledge work, and you'll end up using proxies like butt-in-chair time or jira-tickets-closed which are easy to game and push away the actually competent workers that have outside options.

Just do your job as a manager.