I've had the luxury of a 36.5 hour work week, with no on call for about 18 years. It exists, but don't expect $300,000 salaries with it. You want to be rich, or do you want to live a rich life?
My work phone goes into DnD from 5pm until 8am. I don't answer emails or phone calls, and I don't make exceptions for free.
If I'm on call for a weekend, I bill 16 hours, regardless of if I worked, because I cannot go anywhere if I'm needed at my laptop.
When I go on vacation, I leave my phone at home and take an sim-less android, and buy a new sim/number when I reach my destination.
While you're employed? This is terrible advice. You get consulting money for combining expertise with availability. Younger employees have neither of these. If I found out one of my salaried employees was moonlighting I'd immediately be looking for evidence that it had the slightest impact on their responsibilities & performance. I'd be very surprised not to find any PDQ
I've done some freelance work while also having a full-time job. It's great at first, when you still think that you can give 100% to your dayjob and fit the freelance work into your free time on evenings and weekends. If you can find relaxed contract work that fits to your schedule without detracting from your dayjob, then by all means go for it.
The problem is that contract work is rarely perfectly asynchronous like that. It won't take long until the company has some questions about your work that require a phone call during daytime hours. Or they find a one-liner issue that they need fixed ASAP, not when you have free time. Or they say they would like to continue paying you for contract work, but only if you can start responding faster during the day and turning requests around more quickly.
All of these pressures start adding up, tempting you to sandbag your salaried dayjob so you can have more hours to rake in that incremental hourly contracting money. In my case, I chose to give up contracting to avoid any moral, ethical, or legal breaches with my day job. However, I've seen many junior employees sabotage their own career progress by spreading themselves too thin with salaried work and freelancing work. Something has to give.
Worse yet, I've seen at least one case where someone used their company laptop and company phone for the contracting work for clients. Per your employment agreement, that puts the ownership of the code into a gray area. You don't want to go there, but when the clients are hammering your e-mail and phone for an answer it's tempting to just give in and interleave that work with your dayjob. Bad idea.
Finally, there's a myth that employees have a finite amount of work each week. When we do sprint planning, we calibrate to velocity, based on how much work the employee got done last week. I rely on my employees to help inform me about reasonable estimates and to help judge task complexity. Side hustlers have a misaligned incentive to exaggerate complexity, sandbag on tasks, and otherwise manipulate the system to minimize their dayjob workload. Less dayjob work equals more time for freelance income.
Bottom line: Some people can pull it off in rare circumstances, but more often than not a side hustler on your team will drag everyone down.
a predictable response, but it's the wrong one which will surely lose your company plenty of money and valuable employees extremely rapidly while generating a tremendous amount of ill-will from the people in your network. really, it's the attitude that's creating the problematic and unprofitable approach here. aside from being disgustingly invasive and utterly reprehensible from a social perspective, you've also put yourself in a position where you're spending your company's time on something that will never generate it any financial returns, only more costs when the employee discovers your snooping and inevitably ditches you and you need you find a replacement on short notice.
the correct response here is to re-evaluate how much you're paying the employees that are moonlighting because it clearly isn't enough to keep them appeased, which means that by definition it isn't enough to keep them operating at 100% during the hours you expect to be getting 100% of their energy and potential for productive output. in other words, moonlighting employees need a raise because at the salary you're paying them, they know they can't afford to stop looking for more opportunities to work for pay. when you do find a reason to give that employee a raise proactively, you'll increase their output to the level you thought you were purchasing with the initial salary negotiations. you'll also increase their loyalty to the company, and avoid intruding on their private life, which is explicitly, irrevocably, and unimpeachably beyond your purview, consideration, or examination under any conditions whatsoever.
in a nutshell: focus on things you can change, then stay in your lane.
Might be true for some people, but it's not the primary motivation for freelancers. Usually it's the highly-skilled, highly-paid people who are in a position to pick up freelance work, not your lowest-paid workers at the bottom of the hierarchy. They do it not because they need the money, but because it's there for the taking and they get to work on something interesting while they do it.
With a salaried dayjob, your effective hourly rate goes down with each additional hour you work. With a freelance job, your effective income goes up with each additional hour worked.
Someone who has both types of job at the same time has an incentive to minimize their input to their dayjob so they can maximize the incremental income from their freelancing work. Sure, theoretically a perfect employee could keep their dayjob perfectly isolated from freelancing work, but in practice people with an hourly side hustle can't resist the temptation to sandbag at work.
The whole crux of the argument for shorter workdays and shorter workweeks is that people only have so many productive hours each week. Past the point of diminishing returns, their work quality and productivity drop. If someone is working 40 hour weeks, commuting, and also freelancing for another 10-30 hours per week, which job gets their best hours? Which job gets their least productive hours?
In my experience, side-hustle freelancers always let their dayjob work output slip, whether they expect to or not. This is why you need to watch employees very closely as soon as you get wind that they're freelancing.
It's absurd to expect 100% in the first place. All you should be concerned with is whether or not someone is getting their work done. Not whether they are capable of doing even more.
Do you also acknowledge the weeks their performance is better than average? Do you compensate them for it, or is it just a given?
You have the right to be concerned about someone's time but only while they are at work. Your employees get to do what they want outside of work hours.
I'd wager those X hours a week in the office are often not the most important part of your life, why should it be for them?
Every second you are employed, you should be keeping one eye on whether your current employer is about to screw you, and another eye on your exit strategy for when they inevitably do. Scan the job postings monthly. Never reject a feeler that comes through your network. No loyalty for the disloyal.
If I found out that my boss was cracking down on a co-worker for suspected moonlighting, I'd start looking for other work myself.
You don't own the lives of those you employ. While it's perfectly reasonable that if you see quality slippage you should react - actively searching for an excuse to fire someone for having a side gig is like a weird possessive and jealous relationship. Additionally, if folks at your company are picking up side gigs then maybe you should review your compensation because there's probably a reason people aren't content with their current working situation.
Not just compensation but other stuff like the ability to take on different types of projects and learn new stuff on the job.
If I have a job that has me do the same thing with the same tech stack for whoever knows how long, I'm going to grow stale. I don't want to grow stale, that's both boring and also denying myself future opportunities and generally just putting myself at a disadvantage. Possibly very screwed if/when the company decides I'm no longer needed.
You realize that moonlighting gives them skills they can use to help you.
If they're moonlighting, it means either you or they are missing something in your work contract, that should concern you.
It takes a lot of work to not work that much. I used to spend 20% of my time selling/pitching/quoting/etc for free.
Right now I have a semi-stable 30-35hr/week gig, so I'm not having to sell any.
So now I just need to keep upping my rate.
If you were working as a painter, a carpenter, a landscaper etc. Would people find it acceptable if you painted for an hour and charged for 15 hours? Just because they needed you for one?
To be clear, I am not attempting to demonize you or anything, but to me, this seems like a sort of entitlement that tech workers have that some other workers just cannot experience.
How can other professionals obtain that level of freedom?
In other words, no, it's not "reasonable" (reasonable being whatever people can agree on) for a painter or carpenter, but this is not intrinsic to the job itself. It's incidental to the accident that those jobs generally have less market power. If a carpenter did manage that, they could do it too.
If a company puts a demand on your time, they need to pay for that time no matter what your profession. So when I'm on call on a weekend and I'm expected to answer my phone and be immediately available and connected to the client, I'm billing them for the fact that I cannot leave the confines of my internet.
I worked for one of the big tech vanity names held as a poster child in the AU. They started to introduce mandatory on-call, which was non-negotiable. For an extra $200 AUD (ex tax) a week, you had the privilege of sacrificing all your personal time. Carrying a laptop, having constant phone-signal, not drinking, and being completely available within 15-30 minutes of the first ping was mandatory; otherwise, you could be facing disciplinary action.
Effectively it's a huge pay cut at less than minimum wage. For the loss of personal hours, you'd get significantly more money taking any minimum wage job. I don't go to work for free, I go to pay the bills.
Then the management blackmail starts, you get free food...a deli counter and fridge of soft drinks which I never used anyway. Then you get the be a team player, take it for the team emotional blackmail.
I'd happily do on-call on a best attempt if I'm available I'll answer the call for free. Restrict my personal time/activities outside work, I want paying at least minimum wage per hour after your company just IPO'd and worth several billion.
I find it a bit despicable in the AU when owners who are the only ones to really benefit in case of success (never seen a stock option here) say we are a startup and have to make sacrifices to make it (big) etc.
First sight of trouble and your job is gone; I struggle to see the upside for anyone other than the owners.
You should have to pay for on-call service.
It is perfectly common (and reasonable) to be expected to be compensated something for being available outside your normal hours.
E.g. many plumbers will charge you extra (or build into their fees) for a sunday emergency call, why shouldn't a developer ?
If I were in that consultants shoes I probably wouldn't propose 16 hours, but for sure I would bump my hourly rate (say 1.5x) or a min charge of 4 hours or something, if you wanted me available on say an hours notice over the weekend. If you wanted me available at the drop of a hat it would be more.
Scheduling normal work over weekends, etc. is a different issue, but being "on call" should always involve some compensation for the impact on your life.
The entire point is to not work during that time.
When you are informally on-call you are unable to enjoy your time to the fullest, your employer is demanding a price from you without compensating you for your time, it is an obligation of yours for yourself, your friends and family and your co-workers to demand fair compensation for this time - that's a key component of labour exchange in the free market and good unions exist to help protect those rights for junior employees who tend to have less leverage when negotiating their rights than more senior folks.
By being in such demand that the people who want to hire you will agree to those contract terms. If you’re extremely good at what you do and what you do makes our saves people lots of money they’ll deal with your problems. At the other end if your client is willing to keep on paying ever escalating rates they can be massive unreasonable assholes and you’ll still keep on working with them because the money’s just that good.
Thankfully that never happened because while we were all quite respectful about each other's time due to the jurisdiction and industry we worked in none of us were eligible for OT even during stat holidays. Were that company within a more reasonable line of business I'd demand a setup like that and feel perfectly justified - and that's pretty much why I don't work in the games industry anymore.
Maybe we could compromise on everyone could working 38 or 36 hours a week for somewhere between 80k and 140k.