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Comment by Hnrobert42 | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: I’m okay with this. I feel angry at those who lack integrity and work two full-time, salaried jobs.

At a previous job where we were all 100% remote, we dealt with an employee who did this. We caught him because his work quality was poor and he was unavailable for days at a time on Slack. It took a lot of time to investigate and justify the firing.

After being fired, he laughed with folks about how long he got away with his subterfuge. This job paid $100k+. IMO, his actions were criminal. He stole from the company.

I am usually EXTREMELY passionate about data privacy. My worry is that I don’t know for what purpose companies will use my data – that they will use it unfairly against me. Excepting errors, IMO, this is a fair use.

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>We caught him because his work quality was poor and he was unavailable for days at a time on Slack

And what if his work quality had been consistent and his availability what you expected it to be? Would you still have this reaction?

An employee having another job is basically none of the employers' business.

Of course, if an employee's being useless, perhaps warn / eventually fire them, irrespective to whether they have a second job, which again should be none of the employers' business.

It is really difficult to objectively evaluate performance. If nothing else, evaluators have their own inherent biases. Multiple paychecks is an objective measure. It helps determine whether a borderline employee just needs help and support or had chosen to underperform.

I believe companies have a duty to try to help struggling employees. The corollary is employee’s must do their best for their employer.

If an employee is doing a great job, they can have 50 simultaneous jobs. I don’t care.

> We caught him because his work quality was poor and he was unavailable for days at a time on Slack.

> It took a lot of time to investigate and justify the firing.

So you already knew the work was of poor quality. That's enough reason to let them go. Why do you need to investigate and justify it any further? You don't need to invade their privacy.

> I feel angry at those who lack integrity

I feel angry about a lot of stuff but employees exploiting corporations isn't one of them. I wouldn't do it myself because that's not how my father raised me to behave. I just don't really feel anything when others do it.

Do you think these companies have integrity, loyalty? They have an generally terrible reputation due to their long history of having neither. Do you seriously believe they're a victim here? I mean, we're in a thread discussing the overreach of surveillance capitalism that enables collusion to reduce wages. All this integrity talk is ridiculous in that light.

The fact is that employee just didn't work out for the company. A false positive in the interview process. That's always a risk when you work with other human beings. He didn't "steal" from the company.

We were a small company. They still do have a great deal of integrity and loyalty. A company is only the people operating it.

He absolutely stole from the company. He agreed to do his best for at least 40 hours a week. The company paid him for that.

Integrity means to do what you say you are going to do. Two wrongs don’t make a right. If he didn’t like the company, he could have quit.

Edit: To the theft part, I will also add that while that employee was “working” for the company, we were unable to hire someone else. So not only was he stealing from the company, he was stealing the opportunity from someone else.

> Why do you need to investigate and justify it any further?

In the case of my previous employer, we did not use the Equifax service. However, we did have to compile significant evidence of underperformance. Do not underestimate the difficulty of firing someone, even in the U.S.

Ok but you could've hired someone that was incompetent enough to do same shitty results while working full time in your company. In both cases they'd be fired for shit performance

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