Excellent example article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-genz-working-2-remote-jobs-gets-away-with-it-2023-5
The more CEOs and managers that read this are also going to want more employee surveillance.
If someone betrays your trust or doesn’t perform the job adequately: fire them. If someone performs the job adequately and can hold down a second job simultaneously then what is the problem? If you’re concerned you’re not getting value for money either extend the scope of your job until they can no longer hold down two jobs simultaneously and have to choose one or the other or fire them and hire a less competent employee who takes twice the time to do the job and costs less. But both of these options seem pretty ludicrous. Honestly, the entire debate around this subject all just stems around ego and power/control driven managers who shouldn’t be in the job in the first place.
And no, I’ve never personally held two remote jobs simultaneously. But companies really need to move away from this “paying for time” mindset to “paying for the job” mindset. Like if they want to do remote and they’re concerned about this then why not just hire contractors?
Also firing people is not easy everywhere. In EU this is a complex process that can involve unions, trainings etc. While it's mostly a ton of paperwork that you just do it just adds up to spending money on a person who didn't want to work there anyway.
I think that is a risk with hiring regardless. Both sides have an information gap.
I joined a place and within a week realized it was a disaster and I didn't want to work there. If the company had informed me half the teams had quit / was in the process of quiting I would not have joined. It's not like I could go back and get my old job
It sucks being a manager and pumping tons of time trying to get someone up to speed and not knowing if they just need more investment and support that will pay off or if they aren't reciprocating effort and working other jobs.
After being burned, my default is little compassion and investment in full remote employees. Ill train in office employees because I have more confidence I'm not wasting my time.
This is on top of the fact that multiple employment usually requires directly lying to your manager and coworkers, inflating task difficulty, or creating problems for others to slow the overall pace of a project.
It is hard to detect liars, cheats, and saboteurs in workplaces with a baseline expectation of trust and low micromanagement.
The problem IMHO is not people who do a great job on time, but people who inflate timelines, and derail projects.
If you give someone a novel problem, and they say it is difficult and will take 80 hours instead of 20, the only way to catch them in the act is to duplicate the work yourself or with another employee. Similarly, if they raise lots of questions and involve other people, it is difficult to determine if these are valid complications, or manufactured complexity, without replicating the work.
Humans are pretty good at deceit.
Not to say that stupid bosses, reacting emotionally to such "cheating", won't make life crappier for lots of people. But stupid bosses and their emotional reaction were making life crappier for lots of people back when "remote work" meant "pulling on a rope, with the other end connected to the block of stone that we're hauling up the side of this new pyramid".
And - stupid bosses are always going to have obsessions that make your life miserable. Having him obsessing over something that you (99% chance) have no real interest in doing may be better than the alternatives.
If you "get away with it", either:
1) your manager is not tracking and managing your time/productivity properly, or,
2) you're actually fit for purpose, the company is happy with your output, it meets expectations for what they pay and things are totally normal.
Nobody is obliging these companies to employ these people.
Programmers working agile should have a throughput denominated in story points and managers should come to an understanding of their bandwidth over a little time. They can then reason about whether they're working on par or not. The reality is that you have a lot of managers not being effective, who enable all these cheats as well as a legion of just regularly mediocre people to skate on by, bill 8 hours, do very little and go home.
Big companies continue to make so much profit that employing such people (shitty managers and programmers) is not really a big deal regardless.
Our startup was acqui-hired. We were assigned to the one VP who voted against hiring us. That VP then devoted themself to managing us out. Natch. We were literally prohibited from doing new work; support existing clients only. While requiring us to file time sheets and status reports (forcing us all to lie).
One teammate really got into everything Clojure.
Another went back to school to get his MBA.
One teammate launched his next startup. He'd drive into work, remote back to his own computers, and code like a demon. He did quite well.
I ran for office. I did less well.
Our H1Bs, unfortunately, had a terrible time.
If you have a multi-stage dev pipeline-- say with a user-testing, audit, or compliance phase somewhere in there-- it can become the bottleneck. If you have devs who can potentially push through N story points per sprint, but then it goes to {user testing, audit, compliance, QA, etc} that taps out at smaller M points, there's a lot of slack in the system.
Better and more engaged line managers solves the problem.
On the other end, you have BigTech salaries that start around $150K at the low end. An intern I mentored in 2021 got a return offer of about that much.
What side do software jobs in mining end up on? That’s not a rhetorical question. I honestly don’t know.
Which tech companies are profitable, pay in the same range as those 6 and are still allowing fully remote work?
In this environment, I wouldn’t move to any company that’s not profitable. Not that profitability prevents layoffs. I definitely wouldn’t hang my hat on “equity” in a non public company.
I work at AWS. But my position “cloud consulting” was always designed to be fully remote even pre-Covid. I was assigned to a “virtual office” when I was hired.
If they had changed that, there would have had to have been a long conversation about compensation increase. I agreed to my compensation explicitly because it was fully remote in a lower cost of living area.
I still honestly would have only stuck it out until the job market improved.
Those anecdotes, those testimonials, those surveys... All aligned with the advertisers interests... Are obviously propaganda.
This is just propaganda meant to get people back to the office, poorly veiled propaganda at that.
If the person signed conflicting agreements and violated those agreements; its pretty clear what the lawyers will say to do. It will be one of those moments that seems like out of a sitcom, with a joke waiting but the response is more serious... "this is what we are going to do, you are lucky that is all we are going to do".
If the work gets done and you aren't in violation of agreements there is nothing wrong with working multiple jobs especially when as a CEO of a larger company you've participated in suppressing worker wages.
More specifically why do we consider some jobs as being "greater than one job is mandatory" (because being able to afford food and rent is important) but for other jobs it is not?
If a company thinks the only thing that is important is that you are "working" 40 hours a week, and that they'll force you in the office to ensure that. They don't care about what you do in that office, and they don't care about getting your job done: the hours you're at your desk is more important than anything else.
All of that indicates incompetent management, and terrible task distribution.
At the same time as an employee of such a company I would take such messaging as being an explicit "working harder or longer than your coworkers it will not be rewarded", because again the message is "time at desk is the important thing not what you do or accomplish".
Is still "ok"?
Non competes in Canada and the EU are generally not enforceable but you see them regularly. Why should this line be any different.
Edit: which -> why
Because it most definitely is not about non-compete agreements in the usual (post-employment) sense.
You understand that, right?
If you're meeting their expectations it's none of their business in my opinion.
But hey -- you're quite welcome to believe otherwise, of course -- and to throw yourself against the wheels of the legal system on the basis of your "opinion" of how they ought to work, if you like. It's a free country, after all.
I'm sure they can fire you but it seems to be "at will" employment in most of the US anyway.
In Ireland and Canada such a clause would likely fall under being "unreasonable" for low paid employees. Similar to how a "non-compete" is not worth the paper it's written on (excluding when direct financial compensation is paid. Eg gardening leave).
IMO, companies are stuck with real estate leases or purchased buildings. New companies will shun real estate and as leases expire so will existing companies. Companies with purchased buildings will force their employees to the office until they are convinced they are not competitive in the job market, then they will dump that office space.
Example, Salesforce exited a building literally named after itself...
https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2023/04/13/salesforce-t...
If we worry about everything then I guess people in the offices should stop working efficiently cause that will ruin remote work too? Nah, cause Business gonna business, they don't care about what's "right".
Just stop worrying and enjoy what's currently available to you :D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35944295
So yea, business gonna business. No sense in worrying about it. They'll either force you with random reasons or not.
If they can't tell their productivity is down, then they will likely stay uncompetitive even in the office.