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I have and have had several coworkers that remained very productive at work while running their own businesses on the side.

My own personal experience was much as you say. (I kept my day job for 8 months while trying to do my startup on the side.) Eventually I found that the startup was all-consuming, I couldn't concentrate well on my day job, so I quit.

I can't help thinking that maybe this is because of my inexperience as an entrepreneur, though. Because several people have created successful startups while employed by someone else. Steve Wozniak did the Apple I, video controllers, floppy disks, and all sorts of other hardware while employed by HP. Pierre Omidyar created E-bay and grew it to profitability before he quit his day job. Joshua Schacter wrote del.icio.us while employed by Morgan Stanley. Bill Gates grew Microsoft while both he and Paul Allen were employed by Altair.

I've yet to read a single real-world example of a person who has a full-time employee on staff working on their own business, or who is a full-time employee working on their own business while being paid a salary by another company.

You're clearly not reading carefully, because I pointed out examples where I've done this, and I'm sure many others have as well. Most businesses are started on the side of something else, including most successful businesses. While it's likely true that you can't indefinitely work as an employee while building a business, you can certainly start a business that way, and it's been done many, many times before.

I'm not arguing that you shouldn't have the right to fire someone if you don't like them working on something else on their own time, just that your mindset is indicative of a larger management problem of viewing your employees as assets that you own 24/7. Why would anyone of value want to work somewhere like that? There are plenty of people out there who value output over input and understand that an employee's personal life is none of their business.

Dude, you're hiring contractors for temporary work. Of course they have their own businesses!

Put someone on your payroll full-time with benefits, paid vacation and sick leave and then encourage them to start a business on their own time while you pay them full wages. Then you'll have something to crow about.

The only information that should come into play when making decisions about the firing of full-time employees should be their actions between the time they start work and end work every day. Your preconceived notions about how an employee's outside activities affect their job will not apply to everyone, and are irrelevant to the question of continuing their employment.

Find me five examples of where it has worked. Can't be hard if it's true.

How mature does their business have to be? Markus Frind (of plentyoffish.com) doesn't have an outside full-time job, but from what I hear he easily could. But the issue is not whether there are examples. The issue is that you shouldn't need to know whether an employee his a business or not. You look at their performance and nothing else. If you're right, their performance will suffer and you have reason to let them go. If you're wrong, you'll never even realize they have a business on the side. However, the converses of these two statements don't hold.

Markus Frind had a day job for most of the time he was developing PlentyOfFish - when he's described his development process, he said "Basically every waking moment outside my day job was devoted to improving the site, trying out ideas, and making it better for my users."

BTW, between your post and mine up-thread, that's 5 examples. Microsoft, Apple, E-bay, Del.icio.us, and PlentyOfFish.

Steve Wozniak, Joshua Schachter, Craig Newmark, Brewster Kahle, Markus Frind

> The only information that should come into play when making decisions about the firing of full-time employees should be their actions between the time they start work and end work every day

This just simply isn't true. Imagine if your CFO gets caught with hookers and blow by the cops on a Saturday night. It may not affect his work during work hours but it most definitely negatively affects your company from a PR perspective.

So you just can't make a blanket statement like that.

I assumed that serious issues such as illegal behavior were obviously excluded from my statement. Your case also applies to the defense industry where disclosure of classified information can land you in jail. I'm talking about clearly legitimate out-of-work activities here.

> assumed that serious issues such as illegal behavior were obviously excluded from my statement.

It wasn't obvious but it sounds like we agree so no harm done:)

I've yet to read a single real-world example of a person who has a full-time employee on staff working on their own business

That they know of! It's not exactly the kind of thing most sensible people would draw attention to.

Well, gee, if it's so awesome to empower one's staff to start their own business while working on your payroll, I'd expect employers of software developers would be trumpeting their fine examples from the hills to attract the best staff possible!

Why the silence? Because starting a business while working full-time for another employer does not work, and any person who has started their own software development company would understand why.

Define "own business": I guess if you are looking for multi-million dollar businesses being run in someone's spare time, yeah, you won't find many examples. But what about the guy who simply wants to have a second source of income by running something in his spare time? Plenty of examples of people who turn a hobby into something that resembles a business. Plenty of people earning a second income by trading something, creating something. How much revenue is enough? 5K / month?

I wonder if Einstein was bad in his patent office work because of his involvement in his relativity side project.