How do you deal with remote people working multiple full-time jobs?

Hey folks,

I noticed pre-covid that businesses tend to make internal decisions such as spending and hiring, that even when not directly related to my department, ultimately affected the compensation they were available to offer me. Now with the pandemic closing a number of businesses it seems the issue of bad business decisions is even higher.

It's simply a matter of trust. If an employer is not providing the absolute maximum hypothetical compensation then we can all agree that is a truly disgusting and untrustworthy employer. I don't have exact numbers for my employer yet.

First of all, I'd like to figure out how I can identify an employer making business decisions I am unaware of. Generally it would be fine for me what businesses do internally but when it affects my salary, then it's not acceptable.

Secondly, if one has figured out that a business is taking private actions that one doesn't like, how should one handle that? I would need to quit that job the next day, but from a personal finance perspective I cannot easily afford leaving and acquiring new jobs from one day to another.

I'm looking forward to your experiences and ideas.

A colleague of mine took up a second job, not because of money, but he (we) literally had nothing to do. Every day I’d ask my team lead, every day he’d say he’ll find some work for me. I thought it was unethical for my colleague to do two jobs, but is it though?

You know the irony? He didn’t have much to do even in his second job. So he was collecting two paychecks for doing almost nothing and was bored/irritated. Whose fault is that?

I think your effort and time would be better spent in making sure your employees had enough, interesting work to keep them occupied, instead of spending time playing detective. Let’s say you found one or more of your employees are doing multiple jobs. What can you do about it, other than getting upset and firing them? What happens after you fire them? You’re gonna hire again, and play detective again, with the new employees? It is just a waste of time.

Overworking your employees is bad. So is underworking. I’d rather spend time keeping my employees happy than snooping on them.

Why do you care that someone has more than one job? If you can’t easily identify if someone has multiple jobs from decreased productivity then how does it matter? Do you have clear milestones and performance metrics? Do you pay your developers well enough that they don’t have to take on other jobs?

Think about what actual problem you have if some of your remote developers have two jobs. Can you measure the costs or risks? Or do perceive it as a betrayal or lack of control?

Ed Zitron wrote “If someone gets their work done to a high quality and on time and also happens to be working another job, you do not actually have a problem, and if anything, you’re lucky to have them.”

https://ez.substack.com/p/the-two-jobby-problem

I'm a CTO and I have been programming for a couple decades.

I don't care as long as I have the results delivered. I cannot imagine myself doing just a single development project during the week. Sometimes you absolutely have to switch contexts and think of a completely different task, perhaps in a different language/framework. I actually encourage that in a similar way Google encouraged people to work on their personal projects back in the day.

Having said that, it must be clear and transparent to all parties.

Mortgage rates just hit 5%+ here in US. CPI is up hugely in that last year. Some people are probably doing this out of necessity. I don't think you should be caring about this, it will come off like being a control freak to your employees. If they're not performing well, just fire them or focus on their perfomance in the ccontext of their job, but you don't need to address the why or how that you think is causing it. When someone performs poorly due to mental health reasons, do you delve into the reasons they're feeling bad and performing badly, and tell them what to do? No, that's not your job -- if anything you should help them get help. The same thing applies to work performance, focus on improving their performance but don't try to control what they do in the free time. The problem is, for every 1 person you tell to stop and accuse of abusing your generosity, you'll have someone else who isn't abusing it but simply working in their free time to make ends meet--yet you've now accused them. You will build a culture of resentment of people you falsely accuse and that could be damaging.

Aside from legal issues, this is a complex topic I'm also interested in, specifically for programmer / engineers, or in general people in tech, they are 1) knowledge workers 2) in high demand (market lack of such skills). 1) implies that working is not just about scheduling a certain number of hours per week to a task, it's a mindset thing. You're hiring their brains for an extended period of time on long projects, to achieve a bigger goal. 2) means they have tons of opportunities at a lot of others places. 1 and 2 together in general means they are pretty independent strong minded people (which is a good thing), that they can't be really controlled (which is a good thing) and they can do pretty much what they want in the time allocated to the employers.

Clever people on the internet will tell you it all comes down to trust between the employee and and employers.. Of course there is more to it, that's just the starting point of the discussion. How do you create and sustain that whole work relationship is a full time craft for a manager.

And then there is the debate between freelancing and employing. Freelancers are perfectly fine with multiple clients, it's part of the thing. But with knowledge employees, they are expected to be dedicated to your company (they don't have specific hours but a general goal to perform and a certain expectation of commitment), otherwise they're just playing the same game than freelancers, in disguise.

If you're going to tell me that "its just about setting some KPI / performance metrics, if you cant do that then you're not a good manager" then please don't also tell me at the same time "engineers should be free of all constraints, let them do their thing without any surveillance that's bad for their morale !" in others situations. We have to choose. Either we trust the person is going to be dedicated to us (or will come forward that they want to work with another company at the same time) without hard surveillance, or you're treating them like resources that we can manage, track and fire easily if the performance review is bad. No side of the spectrum is best, where to stop the slider is highly dependent on the situation and people too

"Generally it would be fine for me (/us) what people do in their non-work time, but if it affects our work, then it's not acceptable. So how can we identify such a situation?"

I feel like you just answered your own question. If you say you'll be fine with someone working multiple jobs if it doesn't affect their output then why would you need to "identify such a situation"?

Just let people do what they want and evaluate people's output and performance.

it’s not your problem. pay them more so they don’t need to juggle multiple jobs?