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Ask HN: Thoughts on Overemployment?

2 points by frabjoused ↗ HN
I just went through a rough case this week where one of my employees was overemployed FT by three companies and pushing commits to these throughout the workday. When confronted he denied it despite overwhelming evidence, gaslighted me by painting me as untrusting and used that as an excuse to quit.

Is it worth hunting down this type of behavior? I honestly don’t have a problem with someone having a side gig, but when it reduces their attention to just being able to do the bare minimum asked of them it seems very unethical.

4 comments

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billy99k
How did you find out it was three companies?

I don't see how you could possibly give your full attention to one job when working for multiple at the same time.

I also wouldn't want an employee accidentally committing proprietary code/logins, which could be a huge security issue.

a 'side gig' to me means working on it outside of working hours, not at the same time.

This is just dishonest.

frabjoused
I started looking because there were little things - he would not use his camera on zoom when the rest of the company does, he would only screenshare one tab at a time, he would not put us on his LinkedIn profile.

I looked around and noticed 3x more commits to private repos daily from his GitHub than commits to our company.

After confronting him he said people from his past companies must have been using his GitHub account. (Are you kidding me)

I asked him to solve it then and there by screenshotting and showing me what the private commits are. The screenshot had commits to two other companies.

ogarten
1st of all: sounds incredibly controlling.

They could also work on things in their free time and to be honest, as long as they do their work you shouldn't need to care. You only buy 8h of their time usually.

Camera off: Oh shit, I don't want to be watched in larger zoom meetings

Sharing one tab at the time: Crazy. How dare them.

LinkedIn is none of your business. It's their private profile and they can do whatever the hell they want with that.

I am not saying they aren't overemployed but your behavior isn't exactly at its best either.

frabjoused
Sure, but none of the above things would ever merit a mention. I don't care about any of these particular things. But when all of them are combined it's a red flag. So I looked into it and it turned out I was right. I bought 8h of his time but was getting maybe 2 or 3 and no attention. For every 5 commits to our repos, there were about 35 to other private repos, and it was happening throughout our workday.