https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33198708
(537 points, 356 comments)
Most contractors seem to have no mutuality of obligation to their clients and I have friends running two and three gigs who claim their clients are happy.
I’ve had contract engineers who were obviously engaging in the practice though, and it drove me up the wall.
It just seems so dishonest and at the same time perfectly legal.
e.g I worked with a non-exec board member who gave us 5 days a month in exchange for a certain amount of equity in the company.
No. Not all of us.
A contractor owes you exactly what's on the contract, usually a certain amount of work delivered; what she/he did outside of that is (or should be) of absolutely zero interest to you, unless it's some kind of corporate spying or other illegal or unethical behavior.
A full-time employee is usually working based on a certain number of hours, so they owe the company exactly those hours, no more no less; if during those hours they perform satisfactorily, again, anything they do outside those hours should hold zero interest to you.
Your coworkers are right: if they can successfully deliver results while juggling multiple jobs, why does that drive you up the wall?
It has always been common to have a main job and a side gig, a main job and moonlighting in hospitality or service industry.
Just get your deliverables in, use separate company laptops. The incentives for overachieving are non-existent, oh wow a 5% bonus/raise dangled in front of you for even more responsibility versus an entire parallel salary and compensation package at the expected contribution level.
[1] Many engineers will have side projects that they spend time on anyways. They may even care about & prioritize them more than your projects, no matter how much you pay them!
The output requested at a job can often be "not that much".
Where you lose me is on employment contracts making this illegal, that's quite a risky proposition.
Why not just get jobs as a contractor and be upfront?
Contractors usually don’t have this, which is why it’s perfectly legal for them to run two or three concurrent gigs, but when I’ve engaged a a “full time” contractor who is doing this, their performance - the amount they get done vs what is expected given their day rate - is terrible.
Some employers may require the full 38 hours, but let’s not forget the whole point of salary is for flexibility on behalf of the employee AND the employer. The employer may ask you to work a bit of overtime, but likewise it shouldn’t be expected that the employer “buys” you as a salaried employee. You get benefits like leave and the employer gets benefits such as you turning up every day. They pay you, you deliver results, if you don’t perform you get fired.
This is a different argument for contractors who do get paid by the hour so that starts to descend into some very ethical grey areas. Those grey areas mostly exist though because a lot of employees treat contractors like salaried employees (I.e. expectations are the same but no benefits).
I could never do it, but there isn’t really anything REALLY wrong with it.
The problem is that many creative jobs like software engineering (and yes, even the scutwork of software is still a creative endeavor) require more brain power on context than you can comfortably do as a single person.
And I say this as a SRE Consultant who explicitly has built my business on having multiple jobs. I have to reject work because it would overflow my ability to juggle and the fairly limited amount of things I currently know really well.
