Indian Engineer Caught Secretly Working For Up To Five US Tech Companies At Once | Outlook India By all accounts he was a qualified and effective engineer. I do think it's interesting that he was caught and fired repeatedly before someone thought to "go public" about it.
I immediately think, "Where were his supervisors in this?" It is a supervisor's responsibility to set expectations, prepare employees to meet them, facilitate their success, provide performance feedback, and recognize that performance. Instead, too many choose to count noses (attendence) and watch the clock. Neither of these is productive and, even when employees are required to be present in the office (or virtually in other situations), leave them available to pursue other activities, including jobs. A properly challenged, engaged, and supervised employee could not do this. But even more importantly, if that employee is meeting the requirements, who cares what he or she does elsewhere?
It's an ethical issue, it usually means the employee could have done much more and be even more productive. Some companies have rules that forbid working for another company, at the minimum, during the employee's work hours. I didn't read the whole article and don't know if there was conflict of interests and other violations, that are subject to disciplinary action, up to termination and in some cases legal actions as well.
This assumes many facts that are not in evidence. It also blames the employee when it is the supervisors' (plural possessive) responsibility to manage employee performance. I'm not saying the guy is blameless. But what are supervisors for if they cannot even cope with this dereliction?
I hear your point and largely agree—supervisors do carry responsibility for oversight. But it's also worth noting that in some industries, especially in high-tech and IT, the nature of work and supervision has changed dramatically. Today, many roles are fully remote, and employees may never meet their coworkers in person. With the right tools and communication habits, distributed teams can collaborate effectively across time zones with minimal direct oversight. In such environments, as long as someone is responsive, appears active, delivers results, and submits timesheets, their performance might not raise any red flags. From experience, I’ve seen people juggle two full-time jobs, and I even knew someone who handled four. Personally, I’ve held demanding roles where even one job left little room for anything else. But for someone with the capacity—or perhaps a pressing financial motivation—it’s not unheard of, as we see in this thread. The issue is more complex. While supervision should catch underperformance, it's also true that modern work culture allows more autonomy than ever before. That flexibility can be both empowering and open to misuse.
Excellent question! I was the supervisor in a similar situation. I hired a guy straight out of college. He was an excellent engineer. After working a few years he came to me and said he wanted to earn a masters degree. He asked if he could work from home and keep some odd hours. I told him sure. At that time I assigned him to a one man project that was expected to take about a year to complete. When the year was nearing the end, he said that he had lost the code. He said he never checked in the code instead keeping it on a flash drive. He lost the flash drive. I gave him the lowest rating for that year, a NI (Needs Improvement). That also meant he wasn't eligible for a raise. Soon after that I retired. I heard a year or two later that the company had hired a new lady. That lady said that this fellow also worked at her old company for a few years and was surprised that he also was working at the same time for my old company. My old company fired him immediately. So obviously he was being paid to work full time at two jobs (at least ).
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/business/articles/over-employed-engineer-caught-secretly-115532357.html “He really crushed my interview. I interviewed around 50 people in the prior two weeks before talking to him and he passed, by far, all of the people I interviewed,” he said. “He also was a very likeable person.” An over-employed engineer was caught secretly working for multiple Silicon Valley startups at once—picking up salary offers of up to $200K per job
I don't blame him! Milk those employers and retire early. There's too much corporate greed, especially in the U.S.
Hmm, I wonder if there are p/t work from home options that are available for me... (thinking of doing something remotely, work at home)
I've worked remote since 2011, before it was cool! Most work can be remote work. I worked as a remote call center worker, nonprofit program manager, business analyst, IT implementation consultant, and now Salesforce Administrator. Smaller nonprofits definitely have part-time positions available, so that might be the first place to look. Teachers/facilitators/professors of course also work part time, adjuncting. You could also look into teaching English over webcam, there are several platforms for that (though I can't recommend any because I've never done that work myself.)
