In the US, many companies have exclusivity clauses in the employment contract, meaning it’s breach of contract to do paid work for another company at the same time. The typical agreement being made by an employer is salary in return for the employee’s full time attention, where full time means ~40 hours of work per week, or sometimes more. As a manager I do care if my employees work significantly less than full time and devote that time to other paying jobs, especially if they do good work. That’s opportunity cost; if they could be producing more in the ~40 hrs/week agreement we have, they’re cheating the company and violating the agreement they made. I don’t care if they do hobby work or open source projects in their spare time, if they’re fulfilling their agreed upon obligations.
Ok, but if I have L7 vision and skills, but get hired as a L4, and can complete my work in 10h/week, what right does the company have to demand more than that? It sounds like a mismatch between level/salary and skills. If a person can fulfill their role profile, isn't that what the company hired them for? We aren't talking about officer-level positions here.
> If a person can fulfill their role profile, isn’t that what the company hired them for?
Generally speaking, no. Full time jobs are supposed to be full time, and the expectation, and explicit agreement the employee signed up for, is that employees will apply their skills for 40h/week regardless of level, vision, or skills.
Have you read your employment contract and/or employee handbook? You probably have one or both of those even if you don’t know it, but if you don’t have one of those, have you asked your employer what they think about this, whether they agree to let you work 10h/week and keep your full salary if you can “complete” your work? It sounds funny to me to even say it that way. At no time in my life has there been a specific set of tasks and work per week after which I could say my work was complete, software engineering doesn’t work like that.
Again, the right the company has to demand your full time attention is that was the agreement you signed up for: salary in return for 40h/week of your best effort.
I don’t think L7 can do 40 hours of L4 work in 10 hours. In my experience L7 can do things L4 cannot do in principle, no matter how much time they have. This makes their time more valuable.
I guess you’re lucky, TYL. Just checking since most people don’t read their employment contracts carefully - have you actually checked for exclusivity clauses? Are you talking about full time engineering work, or something else? Exclusivity clauses are less common for part time work, contract work, and labor jobs. I’ve seen both exclusivity clauses and non-compete clauses for multiple jobs, both at large established companies (e.g. Disney) and for smaller startups.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and a bunch of others famously got busted colluding to avoid hiring from each other, and the employment contracts at the time also had exclusivity clauses. I know because mine did, and I received a payout from the settlement of that lawsuit.
