We aren't talking about people holding mulitple low-paying jobs to make ends meet. It's mostly people in well payed positions taking advantage of being remote.
It's a tricky problem that I don't necessarily have an answer to. My point was that it's misleading to compare people who have to work multiple jobs to survive with people who are making hundreds of thousands at each job.
Example from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784608:
> As far as the money goes, my math goes like this:
> - 1 job: 250-300K cash, 250-300K equity (at the high end, higher if I moved to management)
> - 4 jobs: My current situation is 225K avg cash (including bonuses) per job, 100K avg equity per job
You can't look at this and say (like the GP comment did) "how about paying employees adequately".
It’s up to the employer to set clear performance expectations and measurements, then handle employees who don’t meet those expectations as a job performance problem. If the employer can’t do that basic management work, preferring to pry and control and intimidate their employees into submission, they deserve what they get.
I don’t understand the argument “They are already well-paid so they shouldn’t look to make more money.” Try that on the C-suite execs who sit on multiple corporate boards.
Yes, and that's the question that OP is asking - how do you set those expectations and measurements. It's a starting point for the whole conversation, not the end of it.
> I don’t understand the argument “They are already well-paid so they shouldn’t look to make more money.”
I've never made this argument or seen anyone else in the thread make this argument.
> First of all, I'd like to figure out how we can identify someone working more than we are aware of. 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?
The question indicates the OP doesn’t have a way to measure performance, and instead focuses on identifying employees who might have other jobs.
> I've never made this argument or seen anyone else in the thread make this argument.
I must have misunderstood what you meant by this:
> We aren't talking about people holding mulitple low-paying jobs to make ends meet. It's mostly people in well payed positions taking advantage of being remote.
One could read “taking advantage of being remote” more than one way, but in the context I read it as people already paid well taking advantage of their employer.
While this statement is true, I'm nonetheless interested in a good ways to measure and agree on performance metrics. But please metrics that do not affect (especially the remote) in a negative way. Personally I'm not so much of a fan to put number of people's performances, especially in development, which makes it really hard some times.
If your performance metric comes down to “Employee has blocked out eight hours per day exclusively to me” then you’re a terrible manager and employer.
I would almost play along with bullshit check-in calls like you describe if I could call my manager and the company executives randomly to check if they’re actually working too, and not golfing or buying NFTs with my withheld taxes.
whether that takes eight hours or four, and whether it happens during normal business hours or at 3 am
I could call my manager and the company executives randomly to check if they’re actually working too
Employers can’t give employees “full freedom.” Nor can they prohibit the employee doing whatever they want on their own time. Forcing employees to commit to one job is just coercion unless there’s some clear business rationale behind it, not just control and an attitude that the employer owns the employee.
In that context you can take your math and divide by 10 to get the mainland EU average for software engineer salary (~40k). With up to 50% tax rate gives incentive to have multiple jobs if your diet consists more than of plain yogurt and bread.