IT services giant Wipro fires 300 for moonlighting | Hacker News Reader

IT services giant Wipro fires 300 for moonlighting

theregister.com

31 pointsBrajeshwar10 comments

It's one thing to fire employees who breach contract & another to tell them what they can do when they are not working.

Would love to see these sort of policies be applicable for senior members who sit of countless boards of other companies as well.

It's surely quite common for employment contracts to forbid taking a second job in the same business type.

In Wipro's case the employees were working for competitors not just doing the same kind of generic work; I'm pretty sure that most companies would object to that rather strongly.

I’ve had employment contracts (financial services) that forbade any other employment at all.

I wasn’t surprised by this. If your contract is one for a professional, knowledge worker type role and you’re paid according to your results or output, then the company wants you to focus all of your working attention on it. If you’ve got mental capacity to do more work, do it for them, get rewarded accordingly.

> get rewarded accordingly.

Nope. Same companies have an overtime clause that allows them to pay you absolutely zero for that extra work.

> companies have an overtime clause that allows them to pay you absolutely zero for that extra work.

Not where I live they don't! And they can't require unlimited overtime either.

This would be a sound approach, if reward was proportional to effort or output. It's most assuredly not, and everyone pretty much knows that by now.

Nope, not common at all. And the word competitor could be every other company out there. Unless every company demands to see tax returns it will be difficult to verify anything from taking after-school classes/tuitions, stock trading....may just push people to take up contract work or freelance for the most part.

FTA: "Rishad Premji, executive chairman of Indian IT services giant Wipro, revealed on Wednesday that the company fired 300 employees for moonlighting with its competitors."

The problem was not that they did work on the side, the problem is that they did it for the competition. The CEO notes it would have been different if the employees had been working on side projects of their own.

I mean, who doesn’t compete with Wipro?

> one thing to fire employees who breach contract & another to tell them what they can do when they are not working.

Those can definitely be the same thing (in America).

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