Slashdot Asks: Should an Employee Be Fired For Working On Personal Side Projects During Office Hours? (quora.com)

An anonymous reader writes: I found this article that talks about whether an engineer should be fired if s/he is working on a side project. Several people who have commented in the thread say that the employer should first talk to the person and understand why they are working on personal projects during the office hours. One reason, as many suggested, could be that the employee might not have been fairly compensated despite being exceptionally good at the job. In which case, the problem resides somewhere in the management who has failed to live up to the expectations. What do you folks think? Let's not just focus on engineers, per se. It could be an IT guy (who might have a lot of free time in hand), or a programmer.

Comments

It's not called office hours for nothing

[DontBeAMoran]

You're getting paid during office hours to work for the company, not to work on your personal projects.

Also, to basically everyone reading this: you're also not paid to read Slashdot - GET BACK TO WORK!

Re:Sadly?

[gnick]

Should an employee be fired for sitting and watching Baseball for a few hours on the company dime? How about watching the Flintstones? Playing Internet Poker?

Posting to Slashdot?

Re:This is seriously up to for debate..?

[HornWumpus]

I know an engineer who (along with 3 others) was left on an empty floor while they waited for a project to start, it was a couple of months.

When the project started, management found they had disassembled all the cubes on the floor and constructed a maze. The only way into the actual work area was crawling under a desk.