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

You were hired to work for THEM

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for yourself. You want to work on your projects, do it on your time. Why is this complicated? It's not.

Re:You were hired to work for THEM

[MightyYar]

It depends, though. At least in most of the US (it varies by state), a salaried employee is supposedly being compensated for the job that they do, not the hours that they keep. If the job requires certain hours, then technically you should be using hourly employees. There are obviously fuzzy areas, and many, many businesses play fast and loose with the rules. Anyway, if the employee is salaried is doing what is asked of them, then they are still guilty of using company resources for a personal project. But that's a far lesser sin than "stealing" hours, which is what is implied in the question.

Re: You were hired to work for THEM

[saloomy]

Employer here. If my employees tell me in advance (and a few of them have), that they need to respond to a personal project when coding for me if there is a critical issue when on the clock, then I have no problem with it, provided they "clock out" during that time, and it doesn't severely impact the work they provide me, and my requirements are not urgent (like a pressing bug). I think having open and honest conversation is the best way for me and personally I think it helps me retain ambitious and entrepreneurial talent, but I'm a small time employer, and I imagine large HR departments can be PITAs and unaccomodating.

Re:You were hired to work for THEM

[networkBoy]

/topic

It is *that* straightforward.

Add to that, if they're paying for your time while you're developing something, then there is legal precedent that they actually *own* what you developed.

Re: You were hired to work for THEM

[networkBoy]

you are a *rare* employer.
My hat's off to you for being transparent on your expectations. I hope your business flourishes.

Well, sadly, probably....

[cayenne8]

If you are a W2 employee and working on company time on your own projects, you might have more to worry about than being fired.

If you are creating new content, inventing a new gadget, etc....and you do it on company time, you may find that you DO NOT OWN what you have created.

Many if not most employment contracts/agreements have verbiage that states that anything you come up with on company time, belongs to the company.

They may not fire you, but they will now own it and you won't make any $$ on the side for it....

If he gets paid extra for overtime...

[Austerity Empowers]

Different people have different arrangements, I'm sure a lot of people here are strictly 8-5. But in my world I'm expected to be available and on call around the clock based on the specific function I perform (it's a lot of hurry up and wait). So I may be working at 11PM, but at 2PM I may be free. I do not get paid any extra for overtime. So who is to say that I'm on company time?

While the simple answer might be that I should always be on task during work hours, I strongly doubt my bosses would like me to just abdicate when a job finishes at 11PM and needs my attention but doesn't get it until the next morning, nor do they want to pay for another person to do it (even if that were remotely possible, which it isn't). So if I'm dicking around in the middle of the day, and I'm at the office just to maintain office hours, it should be assumed that I'm simply not on company time right now.

Depends on the industry and work environment

[RandySmith6424]

I for instance work for the government in IT and during holidays when the non 12 monthers are out, I am basically a paper weight at my desk all day. So I take online classes, work on a few outside client minor jobs, Test and run random network crap remotely from my house or just read a bunch of sports websites. I mean what is the difference between working on a side job or doing nothing at all while I have nothing to do?

Re:Depends on the industry and work environment

[monkeyxpress]

I once worked at a company where the embedded software team was based around one guy who was the ultimate control freak. They needed to speed up software development, so upper management kept giving him more people for his team. He refused to let them write any software, so his team just kept growing because upper management thought the problem was still capacity. One guy I knew well did a masters degree while sitting two desks from his boss. I talked to him about this (when he wasn't busy working on his thesis), and he said he asked his boss every day if he had any work for him to do, and his boss always said he would get back to him. He was on a good salary too, and I think the company helped pay for his course, and gave him study days to attend lectures.

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:It's not called office hours for nothing

[apoc.famine]

I'm paid largely to put out fires. When there are no fires, I work on process and documentation to ensure that there are less fires in the future. But there are definite times when I'm juggling several issues, and I'm waiting for more information or a decision from leadership on those issues. At that point, I don't have much to do. There's really not time to pick up the process and documentation work, as that's time-consuming, and it's 100% guaranteed to be interrupted by the evolution of the ongoing issues.
 
So during those lulls, I dick around on the internet, work on my own projects, go for a walk, or wander off early to grab a beer somewhere.
 
I don't get paid for what I produce. I get paid for fire prevention services. If there is no emergency I need to respond to, that means I'm being successful at my job. If there are less emergencies as time goes on, I'm doing an awesome job. And if all of the current issues are at a point where someone else needs to do something, it's thumb-twiddling time.
 
As a salaried employee who's job it is to do something other than produce, I don't feel the need to be doing something every minute I'm at work. If I pick up anything, it needs to be droppable at a minute's notice, when I have to go back to putting out fires. That's not conducive to most of the stuff that needs to get done around here, and it's far worse for people who need that done if there's no way for me to guarantee when I can get to it. If it's on my plate, it's not on somebody else's plate, and they're much more likely to get to it in a timely fashion than I am.
 
My value is in being responsive. Idle time is part and parcel of being able to be responsive.

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.

Re:2-3 hours a day!

[orgelspieler]

Oh please. I'd be surprised if my salaried employees didn't "steal" 2 hours a day; BSing with co-workers, checking the news, running an errand on the way back from lunch. They more than make up for it with after-hour calls, weekend site visits, etc. The hourly guys is a slightly different story, but as long as their 15 minute scheduled breaks don't turn into half an hour or so, that's fine. It's not like I pay them enough to actually give a shit whether they "steal" 20 minutes here or there. Maybe if my company didn't hand out 2.5% raises every two years, all the while jacking up insurance premiums, we might all pull a little more weight.

Honestly, the the only "time thieves" I have a problem with are the smokers. (And that one guy who would go fishing down the road, and claim to be doing his safety audits; fuck that guy.)

Re:2-3 hours a day!

[drakaan]

I agree with pretty much all of that. As an ex-smoker of around 5 years, I'll say that while taking a smoke break meant I wasn't working, it was not without it's benefits to my work process. Stopping for a smoke was something that often let me go from a tangle of competing thoughts to a solution. It also often led to conversations about work that might otherwise not have happened and that helped move things forward on projects.

I'm not saying that there aren't alternative ways for similar interactions to happen, but there aren't many other generally-accepted ways to say "I'm going to stop working for 5 minutes and let my thoughts settle or mingle with some folks".

Confession

[pr0t0]

I've worked on personal projects on company time. There are times when it's feast or famine in the workplace. During down times (meaning any or most other busy work has been done), I have used some of that time to work on personal projects. As an example, one of those personal projects was to make a web app to create and hold my gaming group's D&D characters. During that time, I taught myself AngularJS, Firebase, Bootstrap, and jsPDF. Since that time, I've built 2-3 other web apps for my company using what I learned then, and was able to offer those solutions because of how I used that down time. I learn better by having a project than by reading a book.

Whether what I did was an appropriate use of my time or defensible, is probably separately debatable. But you never know what you are going to learn, or how it might apply to what you do for a living when working on little projects that you are passionate about. As long as you never, ever, let it get in the way of your work or output. The job always comes first.

That said, I've never worked on anything that I thought would make me a millionaire or give me reason to leave my job. I love what I do, who I work with, and who I work for. I'm very loyal. Part of that loyalty was earned by allowing me to pursue little things over the years that interested me. It could be argued that perhaps there was no concerted effort to afford me that freedom, but no one looks over my shoulder, runs through my browser logs, or demands an accounting of my time; because like I said, my work is always done.

Re:2-3 hours a day!

[SuricouRaven]

If your employees aren't allowed to steal some time at work, they'll burn out after a few months.