[milliondollar]

It's time for the "Ron Brown* Vacation" story from dotcom boom 1.0.

I was a tech project lead at a semi-famous internet portal startup, so worked across departments picking up staff for my projects. The DB guy assigned was Ron Brown. Went to onboard him and he wasn't at his desk. I ask the guy next to him. "Oh, he's on vacation this week."

I came by the next week. No Ron Brown. Where is he? I got a very specific story in response: "He was in a fire, he had his feet burned." Terrible! So I got someone else assigned as DB guy.

Never saw Ron Brown again. About six months later, I was down by his desk. Asked whatever happened to him. "Oh, last week we discovered he just stopped showing up to work, so we just fired him yesterday!"

This was in a company of <200 people, and certainly there were less than 10 DB experts, all onsite. So I'm sure these days it's totally possible.

*Name changed to protect guilty.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

At my last job there were stories of an employee who worked for both that company and a tech company across the street: just using “meetings” and other excuses to split his time and collect two salaries. The story goes that he was only discovered because the HR people at the companies would occasionally go out to lunch together and, one day, his name came up.

[Apofis]

If he was doing a good job I may not even care.

[sdan]

reminds me of the stories of people working at both Facebook and Google over the past year because of remote work