| I'm on both sides of this. I've started 2x companies at the same time (one where I work 9-6 and the other which I work around 6-12 and all weekend) so I'm literally working all the time. Initially it made me struggle in my 9-6 because typically when I don't understand something, I'd spend my outside hours reading into things or do some extra work to finish up... but now I appear as a standard developer instead of a 10x and it's frustrating as hell. The side project one has become vastly more successful and lucrative than my 9-6 and it's starting to creep into that time as well, with many employees asking me for information throughout the day and asking me to quickly help with things. I've told my 9-6 that I need to quit because it doesn't make sense but don't want to suddenly leave and harm the perspective value of the company. Both places know the other exists and I've really tried to keep them separate but it was easier when I was working in a vastly different timezone because I could juggle them both easier (get lots of valuable work done whilst nobody is online and feel like the day is already achieved). Now the other side of it which really pisses me off massively, is that for the side-job I've had to build a front/backend team to deliver things and it's fairly big now but it's 100% remote and we have no office (even before COVID). Some people that you hire are rockstars, others are just ok and then there's the guys who scheduling issues for meetings, suddenly become more active for a week when you notice they're not doing anything, push almost nothing. I wasn't aware of r/overemployed but it's been clear to me that this is a common scam for a long time. People start off great and then they suddenly stop delivering, which was making me start to really hate this remote stuff. We've applied a few things systematically to try and prevent the overemployed scam:
- Daily geekbot standup reports of what you did yesterday, today and what's blocking you - Detailed weekly geekbot standup reports of what you managed to achieve during the week and what you're still working on (the people who stand out are the ones who are continuously working on the same items each week. The "detailed" is the part that really shown us the cockroaches hiding in the woodwork) - Each release has commit log with the author next to each (it shows who is delivering) - Enforced daily pushes - even if you're not yet complete with your work, you should be committing every day, so if we need to investigate, we can see what you're actually doing on a daily basis. We had people who would only push chunks every couple of days or every week and it was hard work reading through it, to see if it looked meaty enough. - HR Slack channel with automated leave calendar notifications, so you can see who's booked off for the day, with requests being approved by HR (everyone knows who is around for the day) and also if you need to disappear for an hour or two, you can write it, so everything is more transparent and people can be honest about being AFK. We have a project manager, who we thought would keep tabs on the velocity of each developer and catch out who wasn't delivering much, but it really didn't help and it took management to notice something was wrong with various people. We've got stricter over time. At first we were getting abused due to lack of time and process and it was mega depressing having so many people and not seeing things progress with the product and feeling like you were being scammed but now due to the process it's not that bad IMO. I can't wait to quit my 9-6 so that I'm able to be more hands on with the other and not have to work around the clock. Most of my work in the side job is trying to improve processes, unblock people and code in things to reduce the reliance on me so things are smoother. |
I work one job and this scares me. An issue can take more than 3 hours, and I might spend parts of my day investigating, filing new issues that come up from the investigation, writing supporting documentation or cleaning up the backlog.
I otherwise sympathize with your plight, but requiring daily commits seems like it would lead to a lot of half-baked commits and team members who are annoyed by having to push work they're not really finished with yet.