Of course it's unethical, it's time theft. It requires you to be dishonest. You can make money as a con artist in many ways, this is just one of them. You can lie about your qualifications and experience too. If your only reservation with being dishonest is the possibility you might get caught, I think that says a lot about you as a person.
Depends on your contract, but I think very few companies can legally expect to "own your time" unless you're logging billable hours, or clocking in (hourly wage). If you're logging billable-hours and double billing, yes that IS fraud. Obviously, if you're clocking in, it's unlikely you'll be working two jobs simultaneously, and if you are, it's unethical.
>The Employee agrees to devote full-time efforts, as an employee of the Employer, to the employment duties and obligations as described in this Agreement.
The template linked above also an option of specifying work hours, so that makes it extra risky from a legal point of view.
That is beside the point. It's expected you will bring your best effort to the job and not do half-ass sloppy work. The article is not recommending you work 16 hour days, they are recommending you bite the hand that feeds.
Of course, if you're an hourly employee and don't (as you mostly shouldn't) have non compete clauses of some sort it's mostly fine. However, as a salaried employer who generally can't also work for a competitor, it's pretty scummy unless it's something unrelated and you're putting in your hours--which it would be hard to do. I'm sure there are "life hacking" people who think this is fine but it's really not.
And if you're anyone other than a low level drone of course people know who you work for and you're publicly visible.
Sure, if you have a full-time tech job and also a "full-time" side gig running a pottery business (or doing some unrelated consulting/writing on the side), very few companies are going to have a real issue. (If you aren't really doing a good job on your tech job that's between you and you employer.)
But these sorts of stories are basically all about people having two full-time tech jobs and time slicing them--including possibly outsourcing some of the work.
ADDED: And maybe it's just a function of the sort of job I have but what are these extremely well-paid jobs where you're some anonymous drone where a wide range of people in the industry aren't very familiar with who you work for.
If a person can do the job that's expected of them I don't find it unethical (assuming they're not working for competitors, utilizing resources of one employer for the other, etc.) They're not hourly employees and double-billing.
Employers are dishonest and unethical all the time. Just because the norm is having one employer (to the primary benefit of the employer) does not make it unethical to have 2 jobs.
Having said that, I wouldn't want to deal with the stress of one employer finding out about the other(s).
Most salary contracts prevent moonlighting like this to one extent or another.
You’d need to vet the fine print on whether working 2 40 hour per week jobs is ok. Not to mention that both jobs may ask more hours of you at any point.
There are jobs where you're clearly just trading time for money. And there are jobs where you're basically expected to be working for multiple clients (but presumably not sharing confidential information)--though in some industries that means not taking jobs from multiple competitors. But, yes, taking multiple full-time jobs in an industry and lying about it makes you dishonest. Of course, if the companies are just fine about it that's totally cool.
or working a job and having a hobby that it turns out later can be profitable? Or working a job and working on a startup on the side? Or, hell, working at a job and doing your own, unpaid, yardwork on the side, or childcare?
