[quote=XBoxBoy]In a crazy twist relevant to this thread, I found out today that about 1/3 of our development staff is working on a “side-project” in their “spare time” while working from home. Something they hope will allow them to quit and create their own startup company. Of course upper management knows nothing about this.
It’s a fascinating idea to me that maybe companies suddenly start loosing work from home employees because they’ve had enough time to pursue their start up dreams… Suddenly your employees are your competitors![/quote]
This was going on even before remote work, although now it’s just makes it a lot easier. Given the right motivation, anyone will do this under any condition. It’s just a matter of motivation when one comes to the realization that they will never obtain their financial goals from their job alone and that they won’t just “take it” as is.
When I was at a big employer, while several of us were working on trying to move up and get promoted, a coworker of mine was a Senior Software Engineer and just put his minimum 40 hours/week, didn’t go after the high profile projects, and kept with the easy low hanging fruit projects and did enough to get by. He kept his office door closed most of the time.
It turns out he was studying for his real estate license, operating as a real estate agent for the few years, started his own real estate brokerage firm the next few, and then ended up being one of the top brokers in 92130, all while he was employed as a senior software engineer at this big company. He was paid decently, and when raises and bonuses where handed out, they weren’t that much lower than anyone else…And when the company did layoffs, of course he was laidoff, but so were a lot of people that worked their asses off..The difference? When he was laidoff, he was laughing his ass off because he was planning to quit anyway, since his firm already had like 15 people and he wanted to do it full time because the money was way better. He was happy to get laidoff because they gave him a huge severance package, and he never needed to go back and work for someone else again. I think during that time he bought like 10 SFH in 92130 when things were less than $1million each…and he’s one of those guys that never sells. So… he killed it.
Those of us that use to work 50-60+ hours for those small incremental raises/bonus that after taxes are the dumb ones…We we busying making other people rich, lol.
Don’t for minute thing this doesn’t happen even if you work at a company that well compensates you with stock/options/bonus. I have plenty of friends that work at qualcomm as managers/directors, and all of them do the same thing. They all run their side rental business…A director friend just bought homes in Denver, Atlanta, Riverside this year, on top of the few they bought last year and the year before….I guess the job is easy enough in corp R&D at QC that plenty of people moonlight even while being well paid with RSU stock grants and bonus.
Common thing with these people is the same thing. They know how to take care of themselves and are smart enough to figure out not to count on a company to take care of them….especially when companies reward people with simple COLA adjustments YOY.
Short of a massive stock option appreciation, its unlikely a salary alone will make anyone whole in this market, especially this housing market. That’s just reality. The quicker one learns this in life, the better of one is sooner.
A lot of successful companies started from people that worked for another company. As long as you aren’t stealing code, it’s really not a big deal. At least now that people are home, they aren’t going to be using company resources to do it. Even for my work, I don’t use the company computers I use my own dedicated hardware which is 4x faster and doesn’t have all the monitoring software watching me. Since all the code is checked into gitlab and/or github in the clouds, doesn’t matter.
