In a leaked memo, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke put limits on employees having side hustles, saying Shopify requires 'unshared attention'

Not terribly much time, by the looks of it. For example, look at the list of boards Disney CEO Bob Iger sits on:

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DIS/company-people

Publicly traded companies should have their board compensation made public. Iger sits on a lot of philinthropic organizations; I think 501c3's will have that reported to the IRS. But he probably has a day long meeting for each once or twice a year.

Edit: here's Bloomberg Philinthropic's IRS filling (one of the boards Iger sits on). $10.9k per board member. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205602483

For public companies you get elected by the share holders. If you own enough stock you can pretty much elect yourself. But otherwise it's a game of trading favors... cause a lot of stock is owned by large stock funds and what not, so you have sort of power brokers deciding on a large quantity of votes that they don't really own...

Fuck that noise.

In tech, my brain is my brain. Your employment is a license to use my brain for 8 hours a day. If I choose to get employed elsewhere, I still have my brain and it's being licensed there too. If you want to license my brain 24/7, then we're upping the cost significantly and you better fucking put it in the terms.

Fuck Shopify sideways with a rusty pineapple. 🤌🏼

So glad to live in California where that type of shit is explicitly illegal. Open source software would be so fucked with how much software is produced here.

That's meaningless if you don't use their equipment to do it. If you make a sandwich, do they own it? A table? A child? A novel? A painting?

I'm pretty sure this is illegal even in the US.

edit: shit, it depends on the State?!

that would never hold up in court I would imagine so long as you aren't using company property to write the code

I had one tried that, I crossed it out before signing.. it's total BS.

One of the companies I worked for put into their employment agreement language that stated they owned all the code I had written before starting work for them. It was the most hilarious overreach I've ever seen in an employment agreement - but then companies can put literally anything they want into the agreements, and they aren't worth shit anyway.

I told them this was utterly ridiculous and edited the agreement to remove this and some other nonsense before signing it, and they hired me anyway.

Why would they do that?

If you’re an engineer employment contracts generally include clauses to give them anything you invent at home

No NDA, completely different sector. Stated reason was the same as in the article: "we need your full undivided attention", followed by some bullshit that they were "concerned" I would be overworking myself. Maybe they should have reduced the work load at work if they were truly concerned, as I was pulling 60+ hour work weeks at the time.

My company will actually donate money equivalent to your hours volunteered (albeit at some lower wage of like $10/hr) when volunteering with any one of hundreds of charities and they have an application to submit new charities if yours isn't listed.

Come on dude, you know that they regularly will do these jobs within the paid hours of their main employment

You never talk about what you did in the weekend over the water cooler?

Also: she, not he.

If people have more energy and want to do more work for more money, offer them more money for more work or let them do other work. It's simple.

Can you make me an app? I have a killer idea. Its uber-eats, but the driver has to come inside and eat dinner with you when you're lonely.

Being an instacart shopper, doordasher or Uber driver is a "side hustle." You don't own that. You're a contractor giving up labor rights to make very little extra money.

While that definition sounds ideal, I think most people with side hustles are still working for someone, just with flexible hours. DoorDash, Uber, transcription, etc.

It depends on the societal framework. That would be anti-worker in the U.S. because you’d be sentencing some people to death, since the U.S. doesn’t have guaranteed livable wages or livable safety nets for those out of work. Given the assumption that you can make ends meet, mandating a cap on the hours spent working for someone else’s benefit and missing out on your own life is pro-human.

There is a minimum wage that's not too shabby (not good, make no mistake, but will prevent you from going hungry) and if a person is working but under the existential minimum, the government will basically put them on unemployment benefits and top up their salary to bring them up to said minimum. The system has faults, yes, and most people will do everything on their power to not be dependent on the government for that, but it will keep (cheap) food in the fridge.

Exactly, yes. The same goes for working more than 10hrs in a single day.

Edit: that does not apply to self-employed people. So if you work 90 hrs in your own company, that's fine.

Yes, people here are absolutely fine with that. You probably come from a very different world culture-wise. First of all, second jobs are not the norm here. It's rather rare, actually and most second jobs are hobbies you take money for, like photography or the like. Your employer will almost certainly not even bother to ask any further.

Secondly: your employer cannot object just because they don't like your face. There are set criteria. They will object if your second job would conflict directly with your first job, that'd be if you work at a competitor, would have work hours in your second job that conflict with those of your first job or would work too much all together. That's it.

Yes, this makes sense, and again I'll emphasize anyone can put in a policy "oh you can't start a competing company" but there is a damn high threshold 99.9% of employees don't meet for this to be enforceable. It would be enforceable ina situation where you're very high up with strategic knowledge or information about the company or market that isn't public and you leave the company to try to capitalize on that information using the information you gained during your time at the company. Most people can agree that would be abuse of the company, but even then it can be challenging to prove in some situations.

Long of the short, most of these are unenforceable too unless you're in certain, strategic, leadership or mission critical areas of an org. The smaller the org the more potential you could actually be part of this group but it's on the employer to prove it, and again, you need to be compensated for it. They want to say you can't work for or start a competitor for a year? Cool, an enforceable agreement would be they pay you a year's wages on termination. If you aren't in that kind of a situation, it's people making stuff up and hoping to scare the labor market.

How many CEOs have you met?

Just checking. So often you hear deadbeat "managers" and exec types or owners bemoaning the lack of focus in their indentured slaves who are basically so poor they are justified in not paying attention...