The Dark Side Of Moonlighting

Side gigs are not a new phenomenon, but Wipro’s sacking of 300 employees and other IT firms cautioning their workers against the practice have raised questions of ethics and legality. The tech industry, though, is split in its views on how to deal with the issue

- Ajay Sukumaran

A MID-LEVEL IT EMPLOYEE AT an MNC juggles his well-paying job with freelance work, routing the additional income through his wife’s bank account. An efficient worker who has never faced client escalation, he took on the extra work to repay his family’s debts after he lost his father.

A lead developer in telecom says his side hustle is a step towards realising his dream of becoming an entrepreneur while his full-time job is bread and butter. His employer, however, is not aware of the second income. It was tough initially, but later he found that he could manage both.

A software developer says he allowed his employees to take up freelancing jobs in his previous stint as the founder of a start-up because his fledgling outfit could not match their previous salaries.

Cited above are three real-life cases narrated by tech employees requesting anonymity because of the spotlight on what has become a vexed issue in India’s IT industry—moonlighting. During the peak of the pandemic, work from home was the unthinkable transition that India’s software technology industry— with its five million-strong workforce— pulled off. But in the new normal that remote working ushered in, new challenges have inevitably sprung up—employees making use of this flexibility to take on an extra gig being one of them.

Tech employees doing freelance coding on the side isn’t exactly new. But companies with large workforces have started cracking down. Wipro’s executive chairman Rishad Premji on September 21 revealed that his firm had terminated as many as 300 employees who were ‘working directly’ for a competitor. This set offan industry-wide debate on ethics, illegality and gig work.