The Moonlighting Debate
Wipro, Infosys, TCS – the Indian tech giants have been in the news today.
Over the recent dismissal of 300 employees, which has taken place due to moonlighting.
What is Moonlighting?
In simple words, moonlighting is a side hustle.
It is a scenario when X employee of X company goes and works for Y company projects while working for X company.
The debate over monlighting also seems like the debate about old versus new work culture.
Value systems of the younger generation are changing, so are their dreams and goals.
While the decades old companies like Wipro, Infosys have marked moonlighting as a no-go for their employees.
New-age tech companies like slice, Swiggy have been building for the future of work and have introduced moonlighting policies.
Slice came up with its Code in 3 program and Swiggy too announced it’s moonlighting policy a few weeks back.
The Moonlighting debate also sheds light on the Bourgeois versus Proletariat struggle which Marx had talked about a century back.
Somewhere technology is also shifting our society towards the left, from a capitalistic structure.
• With the rise of open source tools, free learning on platforms like youtube – the modern day proletariat has found their voice.
• Technology is also shifting the importance of capital ownership in society, now creating an enterprise requires less and less of resources.
Every day I speak to at least 4-5 Internet Entrepreneurs who are building content or saas products.
• Personal finance has grown as a super hot topic in last few years, on all social media platforms.
Moonlighting perhaps is a effect of this.
While Moonlighting has it’s new-age glamour, it also raises several risk and ethics related questions related to Intellectual Property of a company.
How much of say can X company have over their employee? Considering they are using the skill set which they learnt at X company on their side hustle with Y company.
And the risk of IP leaks will always exist I suppose with moonlighting.
What are your thoughts?
