- if the junior ("J" for short) was "caught red handed", that means he was working on another project, at work during office hours
- if J was "reported" by a colleague, that says his actions were blatant enough to be noticed by others
- I can't think of many places where it would be legally sound to demand an employee pay back salary
- by the author's own account, J was not actually sued
- if J really was under legal threat, they'd have had to do something serious for an employer to bother getting legal involved, and not merely cutting them loose. Lawyers are expensive.
- the author says J is "her junior" but also seems to be relying on J's account of what happened. Is this someone reporting to her, or a stranger?
The whole post is badly written and ambiguous. I don't really believe a word of it.
I don't think this author is worth much time. Her previous works seem to mostly be Medium SEO bait crap[1][2], I would take this story with a similar amount of seriousness.
> The developer worked in that company for ten months. The company fired him and asked for ten months' salary back from the developer. Otherwise, they threatened to sue him.
This sails pretty close to the wind. In some parts of the world this would be unlawful, regardless of the employee's actions.
I have a hard time believing this story, who can afford to give back 10 months of salary? According to the story the employee accepted to "pay the fine" so that "it wouldn’t hurt his career badly", in my experience virtually no company has the power to hurt a developers' career, it would require a significant amount of fraud from the employee's to do that.
Hard to judge with just knowing hearsay and not the first hand facts but the story makes it seem bad, like he was spending extensive time on side project During work hours and missing deadlines
> He missed two deadlines on a project within one month. His supervisor got really frustrated about the whole scenario because the assignment was not that complex to miss twice a row. But when a team can’t complete their projects within time, the entire team gets negative points on evaluation.
> So, the whole team was irritated by him. Then one day, one of the team members ( anonymous) reported to the project manager that he often worked on several side projects during office hours. This might be one of the reasons he missed his deadlines.
>Many programmers do part-time jobs, right? And many are involved in some freelancing projects besides their full-time job.
No, we don't. Nobody in my circles of coders, spanning 3 different EU countries, do part-time programming jobs after their main programing job (full or part time). They go out, have fun, study, go shopping, do sports, go drinking, read books, play with their kids, go on dates, play video games, jerk off, etc.
In what sort bubble is the author living where this is normalized?
Also, all salaried employment contracts I saw in EU had a clause preventing you from doing extra work for another employer. Some even had clauses that work or side projects you do in your free time must not be related to the IP you work on at work, otherwise they could claim ownership or damages. I checked with government labor authorities and they said these clauses are legal, but proving this in court and enforcing would be difficult so probably nobody in the company will notice or care, unless you expose yourself and it blows up.
- if the junior ("J" for short) was "caught red handed", that means he was working on another project, at work during office hours
- if J was "reported" by a colleague, that says his actions were blatant enough to be noticed by others
- I can't think of many places where it would be legally sound to demand an employee pay back salary
- by the author's own account, J was not actually sued
- if J really was under legal threat, they'd have had to do something serious for an employer to bother getting legal involved, and not merely cutting them loose. Lawyers are expensive.
- the author says J is "her junior" but also seems to be relying on J's account of what happened. Is this someone reporting to her, or a stranger?
The whole post is badly written and ambiguous. I don't really believe a word of it.