I was caught working 2 remote jobs and was fired from one

• Patrick Synge fired one of his employees for secretly working on a second remote job.
• He explained how he caught the employee and why he decided to fire him.
• He said overemployment is “unethical” and harms worker productivity.

This as-told essay is based on an email conversation with Patrick Synge, co-founder and CEO of the business process outsourcing and remote recruiting company. Metric. The company is headquartered in Barcelona and at 10 full time, fully remote employees, in addition to more than 200 contractors worldwide. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m the CEO of a company where every employee works entirely remotely. In January, I caught one of them secretly working a second full-time remote job.

Here’s how it all went down and why I decided to fire them.

My company is headquartered in Barcelona, but one of my employees was based in Peru. He was hired in 2022, and at first he did his job very well. But then I started getting complaints from clients about missed assignments and deadlines. He had also become completely unresponsive. These customer complaints started to become quite regular.

When this employee started refusing certain shifts he usually worked, I started to get suspicious. I had a feeling he was up to something, but since there was no proof, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

Instead, I had one-on-one meetings with him to discuss his job performance. When the same problems continued, I told him that if things didn’t change, I would have to let him go.

Although he showed some signs of improvement, his overall performance didn’t change much. This placed a significant burden on the rest of the team, who had to work their shifts and deal with missed deadlines.

How I finally caught it

In December, unrelated to this particular employee, my company deployed time tracking software called DeskTime.

My long-term goal is to introduce a four-day work week in my company, and I decided that the first step in this process would be to understand how my employees spend their time and what could be optimized to increase productivity.

So our entire team of full-time employees and independent contractors started using DeskTime. They each had to install the app on their computer, so everyone was well aware that this was being implemented.

After a few weeks, I looked through the troubled employee’s tracking data and noticed that the name of another company – an American company – was regularly appearing in the data. It became clear to me that this employee had been working on tasks for another company.

I fired them the next day.

DeskTime data showed that the employee was using software unrelated to their job duties during the workday. It also included a screenshot feature that captured his computer screen and showed him working on a rig where the other company’s name was visible.

Based on DeskTime data, I estimate that he had spent almost half of his working time working for this other company. It seems that he forgot the tracking software since once downloaded, it does not require any manual switching on and off.

To be honest, all the other signs – failure to meet deadlines, lack of flexibility and unresponsiveness at times – had already assured me that he was doing other things during work hours. I probably would have fired him anyway, but the tracked data was the missing physical proof.

I think he was working full-time for the other company, because shortly after I laid him off, he updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect that he was working full-time at the other company.

Why I think overemployment is unethical

I know some people may judge me, but I really don’t support the trend of overuse. I think this is unethical and just plain wrong.

First of all, I don’t think it’s fair to the rest of the team to have to cover up for someone else’s poor performance. This is why keeping this employee in the company was not an option. He was not fair and respectful to the team, and that is something I cannot tolerate: his actions were simply selfish.

Second, I don’t believe a person can productively perform two tasks at the same time, even if they use AI or other tools. Their attention will be scattered and the quality of their work will suffer. As an entrepreneur, I have to think about my business and my customers first. I can’t afford to lose customers because someone wants to make more money.

I really don’t mind people doing side hustles to earn extra income. But it should be something they do in their free time and it doesn’t affect the quality of their daily work.

Do you work multiple remote jobs at the same time and want to provide details about your salary and schedule? Has one of your colleagues or employees done this? If so, contact this reporter at [email protected].