In a leaked memo, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke put limits on employees having side hustles, saying Shopify requires ‘unshared attention’::Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke discourages employees from side hustles in company memo, saying their jobs require their undivided attention.
What an employee does in their private time is none of a company’s business. They can fuck off tbh.
Thing is I’m all for a company dumping an employee who engages in hate speech, for example, in their spare time. It’s at-will employment so anything goes technically.
The problem here is that the guy is targeting something totally inappropriate: the concept of personal time itself. He’s saying in thinly coded language that he expects people to be working all the time. He wants to own their spare time. There’s nothing to do about this except for his staff to dump him and his company and quit their jobs. It’s at-will employment so anything goes.
The capitalist mindset is basically slave holding with extra steps. They think they own you, but couch it in corporate-speak, using emotive words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘efficiency’. That way, instead of sounding like the narcissistic leeches they are, the onus is on the employee to not break the bonds of ‘trust’ bestowed upon them by their capitalist overlords.
I felt this so hard, when I started getting sick, I quit my job proactively rather than inflict the harm my tardiness and less-than-peak performance might do to the company. No severance, no safety net, and now I’m literally destitute after being a top performer in my industry for years. It works.