After Wipro chief Rishad Premji, TCS COO N Ganapathy Subramaniam calls moonlighting an ethical issue 

Wipro CEO Rishad Premji has strongly voiced his opinion against the concept of moonlighting and TCS COO N Ganapathy Subramaniam has also joined the troops against moonlighting.

Moonlighting is becoming a major issue in tech companies. While some tech companies like Swiggy are in favour of moonlighting— the policy which allows employees to take up alternative jobs apart from their primary job. Wipro CEO Rishad Premji has strongly voiced his opinion against the concept of moonlighting and TCS COO N Ganapathy Subramaniam has also joined the troops against moonlighting. He has called it an ethical issue. Subramaniam believes that the IT sector will be at the receiving end if it permits policies like moonlighting.

Speaking at the Business Today India at 100 summit, Subramaniam, “Moonlighting is an ethical issue, we need to inculcate the ethics and (idea of) being right and if we make something like this for short-term gains, in the long-term we will lose out.If you look at it as a war, it is a war. Business is all about operating within constraints. The talent war happened because of two important reasons from my perspective because during the pandemic 90 per cent of the enterprises did not hire. Few organisations like TCS, we went and honoured everything, we kept hiring."

Wipro CEO Rishad Premji termed moonlighting as cheating. "There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating - plain and simple,” Premji noted.

For the unversed, moonlighting is a policy which allows employees to take up additional jobs apart from their primary job. For instance, most companies will not allow you to take up freelance opportunities if you are already working in an organisation. The news organisations primarily do not allow their employees to write or work for any other organisation if they are full-time employees. In fact, companies in India have zero tolerance towards employees who are found engaging in other jobs apart from their primary role. Such employees are often penalised or pink-slipped because it strictly goes against company policy.

Swiggy is one such Indian company that does not hate the concept of moonlighting after all. The delivery giant recently announced an “industry first” policy that allows its employees to take up gigs or projects outside of their primary jobs. “Any project or activity that is taken up outside office hours or on the weekend, without affecting productivity, and does not have a conflict of interest, can be picked up by the employees. The employee will have to declare a few necessary details so that the team can greenlight the project,” Swiggy noted in a blog post.

While the concept of moonlighting may work wonderfully for employees who don’t mind a few extra bucks, the companies are not in favour of employees dividing their focus.