These remote-vs-office discussions where nobody discusses the actual work involved are fairly pointless. Disregarding the obvious scenarios of presence-required in order to work (i.e. manufacturing), the question applies: what is most productive for "information work"? In my personal experience, I've found collaboration conducted face-to-face far more effective than doing so in a distributed/online way. There is a hi…
> In other words, how do we (the employer) ensure our employees aren't moonlighting on our team and only giving the minimum level of effort with us? The tools for properly determining this are no different remote vs in an office at least for IT work. Most dev teams work in sprints and each sprint comes with a commitment from each developer. It is very noticeable even in remote work if a developer is either: - Not mak…
This isn't a logically-evaluate-output scenario. It's low-trust between employee and employer.
The bullet points listed are highlighting situations where someone isn't delivering. What do you do if they ARE delivering, but not delivering as much as they could be? The "Not making a reasonably sized commitment" is implicitly an assessment of trust in someone. (I'm trying to paraphrase what I understand others are doing -- I certainly don't subscribe to this thought process.)
> a high skill employee putting in minimal effort but still being more valuable than multiple other developers
You're correct in evaluating value - "Hey, at least that individual is better than the others..." , Unfortunately not everyone sees it that way.
If the employer's expectation is that you are DEDICATED to your role, then all of your energy goes to that role -- not another one. All this gets into nuance and legality about what you're working on, if you have more than one W-2, etc. In one company I know of, your work agreement stipulates you may not hold another full-time position in such-and-such capacity.
As always, it depends from place to place.