Moonlighting not ethical: IBM India's Patel joins IT industry debate

After Wipro chairman Rishad Premji and Infosys spoke against moonlighting, a senior executive of IBM India has called the practice unethical. Sandip Patel, managing director of IBM India, said the company’s position is exactly what industry leaders had said.

“All our employees, when they are employed, sign an agreement which says that they are going to be working for IBM. So notwithstanding what people can do with the rest of their time, it’s not ethically right to do,” said Patel at IBM’s flagship event Think.

Moonlighting made headlines after food delivery firm Swiggy said in early August that it would allow employees to work on external projects for money or pro bono.

Infosys, India’s second-largest IT services company, recently sent an email to its employees titled “No Double Lives” and said “…dual employment is not permitted as per the Employee Handbook and the Code of Conduct”.

The email said that the rule disallowing moonlighting is mentioned in offer letters and the company’s consent is important. “The consent may be given subject to any terms and conditions that the company may think fit and may be withdrawn at any time at the discretion of the company.”

Premji, in a Twitter post on August 20, trashed the idea of moonlighting and termed it “cheating”.

For IBM, India is a core market in terms of both clients as well as employees. According to media reports, the company has an employee base of 140,000 in India.

“India is a place where we have a lot of good locations, which means we are making things in India not just for India but for the world, and those investments are being made in software and consulting,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior VP, IBM Software.

Patel added that IBM India serves as the microcosm of the corporation with software labs systems in the country. Patel added that as it takes its hybrid cloud offering to enterprises in India IBM will be focusing much more on collaboration with the partner ecosystem.

As a part of this, IBM announced it will work with Airtel’s edge computing platform in India, which includes 120 data centres in 20 cities. Once deployed, the platform is desi­­g­ned to enable large enterprises across multi­ple industries including manufacturing and automotive to accelerate innovative solutions that deliver new value to clients and oper­­ations — securely at the edge cloud services.