I learned about the first one from a client, who mentioned in passing that one of our engineers had built their booking system. I learned about the second from a conference programme with his name on it, describing a product that was not ours. Neither engineer had done anything I would have objected to. Both had decided, reasonably, that asking me was not worth the risk, because our handbook contained a sentence about devoting full attention to the company and nothing else. The policy I had was worse than no policy: it guaranteed I would be the last to know.
Why the Default Policy Produces Silence
Almost every engineering team in Singapore inherits the same clause from a template: something about full attention, or no other employment without consent. It feels like a position. It is not, because it answers no question an engineer or a manager actually has, and its practical effect is to make disclosure feel like volunteering for a problem.
Put yourself on the other side of it. You maintain a small open source library. You help a friend’s company on weekends. You have a contract that predates your employment. The clause says consent is needed, there is no process for obtaining it, no stated timeline and no indication of what gets approved. The rational move is to say nothing, and the people most likely to say nothing are the senior engineers with the most valuable outside opportunities and the most to lose from an awkward conversation.
So you get the worst of both: exposure unchanged, information gone. The policy below is built to invert that, and the design goal throughout is to make disclosure the easy option rather than the brave one.
Step 1: Decide What You Actually Care About
Write down the underlying risks before writing a single rule, because the rules only make sense against them. There are four, and a second income is not one of them.
- Conflict of interest. The outside work is for a competitor, a customer, or a party with an interest in a decision this person influences.
- Intellectual property contamination. Code, designs or data move in either direction between your work and theirs.
- Availability. The person is not present or responsive when the role requires it, including on-call.
- Confidentiality. Proprietary information reaches a third party, deliberately or through reuse.
Naming these does most of the work, because it immediately shows that a blanket ban is poorly targeted. A passive investment triggers none of the four. Freelancing for a direct competitor triggers all four. Any policy that treats those identically will be ignored, and an ignored policy is a liability rather than a protection.
💡 Our Expert Take
Resist the fifth risk that managers want to add, which is some version of divided loyalty or not being fully committed. It feels real and it is not operable: you cannot observe it, you cannot write a rule against it, and attempting to measure it produces surveillance rather than information. Everything legitimate inside that feeling is already covered by availability, which you can observe through review latency, delivery and incident response. If an engineer meets their availability obligations and triggers none of the other three risks, you do not have a problem that a policy can solve.
Step 2: Separate the Four Categories of Outside Work
One rule for all outside work is the mistake that makes policies unenforceable. Split it explicitly, because the risk profile is genuinely different and people can then self-assess accurately.
Passive investment and ownership. Holding shares, owning property, being a silent partner. No approval needed, with one exception: if it is a competitor or a supplier, it needs to be disclosed because it is a conflict even when no labour is involved.
Open source and public technical work. Contributing to libraries, writing, speaking, teaching. Light touch, treated in its own right. This is frequently how you found your best engineers and gating it damages you more than it protects you.
Unrelated paid work. Freelancing in a different domain, a family business, tutoring. Disclosure with a fast answer, assessed mainly for availability and IP hygiene.
Work for a competitor, customer or supplier. The only category where the default answer is no, and the only one that genuinely warrants a difficult conversation. Our notes on non-compete clauses for engineers in Singapore cover the contractual side of this category, which is where it properly belongs.
Step 3: Write a Disclosure Rule, Not a Ban
This is the structural decision and everything else follows from it. A ban asks people to give something up and offers nothing in return, so it is complied with by the people who have nothing to disclose and quietly ignored by the people who do. A disclosure rule asks for information and offers a fast answer, which is a trade a reasonable person accepts.
The wording that worked for us is short: tell us about paid work outside the company and about unpaid work connected to our market, before you start, using one short message; we will answer within three working days; the default answer is yes unless it involves a competitor, a customer or a supplier. That is the whole rule. It fits in a paragraph, it tells an engineer exactly what to do and what to expect, and it does not require anybody to interpret a phrase about full attention.
What makes it credible is the default. If people believe the answer is usually yes, they ask. If they suspect it is usually no, the rule collapses back into a ban with extra steps, and you are back to finding out from a client. Our notes on remote developer device policy cover the adjacent policy where the same logic applies: a rule people can follow beats a rule that sounds strict.
Step 4: Draw the IP Boundary in Both Directions
This is the step that actually protects the company, and the direction most policies miss is inbound. Everybody worries about their code leaving. The damage I have seen comes from outside code arriving: an engineer reuses a module they wrote for a side client, commits it, and your product now contains code with contested ownership and an unexamined licence.
That stays invisible until the worst possible moment, which is due diligence, an acquisition, or a large enterprise procurement review where somebody asks for a provenance attestation. Nobody is being dishonest in this scenario. The engineer reused their own work, which felt like theirs, and no policy told them it was a problem.
So state both directions plainly. Nothing proprietary leaves: no code, configuration, internal tooling, customer data, architecture detail or roadmap, in any form including a conversation. Nothing arrives without provenance: code written for or with another party does not enter your repository unless its ownership and licence are confirmed in writing first. Then give them the practical hygiene rules that make compliance possible, which are separate machines, separate accounts and separate repositories, never a shared laptop with two client folders on it.
💡 Our Expert Take
Say the inbound rule out loud in a team meeting rather than only writing it down, because it is the one genuinely counter-intuitive item in the whole policy. Engineers do not experience reusing their own prior work as a risk, they experience it as competence, and a written clause buried in a handbook will not overcome that intuition. Thirty seconds of explanation, with the due diligence scenario attached, has prevented more exposure for us than the clause itself. The clause protects you after the fact. The explanation prevents the commit.
Step 5: Set Availability in Observable Terms
Replace every phrase about full attention or best efforts with things a manager can actually assess without inquiring into somebody’s private life. Core hours and what presence means during them. On-call obligations and the response time they carry. Expected turnaround on code review. How much notice is needed for planned absence.
The advantage of concrete expectations is that they apply identically to everybody, which is both fairer and more defensible. An engineer with a side project who meets them is fine. An engineer with no outside work who misses them has a performance conversation coming, and it is the same conversation. You never have to argue about whether the second job caused the problem, because you are discussing the obligation rather than the cause.
On-call deserves its own sentence because it is where real conflicts emerge. If somebody has an outside commitment that makes a shift genuinely impossible, you want to know in advance and swap it, which is a scheduling problem with a known solution. Discovering it during an incident is a different kind of event. Our notes on building an on-call rotation cover the mechanics of making swaps routine enough that people use them.
Step 6: Build an Approval Path Measured in Days
A policy with a slow approval path is a ban that has not admitted it yet. If a request takes three weeks and involves three people, engineers learn within one cycle that asking costs more than not asking, and the disclosure rule you carefully designed stops producing disclosures.
Name one approver, usually the engineering lead rather than a committee. Set a response deadline of three working days and publish it. Make the request a short message rather than a form: what the work is, who for, roughly how many hours, and whether it touches your market. Then add the clause that proves you mean it: if the deadline passes without an answer, the request is approved. That single line does more for the credibility of the policy than any amount of reassuring language, because it transfers the cost of delay from the engineer to you.
Keep a simple record of what was disclosed and what was decided. Not for enforcement, but because the second time a similar request arrives you want to answer consistently, and because inconsistency between two engineers on comparable requests is the fastest way to lose trust in the whole process. Our notes on developer training bonds cover a related area where consistency between individuals matters more than the strictness of the terms.
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Get startedStep 7: Decide Now How You Will Handle Discovery
Write the response before you need it, because the version you improvise while feeling embarrassed is reliably worse. Discovery means you learned about undisclosed outside work from somebody other than the engineer, and the instinct in that moment is to treat it as a trust breach and escalate.
Separate the two questions first. Would the work have been acceptable had it been disclosed? And separately, how serious is the failure to disclose? In both of my cases the answer to the first was yes, obviously, and the answer to the second was that our policy was a template sentence nobody could act on. That is a process failure on the employer’s side wearing the costume of a conduct problem, and treating it as conduct would have cost me two good engineers for a document I had never written properly.
So the prepared response is: confirm the IP position first, which is the only genuinely urgent item; record the disclosure retroactively; fix the policy if the policy is why they did not ask; and reserve a serious response for the narrow cases that warrant it, which are a direct competitor, one of your customers, or code of contested ownership already in your repository. Say out loud that disclosing late is better than not disclosing, because the alternative is a team that calculates, correctly, that concealment has no downside. Our notes on notice periods and buyouts cover the endgame for the rare case that does end in a departure.
| Step | The thing teams get wrong | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Name the risks | Adding divided loyalty as a fifth risk | Surveillance instead of information |
| 2. Four categories | One rule for all outside work | A policy everyone ignores |
| 3. Disclosure | Writing a ban and calling it a policy | You hear it from a client |
| 4. IP boundary | Only covering outbound code | Contested code found in due diligence |
| 5. Availability | Phrases about full attention | An argument about cause, not obligation |
| 6. Approval path | No deadline and no default | Disclosures stop arriving |
| 7. Discovery | Improvising while embarrassed | Losing a good engineer over your own gap |
💡 Our Expert Take
If you adopt one line from all of this, adopt the automatic approval after three working days. It is the only part that costs you something, which is exactly why it is the part engineers believe. Every other element of a disclosure policy can be written by a company that intends to say no to everything, and your team knows that. A deadline that defaults in their favour cannot be faked, and in our experience it is the single change that moved us from learning about outside work from third parties to learning about it from the people doing it.
FAQ: Developer Outside Work and Moonlighting in Singapore
Can a Singapore employer ban developers from taking a second job?
Employment contracts commonly contain terms addressing outside work, confidentiality and conflicts of interest, and what a specific contract permits is a question for your own professional advice rather than something to generalise about. The more useful question for an engineering leader is whether a blanket ban achieves anything, and in our experience it does not. A prohibition does not remove outside work, it removes your visibility of it: people with a side project read the clause, conclude that asking is pointless, and simply do not mention it. You end up with the same exposure and none of the information. A disclosure requirement with a fast, predictable answer gives you the ability to assess the genuine risks, which are conflict of interest and intellectual property, while keeping the relationship honest.
What is the real risk when an engineer does outside work?
Intellectual property contamination, and it runs in both directions. The direction people worry about is your code leaving. The direction that causes more practical damage is outside code arriving: an engineer reuses a module they wrote for a side client, commits it to your repository, and now your product contains code whose ownership is contested and whose licence nobody checked. That becomes visible during due diligence, an acquisition or a large enterprise procurement review, which is the worst possible moment. Availability is a real but second-order concern and it is usually self-correcting, because tiredness shows up in review latency and incident response long before anybody confesses to a second job. Conflict of interest matters most when the outside work involves a competitor or one of your own customers.
Should open source contribution count as moonlighting?
Treat it as a separate category with its own light-touch rule, because lumping it in with paid outside work does real damage. Many strong engineers maintain public projects, that work is frequently how you found them, and asking them to seek approval to fix a bug in a library on a Sunday reads as an insult. Our rule is that public contribution to projects unrelated to our product needs no approval, contribution to a project we depend on commercially needs a one-line notification so we know, and contribution during core hours to anything is a scheduling conversation rather than a policy matter. The one hard line is the same as everywhere else: nothing proprietary leaves, including configuration, internal tooling and anything that reveals customer data or architecture.
What should you do if you discover undisclosed outside work?
Separate the two questions before you open the conversation, because conflating them is what turns a manageable situation into a departure. The first question is whether the work itself would have been acceptable had it been disclosed. The second is the failure to disclose it. Most cases we have seen involve work that was entirely harmless and a person who did not realise disclosure was expected, often because the policy did not exist or was buried in an onboarding document nobody re-reads. Handle those as a process failure on your side, confirm the intellectual property position, record the disclosure retroactively and move on. Reserve a serious response for the narrow cases that actually warrant it: work for a direct competitor, work for one of your customers, or code of contested ownership already in your repository.
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Send us the clause you have now and the roles it applies to, and we will tell you which parts candidates in your band push back on and which parts are quietly costing you disclosures. Related reading: non-compete clauses for engineers, remote device policy, and our hiring notes.
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