TL;DR

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def tasks
    Task.where("owner_id = ? OR assigneed_id = ?", self.id, self.id)
  end
end

Remove has_many :tasks in User class.

---

Using has_many :tasks doesn’t make sense at all as we do not have any column named user_id in table tasks.

What I did to solve the issue in my case is:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :owned_tasks,    class_name: "Task", foreign_key: "owner_id"
  has_many :assigned_tasks, class_name: "Task", foreign_key: "assignee_id"
end

class Task < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :owner,    class_name: "User"
  belongs_to :assignee, class_name: "User"
  # Mentioning `foreign_keys` is not necessary in this class, since
  # we've already mentioned `belongs_to :owner`, and Rails will anticipate
  # foreign_keys automatically. Thanks to @jeffdill2 for mentioning this thing 
  # in the comment.
end

This way, you can call User.first.assigned_tasks as well as User.first.owned_tasks.

Now, you can define a method called tasks that returns the combination of assigned_tasks and owned_tasks.

That could be a good solution as far the readability goes, but from performance point of view, it wouldn’t be that much good as now, in order to get the tasks, two queries will be issued instead of once, and then, the result of those two queries need to be joined as well.

So in order to get the tasks that belong to a user, we would define a custom tasks method in User class in the following way:

def tasks
  Task.where("owner_id = ? OR assigneed_id = ?", self.id, self.id)
end

This way, it will fetch all the results in one single query, and we wouldn’t have to merge or combine any results.