11 ms·

I currently have 10 fully remote engineering jobs. The bar is so low, oversight is non-existent, and everyone is so forgiving for under performance I can coast

I currently have 10 fully remote engineering jobs. The bar is so low, oversight is non-existent, and everyone is so forgiving for under performance I can coast about 4-8 weeks before a given job fires me. Currently on a $1.5M run-rate for comp this year. And the interviewing process is so much faster today, companies are desperate, it takes me 2-3hrs of total effort to land a new job with thousands to chose from.

kookiekrak 5y ago
obvious troll, ok
Areading314 5y ago
You should spend some of that money on good legal counsel
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  Why should they? Unless it's some kind of contract I don't think you can be sued for not doing your job - you can be fired (and likely would be), but incompetence doesn't generally lead to legal problems.
  - ipsum2 5y ago
    Conflict of interest - say you're working for two companies that are in vaguely similar spaces (e.g. Google and Apple). Seems like grounds for a lawsuit.
  - woeirua 5y ago
    Many employment contracts expressly forbid you from accepting other employment without prior authorization from the company. If his employment contracts contain that provision, then he would definitely be in breach. But... damages would probably be limited to just the salary that the company paid.
    - Areading314 5y ago
      Could be seen borderline fraudulent since no employer signing this kind of contract would reasonably expect this behavior. So that could add a criminal element in addition to the civil damages.
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      Definitely true for most high-paying companies (meaning experienced enough to not have employment contract full of beginner's holes like this). Explicitly forbidding another full time employment, full rights on all intellectual property, non-competing agreements etc. Also explicitly expecting to work ie 40 hours. I would take this with grain of salt the size of Jupiter, since such behavior would quickly show on any employment feedback source that any proper company hiring should check beforehand. Being blacklisted forever for well-paying companies will bite back very quickly too. In most of the Europe, I believe this would be illegal simply due to amount of work expected - there are hard limits on that. If true regardless, it might not be the smartest idea to brag online about committing multiple frauds, which casts another doubt about the whole story.
      - p_l 5y ago
        Depends on the kind of contract involved. A full-time employment contract (what is often called "permanent" in the west) is one thing, a B2B arrangement is another. Personally, I haven't had an employment contract for over 6 years now, and in fact to stay in the clear one should ensure they have at least two simultaneous clients - though most ignore that, at least in Poland.
  - tomcooks 5y ago
    Working for the competition.
  - fuzzylama 5y ago
    I presume this would be considered fraud.
truetraveller 5y ago
Is this serious?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- athiercelin 5y ago
  Doesn't matter. Industry management will hear about it and start cracking on their remote worker. FUD is out either way. If it is serious, he/she should have keep it private. That's why we can't have nice things.
magneticnorth 5y ago
This is fascinating. What's the long-term plan? Save enough on this plan to retire early? Eventually work a smaller number of them "for real"?
- dreyfan 5y ago
  It's not very satisfying so definitely not retire early. However, it's a good way to raise the equivalent of a seed round without having to give up any equity and simultaneously execute on practical customer discovery regarding the needs of modern engineering teams in a remote-only world.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    There were a lot of big words there but am I right at reading your statement as - "I'm exploiting employers so that I can found a start up that is able to monitor truant employees?"
    - dreyfan 5y ago
      Not interested in employee monitoring but otherwise spot-on.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Takes a thief to catch a thief :-))
  - peytn 5y ago
    You’ve hit the three corners of the Fraud Triangle—opportunity, incentive, rationalization.
majormajor 5y ago
I'm assuming this is facetious, but... high performers are potentially big winners in a remote world. Let's say someone gets 5x the person next to them done. Very few companies will pay them 5x. Maybe double... But if they can manage their time well enough to get X done in some fraction of the time, they could realistically do two or three full time jobs worth of "normal" work, and increase their pay - and income security - over having just one job. This doesn't work when you have to be in person all day, but remote?
- munk-a 5y ago
  It's an interesting point but I think that we're honestly vastly overestimating how highly performing high performers can be - 5x is a pretty reasonable number to me for an extreme skill gap including an experience gap but ruling out the most junior folks. We've already got a wage spread that more than covers 5x with most folks fresh out of college looking at 50k/annual if they're outside of SV and some devs within SV making 500k or more.
  - Buttons840 5y ago
    A 10x can't be a 1x in 10 places. Maintaining 10x the average productivity requires being in harmony with the work environment, the environment makes the 10x engineer as much as he makes himself, you can't do that while working 10 jobs.
- grecy 5y ago
  I feel like this is the post-covid take on the classic SO thread: "I automated my job, do I have to tell my boss" [1] It really depends if you view employment as "they are paying you for 40 hours per week" or "they are paying you for a specified output, good for you if you can get it done faster!" [1] https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-unethical-for-me-to-not-tell-my-employer-i-ve-automated-my-job https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-un...
- screye 5y ago
  A high performer that can produce 5x on a consistent basis in one job will only be able to produce maybe 2.5x on multiple jobs with significantly more convoluted career progression and schedules. Context switching and context setting are both quite difficult. But a 5xer will quickly promoted to principal level (L6) within a decade of entering their industry if they hop around a couple of times. L6s usually make 2.5x of what their peers make. So the conventional process really isn't that bad. ___________ Honestly, if you can consistently produce 5x and provide good estimates, then you should be consultant / contract hire for mid-tier companies. You will make a lot more money and have a lot more agency over your own life. Finding clients is a hustle, but so is holding 3 jobs at the same time. So, pick your poison.
munk-a 5y ago
Thank you for your service as being a literal leech on the economy. There will always be people who try and exploit the system - trying to guard absolutely against them is a futile effort, but I hope the number of folks following in your footsteps is quite few. And hey! Maybe one of your coworkers will see this post!
slumdev 5y ago
Hilarious if true.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
That's hilarious and it sounds like a great anecdote for parties! I'm in the opposite situation, I quit my only job because I couldn't stand wasting my time and I'll just keep on running my business (less money but freedom and time to make more and grow). Out of curiosity and if you're happy to share, are you still running your own company while "working" these jobs?
- dreyfan 5y ago
  > still running your own company? No, I sold my company in 2019 and exited last summer. It took up far too much time to pull off anything like this. The new venture is purely in fundraising and research mode until I stop this little experiment.
moneywoes 5y ago
how?
crvdgc 5y ago
Too bad you can write only one of those positions on your resume.
- a10c 5y ago
  At $1.5M a year compensation somehow I don't think their resume is at the top of the priority list.
- djrobstep 5y ago
  I'm going to let you in on a little secret: You can write absolutely anything you want on your resume.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
Wait, what? You should write about your experiences (anonymously, of course). This is kind of hilarious if true, though I'm a bit skeptical.
mLuby 5y ago
I'm predicting we'll see a new version of the get rich quickish scheme: how to hold 3, 4, even 5 remote jobs at once. Just buy my course to see how I made millions in my pajamas! Also if you get three friends to sign up, you get in free!
ipsum2 5y ago
How much work are you doing at these 10 companies? Are you writing code or just literally doing nothing?
- dreyfan 5y ago
  Yes writing code, I provide enough actual progress that people must assume I'm either extremely methodical or woefully incompetent. I put in about an hour per job per day. I'm logged-in on slack/teams/etc and disable idle indicators. I use a virtual KVM to switch between laptops as needed. The biggest problem I run into is video meetings occurring at the same time, those I usually just disable video and blame it on internet problems. Many of these positions are mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering where measuring progress can be difficult for even full-time contributors. I target overly funded growth-mode companies where they're focused on adding unnecessary headcount to work on poorly defined projects.
  - ttul 5y ago
    I very much look forward to the podcast series.
  - aphextron 5y ago
    You are my new hero.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - BywFFi8eMK 5y ago
    I'm one of those mythical 10x developers, too. Last year, I had a company beg me to start working with them, and I talked them up from $120,000 ($60/hour) of my current gig with a huge corp to $150,000 ($75/hour). I just never gave my notice at corp 1. I did so well at both, and both of my team leads and bosses said I was doing great. So at the beginning of the year, I added another company, this time, another publicly traded corp @ a 52w high, but they didn't have anyone who had my skills so I was a Team of 1 and I would tell them something would take a month but it'd take 1-3 days. I'd spend about an hour on that job, a week, and everyone was happy. I'd just steadily drip drip drip commits I worked on, on say Monday, through the week and update the issue tracker. Maybe 20 minutes a day. I was still playing 4-5 hours of video games, a day, and still finishing all of my work by noon, so I took a 4th job, and it pays the least and requires the most work, so I'm going to quit it in about 2 more sprints or so. That took me down to ~2-3 hours of slacking off a day, but my meetings started seriously overlapping in the mornings, but I've got that figured out. So today was weird. I did first interview at another company (#5) and the CEO came on the call and said I was hired immediately. Team of 1. No oversight. ($65/hour) Early this morning, I got a call saying "The client wants to interview and hire you TODAY, if possible". So I interview with them. Huge corporation, corp-2-corp, $80/hour 1099. They interviewed me on the spot and rushed me an offer, gave me a $2000 hiring bonus if i could only give 1 week notice. Team of 1, no oversight. The stuff is easily automated. Oh, I fully automated Job #2 and do in ~30 minutes what would have taken me about 3-4 hours by hand. That took me about 3 months to automate. So just when i thought it was already nuts, a recruiter I had completely forgotten about called me up and said the client from 3 weeks ago had extended an offer for $80/hour, so that's job #7. I added it up... That's $225/hour in just job offers I received and accepted today. That's $450,000/year if I can sustain it (highly doubtful!) and by July 15, if I can manage, that's $485/hour or roughly $970,000/year.... So take $970,000 / 52 = That's $18,654 per week... $37,307 per paycheck or $80,833 per month.... That's big boy money. So far, all the corporations use sprints. In all but one (the cheapest paid) i'm more than fulfilling my work. I'm currently working about 6 hours a day but when I'm in startup mode, I consistently coded for 15+ hours/day, 6 days a week. I've been making $255/hour for several months now... That's like $27,000/month after tax. I am saving entire paychecks from corps just to pay the IRS every quarter. I realized if I opened up an S-Corp and did corp to corp and paid myself a reasonable salary of $120,000/year, i'd save many tens of thousands, so now every new gig is nothing but corp-2-corp. Funny thing? I'm working less intensely than when I was investing my heart and soul into a single project for way less than $150,000/year.
chourobin 5y ago
this can't be true, how would you pass background checks?
- dreyfan 5y ago
  Uhh, I'm a real person with a clean record? There's no way for a company to ask the IRS if a person has multiple employers.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    They can ask Equifax though (assuming your employer participates): https://theworknumber.com/ https://theworknumber.com/
    - slumdev 5y ago
      You can (and should) freeze your Work Number file. https://theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/ https://theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/
draw_down 5y ago
This rules. Damn. I love it.
biztos 5y ago
I get that this is a joke, but — would that be legal in the US? In Germany it definitely would not, at least not without it being specifically allowed by your contract. But maybe in the US, as long as you didn’t have a conflict of interest? Would the amount of total time worked matter? Would doing it in multiple states simultaneously matter?
- bagels 5y ago
  There aren't any laws about how many jobs you can have. Your employer is free to fire you if they find out though. Usually you have agreed not to have multiple jobs when joining, especially so at places like Facebook.
- fishywang 5y ago
  A typical silicone valley company's contract usually have some clause saying that all your creative work while contracted with the company, even on off hours, belongs to the company. So signing two such contracts with two different companies usually means they both own the code you wrote for both companies, or maybe even trickier legal implications. Of course you can try to get that clause removed during contract negotiation, but I doubt many people would be successful on that negotiation (you might have better luck to exclude some of your open source contributions).
  - youeseh 5y ago
    Isn't this illegal in California.. you can't sign your rights away.
  - labcomputer 5y ago
    Every SV company I've ever worked for has explicitly disclaimed rights to my work done off hours with my own equipment... as they are required to do under CA law.
    - chris11 5y ago
      I'm not sure how you can claim all work was done during off hours with ten full-time jobs. If OP got caught he could have some very expensive legal problems.
bradlys 5y ago
10 remote is a bit excessive. You only need like 3 to hit $1.5m and that’s far more manageable.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Where are these remote jobs paying 500k?
  - rcpt 5y ago
    Obviously holding down 3 staff engineer jobs at FANG. No problem. Everyone's doing it now c'mon ya doofus
    - bradlys 5y ago
      I figure 3 Big N is comparable to 10 other remote orgs.
    - Vadoff 5y ago
      Even top of band senior pay can do $500k at FANG.
      - danilocesar 5y ago
        I guarantee you that you won't "get by" at a FANG doing bare minimum for more than a month. Also, I doubt anyone doing this kind of work will get get a second FANG work after failing the first.
- madorb 5y ago
  no way does this lead to anyone being anyplace long enough to actually vest.
- ping_pong 5y ago
  They would have to last 1 year to get the full TC which isn't the point. They do the minimal amount of work to collect a $150k salary and then get fired in 4 months and move on.
awslattery 5y ago
And here I am doing the job of 3-5 people with multiple cognitive shifts a day, with a good for region/weak for industry salary -_-
- dreyfan 5y ago
  Approach management and discuss a comp increase? Tell them you constantly have tech recruiters hitting you up with far loftier packages but you love the current firm and just want to have a more equitable compensation package. If not, start looking. There are thousands of good-paying jobs out there. We're in a significant labor shortage for engineers and many companies are upping the stakes through stronger compensation and fully-remote-forever work environments. Take advantage of the situation.
icebergwarrior 5y ago
The most unbelievable part of this is that you have 10 "mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering" that only pay $150k each on average. I do not believe you.
- lilbop 5y ago
  I 100% believe them. I'm doing something similar but with 3x concurrent roles and am considering adding a few more. You'll be surprised how bad you have to be to get fired. I can go days doing nothing, then crank at a few hours work for one pull request on a Friday and people are happy.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
raydev 5y ago
How do you prevent them from suing you if they find out?
- dreyfan 5y ago
  This is the US, anyone can sue anyone for anything. That said, California has very favorable employee-protection laws around non-compete, non-solicit, notice periods, at-will employment status, and ownership of work. It's very unlikely an employer will sue over $10-20k. So far, they all just fire me and move on.
  - fctorial 5y ago
    Not to mention if he gets caught in one job, he will lose a bunch of other jobs as well.
akramer16 5y ago
I'm a tech culture reporter at Protocol and I'd love to talk to you about this, if you're down! I'm at akramer@protocol.com or @anna_c_kramer on Twitter, and happy to provide my Signal over email if that's preferred. Let me know if you'd be interested in chatting.
- baby 5y ago
  It’s a joke
jpeter 5y ago
The new hacker news challenge: get a remote job at all FAANG companies
- timdorr 5y ago
  It's the software engineer's EGOT
nmaleki 5y ago
Can you explain your workflow for landing new jobs? Where do you look first? Do you mass apply or seek out specific jobs?
topterG 5y ago
Dude, you're my hero, I'm currently at 3 jobs at once (used to be 4 but the contract ended) and this is 100% true, I like some jobs more than others and it really boosts up income and learning, can you share more secrets? It's been a hell of a ride for me
coderplayer0 5y ago
you might want to check out this guy, with the kvm and offshore servicing, https://lateralwork.com/ https://lateralwork.com/ . 20 remote jobs - next goal
tambourine_man 5y ago
This thread is being laughed at on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ctrlshifti/status/1402876173680472065?s=21 https://twitter.com/ctrlshifti/status/1402876173680472065?s=...
easyrider1 5y ago
Where do we look for these remote jobs. any specific websites to checkout the openings?
brainless 5y ago
Wow you really do sound serious. I have done ghost development for 2 jobs before, as in I took the job and had juniors help me out although I was doing majority of the work. Never thought of 10 jobs. This seems way better for me to set my own funds straight than chasing investors for my product ideas. I do not think I can pull off the work needed though...
foobiekr 5y ago
You should really consider working for several of the large bay area legacy companies like HP, Veritas, Symantec, NetApp, etc. The "work life balance" at these places is quite good in the sense that most engineers aren't working much. I think you could easily do two or three jobs at once and accumulate overlapping stock grants quite easily. That overlap eventually gets your yearly to a serious amount.
joeblau 5y ago
You're a true 10x developer.

kookiekrak 5y ago

obvious troll, ok

Areading314 5y ago

You should spend some of that money on good legal counsel

UncleOxidant 5y ago
Why should they? Unless it's some kind of contract I don't think you can be sued for not doing your job - you can be fired (and likely would be), but incompetence doesn't generally lead to legal problems.
- ipsum2 5y ago
  Conflict of interest - say you're working for two companies that are in vaguely similar spaces (e.g. Google and Apple). Seems like grounds for a lawsuit.
- woeirua 5y ago
  Many employment contracts expressly forbid you from accepting other employment without prior authorization from the company. If his employment contracts contain that provision, then he would definitely be in breach. But... damages would probably be limited to just the salary that the company paid.
  - Areading314 5y ago
    Could be seen borderline fraudulent since no employer signing this kind of contract would reasonably expect this behavior. So that could add a criminal element in addition to the civil damages.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    Definitely true for most high-paying companies (meaning experienced enough to not have employment contract full of beginner's holes like this). Explicitly forbidding another full time employment, full rights on all intellectual property, non-competing agreements etc. Also explicitly expecting to work ie 40 hours. I would take this with grain of salt the size of Jupiter, since such behavior would quickly show on any employment feedback source that any proper company hiring should check beforehand. Being blacklisted forever for well-paying companies will bite back very quickly too. In most of the Europe, I believe this would be illegal simply due to amount of work expected - there are hard limits on that. If true regardless, it might not be the smartest idea to brag online about committing multiple frauds, which casts another doubt about the whole story.
    - p_l 5y ago
      Depends on the kind of contract involved. A full-time employment contract (what is often called "permanent" in the west) is one thing, a B2B arrangement is another. Personally, I haven't had an employment contract for over 6 years now, and in fact to stay in the clear one should ensure they have at least two simultaneous clients - though most ignore that, at least in Poland.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  Working for the competition.
- fuzzylama 5y ago
  I presume this would be considered fraud.

truetraveller 5y ago

Is this serious?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
athiercelin 5y ago
Doesn't matter. Industry management will hear about it and start cracking on their remote worker. FUD is out either way. If it is serious, he/she should have keep it private. That's why we can't have nice things.

magneticnorth 5y ago

This is fascinating. What's the long-term plan? Save enough on this plan to retire early? Eventually work a smaller number of them "for real"?

dreyfan 5y ago
It's not very satisfying so definitely not retire early. However, it's a good way to raise the equivalent of a seed round without having to give up any equity and simultaneously execute on practical customer discovery regarding the needs of modern engineering teams in a remote-only world.
- munk-a 5y ago
  There were a lot of big words there but am I right at reading your statement as - "I'm exploiting employers so that I can found a start up that is able to monitor truant employees?"
  - dreyfan 5y ago
    Not interested in employee monitoring but otherwise spot-on.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Takes a thief to catch a thief :-))
- peytn 5y ago
  You’ve hit the three corners of the Fraud Triangle—opportunity, incentive, rationalization.

majormajor 5y ago

I'm assuming this is facetious, but... high performers are potentially big winners in a remote world. Let's say someone gets 5x the person next to them done. Very few companies will pay them 5x. Maybe double... But if they can manage their time well enough to get X done in some fraction of the time, they could realistically do two or three full time jobs worth of "normal" work, and increase their pay - and income security - over having just one job. This doesn't work when you have to be in person all day, but remote?

munk-a 5y ago
It's an interesting point but I think that we're honestly vastly overestimating how highly performing high performers can be - 5x is a pretty reasonable number to me for an extreme skill gap including an experience gap but ruling out the most junior folks. We've already got a wage spread that more than covers 5x with most folks fresh out of college looking at 50k/annual if they're outside of SV and some devs within SV making 500k or more.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  A 10x can't be a 1x in 10 places. Maintaining 10x the average productivity requires being in harmony with the work environment, the environment makes the 10x engineer as much as he makes himself, you can't do that while working 10 jobs.
grecy 5y ago
I feel like this is the post-covid take on the classic SO thread: "I automated my job, do I have to tell my boss" [1] It really depends if you view employment as "they are paying you for 40 hours per week" or "they are paying you for a specified output, good for you if you can get it done faster!" [1] https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-unethical-for-me-to-not-tell-my-employer-i-ve-automated-my-job https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-un...
screye 5y ago
A high performer that can produce 5x on a consistent basis in one job will only be able to produce maybe 2.5x on multiple jobs with significantly more convoluted career progression and schedules. Context switching and context setting are both quite difficult. But a 5xer will quickly promoted to principal level (L6) within a decade of entering their industry if they hop around a couple of times. L6s usually make 2.5x of what their peers make. So the conventional process really isn't that bad. ___________ Honestly, if you can consistently produce 5x and provide good estimates, then you should be consultant / contract hire for mid-tier companies. You will make a lot more money and have a lot more agency over your own life. Finding clients is a hustle, but so is holding 3 jobs at the same time. So, pick your poison.

munk-a 5y ago

Thank you for your service as being a literal leech on the economy. There will always be people who try and exploit the system - trying to guard absolutely against them is a futile effort, but I hope the number of folks following in your footsteps is quite few. And hey! Maybe one of your coworkers will see this post!

slumdev 5y ago

Hilarious if true.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

That's hilarious and it sounds like a great anecdote for parties! I'm in the opposite situation, I quit my only job because I couldn't stand wasting my time and I'll just keep on running my business (less money but freedom and time to make more and grow). Out of curiosity and if you're happy to share, are you still running your own company while "working" these jobs?

dreyfan 5y ago
> still running your own company? No, I sold my company in 2019 and exited last summer. It took up far too much time to pull off anything like this. The new venture is purely in fundraising and research mode until I stop this little experiment.

moneywoes 5y ago

how?

crvdgc 5y ago

Too bad you can write only one of those positions on your resume.

a10c 5y ago
At $1.5M a year compensation somehow I don't think their resume is at the top of the priority list.
djrobstep 5y ago
I'm going to let you in on a little secret: You can write absolutely anything you want on your resume.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

Wait, what? You should write about your experiences (anonymously, of course). This is kind of hilarious if true, though I'm a bit skeptical.

mLuby 5y ago

I'm predicting we'll see a new version of the get rich quickish scheme: how to hold 3, 4, even 5 remote jobs at once. Just buy my course to see how I made millions in my pajamas! Also if you get three friends to sign up, you get in free!

ipsum2 5y ago

How much work are you doing at these 10 companies? Are you writing code or just literally doing nothing?

dreyfan 5y ago
Yes writing code, I provide enough actual progress that people must assume I'm either extremely methodical or woefully incompetent. I put in about an hour per job per day. I'm logged-in on slack/teams/etc and disable idle indicators. I use a virtual KVM to switch between laptops as needed. The biggest problem I run into is video meetings occurring at the same time, those I usually just disable video and blame it on internet problems. Many of these positions are mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering where measuring progress can be difficult for even full-time contributors. I target overly funded growth-mode companies where they're focused on adding unnecessary headcount to work on poorly defined projects.
- ttul 5y ago
  I very much look forward to the podcast series.
- aphextron 5y ago
  You are my new hero.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BywFFi8eMK 5y ago
  I'm one of those mythical 10x developers, too. Last year, I had a company beg me to start working with them, and I talked them up from $120,000 ($60/hour) of my current gig with a huge corp to $150,000 ($75/hour). I just never gave my notice at corp 1. I did so well at both, and both of my team leads and bosses said I was doing great. So at the beginning of the year, I added another company, this time, another publicly traded corp @ a 52w high, but they didn't have anyone who had my skills so I was a Team of 1 and I would tell them something would take a month but it'd take 1-3 days. I'd spend about an hour on that job, a week, and everyone was happy. I'd just steadily drip drip drip commits I worked on, on say Monday, through the week and update the issue tracker. Maybe 20 minutes a day. I was still playing 4-5 hours of video games, a day, and still finishing all of my work by noon, so I took a 4th job, and it pays the least and requires the most work, so I'm going to quit it in about 2 more sprints or so. That took me down to ~2-3 hours of slacking off a day, but my meetings started seriously overlapping in the mornings, but I've got that figured out. So today was weird. I did first interview at another company (#5) and the CEO came on the call and said I was hired immediately. Team of 1. No oversight. ($65/hour) Early this morning, I got a call saying "The client wants to interview and hire you TODAY, if possible". So I interview with them. Huge corporation, corp-2-corp, $80/hour 1099. They interviewed me on the spot and rushed me an offer, gave me a $2000 hiring bonus if i could only give 1 week notice. Team of 1, no oversight. The stuff is easily automated. Oh, I fully automated Job #2 and do in ~30 minutes what would have taken me about 3-4 hours by hand. That took me about 3 months to automate. So just when i thought it was already nuts, a recruiter I had completely forgotten about called me up and said the client from 3 weeks ago had extended an offer for $80/hour, so that's job #7. I added it up... That's $225/hour in just job offers I received and accepted today. That's $450,000/year if I can sustain it (highly doubtful!) and by July 15, if I can manage, that's $485/hour or roughly $970,000/year.... So take $970,000 / 52 = That's $18,654 per week... $37,307 per paycheck or $80,833 per month.... That's big boy money. So far, all the corporations use sprints. In all but one (the cheapest paid) i'm more than fulfilling my work. I'm currently working about 6 hours a day but when I'm in startup mode, I consistently coded for 15+ hours/day, 6 days a week. I've been making $255/hour for several months now... That's like $27,000/month after tax. I am saving entire paychecks from corps just to pay the IRS every quarter. I realized if I opened up an S-Corp and did corp to corp and paid myself a reasonable salary of $120,000/year, i'd save many tens of thousands, so now every new gig is nothing but corp-2-corp. Funny thing? I'm working less intensely than when I was investing my heart and soul into a single project for way less than $150,000/year.

chourobin 5y ago

this can't be true, how would you pass background checks?

dreyfan 5y ago
Uhh, I'm a real person with a clean record? There's no way for a company to ask the IRS if a person has multiple employers.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  They can ask Equifax though (assuming your employer participates): https://theworknumber.com/ https://theworknumber.com/
  - slumdev 5y ago
    You can (and should) freeze your Work Number file. https://theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/ https://theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/

draw_down 5y ago

This rules. Damn. I love it.

biztos 5y ago

I get that this is a joke, but — would that be legal in the US? In Germany it definitely would not, at least not without it being specifically allowed by your contract. But maybe in the US, as long as you didn’t have a conflict of interest? Would the amount of total time worked matter? Would doing it in multiple states simultaneously matter?

bagels 5y ago
There aren't any laws about how many jobs you can have. Your employer is free to fire you if they find out though. Usually you have agreed not to have multiple jobs when joining, especially so at places like Facebook.
fishywang 5y ago
A typical silicone valley company's contract usually have some clause saying that all your creative work while contracted with the company, even on off hours, belongs to the company. So signing two such contracts with two different companies usually means they both own the code you wrote for both companies, or maybe even trickier legal implications. Of course you can try to get that clause removed during contract negotiation, but I doubt many people would be successful on that negotiation (you might have better luck to exclude some of your open source contributions).
- youeseh 5y ago
  Isn't this illegal in California.. you can't sign your rights away.
- labcomputer 5y ago
  Every SV company I've ever worked for has explicitly disclaimed rights to my work done off hours with my own equipment... as they are required to do under CA law.
  - chris11 5y ago
    I'm not sure how you can claim all work was done during off hours with ten full-time jobs. If OP got caught he could have some very expensive legal problems.

bradlys 5y ago

10 remote is a bit excessive. You only need like 3 to hit $1.5m and that’s far more manageable.

speedgoose 5y ago
Where are these remote jobs paying 500k?
- rcpt 5y ago
  Obviously holding down 3 staff engineer jobs at FANG. No problem. Everyone's doing it now c'mon ya doofus
  - bradlys 5y ago
    I figure 3 Big N is comparable to 10 other remote orgs.
  - Vadoff 5y ago
    Even top of band senior pay can do $500k at FANG.
    - danilocesar 5y ago
      I guarantee you that you won't "get by" at a FANG doing bare minimum for more than a month. Also, I doubt anyone doing this kind of work will get get a second FANG work after failing the first.
madorb 5y ago
no way does this lead to anyone being anyplace long enough to actually vest.
ping_pong 5y ago
They would have to last 1 year to get the full TC which isn't the point. They do the minimal amount of work to collect a $150k salary and then get fired in 4 months and move on.

awslattery 5y ago

And here I am doing the job of 3-5 people with multiple cognitive shifts a day, with a good for region/weak for industry salary -_-

dreyfan 5y ago
Approach management and discuss a comp increase? Tell them you constantly have tech recruiters hitting you up with far loftier packages but you love the current firm and just want to have a more equitable compensation package. If not, start looking. There are thousands of good-paying jobs out there. We're in a significant labor shortage for engineers and many companies are upping the stakes through stronger compensation and fully-remote-forever work environments. Take advantage of the situation.

icebergwarrior 5y ago

The most unbelievable part of this is that you have 10 "mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering" that only pay $150k each on average. I do not believe you.

lilbop 5y ago
I 100% believe them. I'm doing something similar but with 3x concurrent roles and am considering adding a few more. You'll be surprised how bad you have to be to get fired. I can go days doing nothing, then crank at a few hours work for one pull request on a Friday and people are happy.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

raydev 5y ago

How do you prevent them from suing you if they find out?

dreyfan 5y ago
This is the US, anyone can sue anyone for anything. That said, California has very favorable employee-protection laws around non-compete, non-solicit, notice periods, at-will employment status, and ownership of work. It's very unlikely an employer will sue over $10-20k. So far, they all just fire me and move on.
- fctorial 5y ago
  Not to mention if he gets caught in one job, he will lose a bunch of other jobs as well.

akramer16 5y ago

I'm a tech culture reporter at Protocol and I'd love to talk to you about this, if you're down! I'm at akramer@protocol.com or @anna_c_kramer on Twitter, and happy to provide my Signal over email if that's preferred. Let me know if you'd be interested in chatting.

baby 5y ago
It’s a joke

jpeter 5y ago

The new hacker news challenge: get a remote job at all FAANG companies

timdorr 5y ago
It's the software engineer's EGOT

nmaleki 5y ago

Can you explain your workflow for landing new jobs? Where do you look first? Do you mass apply or seek out specific jobs?

topterG 5y ago

Dude, you're my hero, I'm currently at 3 jobs at once (used to be 4 but the contract ended) and this is 100% true, I like some jobs more than others and it really boosts up income and learning, can you share more secrets? It's been a hell of a ride for me

coderplayer0 5y ago

you might want to check out this guy, with the kvm and offshore servicing, https://lateralwork.com/ https://lateralwork.com/ . 20 remote jobs - next goal

tambourine_man 5y ago

This thread is being laughed at on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ctrlshifti/status/1402876173680472065?s=21 https://twitter.com/ctrlshifti/status/1402876173680472065?s=...

easyrider1 5y ago

Where do we look for these remote jobs. any specific websites to checkout the openings?

brainless 5y ago

Wow you really do sound serious. I have done ghost development for 2 jobs before, as in I took the job and had juniors help me out although I was doing majority of the work. Never thought of 10 jobs. This seems way better for me to set my own funds straight than chasing investors for my product ideas. I do not think I can pull off the work needed though...

foobiekr 5y ago

You should really consider working for several of the large bay area legacy companies like HP, Veritas, Symantec, NetApp, etc. The "work life balance" at these places is quite good in the sense that most engineers aren't working much. I think you could easily do two or three jobs at once and accumulate overlapping stock grants quite easily. That overlap eventually gets your yearly to a serious amount.

joeblau 5y ago

You're a true 10x developer.