This strikes me as nonsense. There seems to be an uncritical acceptance of a definition of FT software engineering responsibilities here. As an exempt, salarie

This strikes me as nonsense. There seems to be an uncritical acceptance of a definition of FT software engineering responsibilities here. As an exempt, salaried employee you are being paid for work, not time. If you can manage to do the work for two employers then they have no cause to complain and you've earned your pay. If you fail to do the assigned work or are unavailable for sync meetings (probably the hardest part of this arrangement) then they can fire you. Any parent who is also a FT software engineer has two full time jobs, they just don't get paid for one of them. Cultural inertia around what you 'owe' your employer is not to the benefit of employees. In this situation, where there are plenty of low level jobs that pay $125k that require 4 hours or less of actual coding time per day, working two of those jobs seems like a totally viable option. As others have pointed out you have to avoid employers that try to prevent you from working more than one job, but there are plenty of those (personal experience) so this, again, seems like a pretty good option.