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Overemployed – Work Two Remote Jobs

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
I love all the negative comments here. This has been going on forever and has eagerly been embraced by many many many companies outright, and is done very frequently. It is called... "consulting" I think on HN you'd get far more "yes I do this" if the overemployed is side consulting. That "second job" has far less expectation of time and permanence. I love the misspelling of "mediocore". So ... apropos.
namelessoracle 5y ago
The temptation here is that going from L5 to L6 has a massive increase in what you might be doing in your day to day that isnt comparable to the compensation. A good L5 in a bog standard enterprise role is likely getting their deliverables done in 2 to 4 hours (in comparison to their teammates), and the rest of the time is meetings and non coding tasks. The rest of your day is yours to spend however you want in the remote world. When they go to L6 all that "free time" is now gone helping peers, acting as a multiplier, design discussions, and attending more meetings. You are also being pushed outside your comfort zone of just grinding out the code. Those 4 hours could have instead be used to L4 tier work for another company and the financial incentives are higher to just to do that instead. You also are just expected to grind out code. The only real thing that makes this untenable is making the multiple meetings that each company host. There is probably an opportunity here for a company that can identify talented L5s who can quickly get well groomed stories done for them as a side hustle.
- 62951413 5y ago
  I imagine two SE incomes would result in ~50% marginal tax rate in CA if not AMT. Wouldn't it reduce the incentive?
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    No, because no one every said no thanks to winning the lottery because they didn't want to pay taxes on the winnings. and taxes are graduated.
    - shaftway 5y ago
      You're partially right, but at the income level we're talking about the taxes aren't any more graduated. I'd expect someone with these incomes to be in the highest tax grade, and the marginal rate at this point is 41-43%, between federal and state in CA.
      - throwoutway 5y ago
        Many talented engineers do not live, nor want to live, in California
        downrightmike 5y ago
        The coasts are crazy, the people in the 20th century just dumped all kinds of really toxic chemicals and nuclear waste, I was surprised about just how much nuclear waste is in the waters around California . https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304773104579268563658319196 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304773104579268...
engmgrmgr 5y ago
When employees have high variance, or some other issue, I expect a good manager to debug it. It’s not that hard to figure out your 35% impact is because of your suboptimal juggling of two jobs. We just let someone go for this (proved of course).
- dplgk 5y ago
  Curious how you proved it/found out about the other job.
ragnot 5y ago
I think the root cause of this boils down to one thing: Smart engineers have been screwed over time and time again by startups who used their talents and didn't reward them. I've known many early, foundational employees work themselves dead only to get a meager payday while founders and executives (always hired when the risk is gone and who are always given more stock and money) get rich. You don't have to look far on HN to see similar stories. So enough people experience that/read that and say, "If I'm not going to be rewarded, why not make more money?". So they do this. After all, the only people who could pull this off are the same types of people who would be those essential early engineers. I'm sure there is some aspect of greed related to this, but I would posit that people who are driven to do this are doing this (deep down) because they feel they want to get back at a class of people who have done them wrong before.
aluminum96 5y ago
It's incredible how controversial this seems to be. Millions of Americans have two jobs, mostly because they must do it to survive. Granted, not in software engineering, but I don't see the fundamental issue.
- ramphastidae 5y ago
  Those millions of Americans are working those jobs serially, not in parallel. That’s why this is controversial.
Borrible 5y ago
Not remote jobs, but was Einstein a time bandit to the Swiss patent office? https://oxsci.org/einstein-at-the-patent-office/ https://oxsci.org/einstein-at-the-patent-office/
toomanyrichies 5y ago
From the website's homepage: "Overemployed is a community of professionals looking to work two remote jobs, earn extra income, and achieve financial freedom."
GiorgioG 5y ago
I have a friend that does this, has 3 jobs...makes nearly 500k. IMHO, it's not worth the stress though.
- toomanyrichies 5y ago
  That's my biggest reservation about doing this. I feel like the possibility of one finding out about the other would weigh on me pretty heavily. Not that I think it's unethical, mind you. I'd just be stressed about the worst-case scenario and the impact it would have on my career. Would love the double income though, not gonna lie.
  - Flankk 5y ago
    Of course it's unethical, it's time theft. It requires you to be dishonest. You can make money as a con artist in many ways, this is just one of them. You can lie about your qualifications and experience too. If your only reservation with being dishonest is the possibility you might get caught, I think that says a lot about you as a person.
    - frankbreetz 5y ago
      If you are accomplishing your job to an acceptable standard it is not unethical. As long as it is not hourly, you just have to accomplish your tasks.
      - lumost 5y ago
        Most salary contracts prevent moonlighting like this to one extent or another. You’d need to vet the fine print on whether working 2 40 hour per week jobs is ok. Not to mention that both jobs may ask more hours of you at any point.
    - greyface- 5y ago
      If you're salaried, you're not paid for time, you're paid for output.
vanusa 5y ago
This can't possibly be sustainable or worth the reputation risk of getting caught.
throw8932894 5y ago
> Be free from office politics Cheating like this defeats the purpose. Go self employed and charge by task not by time.
chasebank 5y ago
Which job will you boast on your LinkedIn?
- toomanyrichies 5y ago
  Potentially neither. "I stopped maintaining my LinkedIn due to recruiter spam" would be a believable statement in my opinion.
- betaby 5y ago
  None? I have LinkedIn account for about 10 years and found it useless for job search anyway. I use it like facebook to connect and occasionally chat with colleagues from previous companies.
betaby 5y ago
How 'powerful' are employed? What is their employment status? At previous company CTO was in boards of another 5+ companies + owned partially another 2. How that works at 'that' level?
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  last cycle, I had two interviews on the same day for two different startups, and at both meetings one of the people in the room was the same, and yup they were the CTO of both places simultaneously they remembered who I was but insisted on following the script the second time too i did take the offer :) i think they were impressed because the second time they asked "where do you want to be in x years/where do you want your career going" I said "i want to be you/in your chair"
- yunohn 5y ago
  This is a really important point. While us salaried workers struggle in a 9-5, the powerful get multiple board positions that each pay more than our annual wages.
  - sanjayio 5y ago
    To be fair, the 9-5 workers are paid for their hours, the multiple board positioned folks are often paid in equity, sometimes nothing, and have minimal 9-5 obligations. In having fewer 9-5 obligations, often none, it’s less immoral to have multiple board positions. Fwiw, I’m not on a board, just writing it how I see it.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      > 9-5 workers are paid for their hours 9-5 workers (in tech atleast) are rarely paid hourly - neither individuals nor managers. > it’s less immoral to have multiple board positions I would disagree - I find it immoral that you can be part of multiple decision-making boards, each earning multiples of a yearly wage, and somehow have so little work to do compared to a worker.
  - rmk 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Untit1ed 5y ago
I see a lot of people talking about reputational risk around this, but I'd be more worried about the legal implications. Most of us have contracts that grant IP of what we create to our employer at least during work hours - if you get caught doing this how do the IP implications unwind given that both your employers have the same rights to what you produced? Would it be legally equivalent to selling a bunch of IP that you never had the right to? This whole phenomenon is just the pinnacle of the privilege that we enjoy as software developers. While warehouse or hospitality workers work two or three jobs to stay above the poverty line and have their every move tracked as they do, we choose to parlay our autonomy into occupying two well-paying jobs at the same time. When our employers force us back into the office 5 days a week, it'll be the people who did this who made that happen.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  I knew someone who tried doing just this during COVID (taking two programming jobs), and ended up getting fired by both jobs when they found out.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  > and have their every move tracked as they do, we choose to parlay our autonomy into occupying two well-paying jobs at the same time... Some folks are possibly writing the tech that is overseeing others...
- olliej 5y ago
  Right? It seems like you be very quickly in the realms of breach of contract for most high income jobs. I'm presuming this is targeted at already high income earners, because the alternative is simply a techified name for what some huge proportion of all Americans do all the time. I'd also be intrigued about how it interacts with contracts that say everything you do/think in your spare time belongs to the company (a nonsense condition, but whatever)
- duxup 5y ago
  I had a coworker try to pull the two remote jobs at once thing. Thinking a customer was calling he answered the wrong phone and said the wrong company name, but it was actually his bosses boss. Company fired him, and actually went so far as to threaten to sue the guy until he agreed to pay restitution (one year pay), and they told the other company who fired him. I don’t know if the other company did anything else. Dude was a bad apple / trying to find a way to skirt every rule / do as little work as possible anyway so I suspect if push came to shove they could have proven he really hadn’t done the work he claimed and was busy not working most of the time. I really didn’t expect they would take it that far, company didn’t need his money, but I believe someone wanted to make an example of him. Can’t blame them.
olliej 5y ago
... is this a tech person's equivalent to what a significant portion of Americans do just to pay rent? Only with the added fun of breach of contract, etc tossed in? I thought it was satire at first.
ransom1538 5y ago
It is called "wire fraud" a federal crime. The US has a ridiculous punishment for it [1]. Wire fraud is the favorite of the feds since it is loosely defined and easy to prosecute. Feds also use this law to get people to turn on others due to it's extreme punishments (you will sing). If you sign anything stating this is your only job - don't do this. (1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money; (2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud; (3) that it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and (4) that interstate wire communications were in fact used) "Wire fraud is a federal crime that carries a sentence of not more than 20 years’ imprisonment and fines of up to $250,000 for individuals and $500,000 for organizations." [1]
- betaby 5y ago
  How that works for folks with CXX titles? Whey often 'sit' in multiple boards. Also recently I was re-checking my contract, and there is nothing said there 'only job', I think that would be illegal to put in a contract.
  - ransom1538 5y ago
    All you need to do is be open. Do not lie for money on the internet or mail. State you work for other companies, state you are on other boards, etc. When you lie to people for money is where things go really bad (at least in the US). (wire/mail fraud 941. 18 U.S.C. 1343).
    - betaby 5y ago
      Why one should disclose that? And how and why that's fraud? Do people in US disclose things like 'I flip burgers during the day' - 35 hours/week and also 'work as an office cleaner on weekends and evenings' - another 35 hours/week. Technically those are two times full employments. I'm not from US and may lack some details how it works there. My example above it not theoretical I know person who works like that,non-US location.
aurizon 5y ago
Find 2 companies who both need a remote worker to deal with aspects in common...fill both jobs, and have fewer BW problems, use realfakes avatars to handle the occasional zoom call and use 2 different IP addresses for verisimilitude.
epicureanideal 5y ago
This can only work at extremely dysfunctional companies with incompetent management. I suppose there's an opportunity here for some unethical people to get some money from those companies until they collapse. In any reasonably well-run company these people would be fired quickly. Gordon Gecko might say these people are performing service to the public by helping poorly managed companies go bankrupt faster, but it's still unethical because the goal seems to be to massively underwork at each job. On the other hand, I think that it should be reasonable for software engineers to work two jobs, as long as they are not competitors and there are no intellectual property concerns. Just like any other employee, some people want to work two jobs, and I'm actually disappointed it's not more common to arrange for multiple legitimate jobs (two part time, or one full time one part time) in the tech industry.
- honkdaddy 5y ago
  This is patently untrue. I have a close friend currently working two SWE positions, roughly 60h/wk in total, and has been doing so for about a year with only positive feedback thus far. Both are publicly traded Big Tech companies, neither of which are known as being dysfunctional or problematic. There are more people doing this than you'd like to think. Check out the Discord for this community if you're still doubtful - you'd be surprised at the combination of companies people are able to perfectly fulfill expectations for.
- temp8964 5y ago
  > This can only work at extremely dysfunctional companies with incompetent management. Not really. There are many job positions require tons of institutional knowledge of the data system and the code base, but does not require lots of everyday work. And some of the jobs are seasonable. A senior worker can really do tons of outside jobs.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Maybe it's my bubble, but I could maybe do tons of things unrelated to tech but relevant people in tech are aware of who I am and who I work for. (i.e. I could maybe carve out lots of hours to do various things but I couldn't (and wouldn't) actually have another full-timeish tech job.
pauleibye 5y ago
Please don't do this. It's so painfully obvious when people do this and it's an awful experience for everyone involved when you get caught.
- s_jack_frost 5y ago
  This is survivorship bias. You only hear about the people who are bad workers in general and get caught, not the ones who do both jobs well and only get positive feedback.
Smeevy 5y ago
I had a new hire last year that did this. He interviewed pretty well and we brought him on as contract-to-hire through a placement company. We're a small company, so it was pretty easy to have everything set up for him on day one to begin contributing. The first day was spent getting to know other members of the team and we were working to get him familiar with the codebase of a new application that we were working on. We had identified 10 or so tickets, new data entry pages and some UI bug fixes, that we thought would be a gentle introduction to the new app and walked him through a couple. The first couple of days were okay, but I started observing strange behavior. He didn't contribute in meetings, but he was very outspoken when explaining why this project was substantially more difficult than we'd thought. Also, he kept coming back to the need for us to completely throw out all of the prior work because it was "all wrong." The explanations never got any deeper than that, though. I also noted a couple of exchanges in which I found his behavior towards our project manager to be somewhat belligerent when discussing project details. At first, I just figured he was carrying some of his previous shop with him and that that was how he was used to communicating. I gave him a week to prototype his architectural recommendations and pulled him off of all meetings so that he could focus on it. This also gave me a convenient way to separate him and the project manager from further confrontation while I examined the situation. The week passed and his prototype looked like he'd worked on it for about an hour. I asked him if he thought this was working out and he admitted that it wasn't. I then asked him if he wanted to terminate the contract and he jumped at the opportunity. Speaking with the placement firm later that day, they apologized and said that he had admitted to them that he'd been working another full-time job and that he couldn't keep it up anymore. They offered to forgo charging me for the last two weeks. We still lost a substantial amount of time on the project. Start to finish, this whole episode took a little over three weeks and we were lucky to get out of it so quickly. The kicker was that I was able to replace all of the shoddy code that this guy wrote over that period in one long Saturday evening. I'm more afraid of hiring people I don't know now. There's no coding test that will tell you if someone is just going to lie right to your face every day.
- xupybd 5y ago
  As an honest worker hoping to go remote one day this guy pisses me off. If you pull this crap you're not just burning yourself you're burning ever honest worker in the industry. This is why people ask remote employees to put monitoring software on their computers. At least in this situation it sounds like good management at the top was able to spot the problem early.
tehjoker 5y ago
I think if an economist looked at this they would say workers have identified areas of inefficiency in the economy and found a way fill the gap. However, if every person takes two jobs, that means there's 2x competition for jobs and will depress wages over time. Limited arbitrage opportunity. If you actually work two jobs at once at reasonable efficiency, the businesses aren't going to be paying for this, we are.
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  Currently we are paying for women joining economy as land/house competition ia still same and rich just make more for claims to land. Fuck em, 0 empathy on my end.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    I do empathize and am tempted myself, but I think we have to recognize that intensifying competition between workers isn't going to help us in the end. We have to unite against the business class.
    - lupire 5y ago
      That's what parent was saying. Two-full-time-income families cause wages to plummet dur to excess competition. Working full-time is is stealing jobs from others.
valdiorn 5y ago
Wouldn't you be better off just being a contractor and taking multiple contracts in parallel? That way you're legally covered, and as long as you're fulfilling your tasks, you could in theory keep everyone happy and collect multiple paychecks without breaking any rules.
- xupybd 5y ago
  And you get to be honest. Taking on an employee is a lot more of a commitment than a contractor. It would feel like a slap in the face to find out an employee was working another full time job. Why not just get a side hustle? Get some contracts and let your employer know what you're doing.
- Salgat 5y ago
  You're not in the legal clear if your reported hours overlap between the two companies.
mathverse 5y ago
Where do you all find these jobs where you have so few meetings? I feel like even one meeting a day at each company could eventually lead into an overlap and you would at some point need to explain yourself why you are unable to attend. And there are only so many excuses one can use...
Havoc 5y ago
This strikes me as a glorified way of dressing up the American “I work three jobs and barely make rent”. ie it’s not really three jobs but 3x 1/3rd jobs. Often each being zero hour. This seems like the corporate equivalent. Unless the companies in question are utterly incompetent they’re not giving anyone full time salaries with part time expectations. If people are finding examples like that - fair play.

I love all the negative comments here. This has been going on forever and has eagerly been embraced by many many many companies outright, and is done very frequently. It is called... "consulting" I think on HN you'd get far more "yes I do this" if the overemployed is side consulting. That "second job" has far less expectation of time and permanence. I love the misspelling of "mediocore". So ... apropos.

namelessoracle 5y ago

The temptation here is that going from L5 to L6 has a massive increase in what you might be doing in your day to day that isnt comparable to the compensation. A good L5 in a bog standard enterprise role is likely getting their deliverables done in 2 to 4 hours (in comparison to their teammates), and the rest of the time is meetings and non coding tasks. The rest of your day is yours to spend however you want in the remote world. When they go to L6 all that "free time" is now gone helping peers, acting as a multiplier, design discussions, and attending more meetings. You are also being pushed outside your comfort zone of just grinding out the code. Those 4 hours could have instead be used to L4 tier work for another company and the financial incentives are higher to just to do that instead. You also are just expected to grind out code. The only real thing that makes this untenable is making the multiple meetings that each company host. There is probably an opportunity here for a company that can identify talented L5s who can quickly get well groomed stories done for them as a side hustle.

62951413 5y ago
I imagine two SE incomes would result in ~50% marginal tax rate in CA if not AMT. Wouldn't it reduce the incentive?
- downrightmike 5y ago
  No, because no one every said no thanks to winning the lottery because they didn't want to pay taxes on the winnings. and taxes are graduated.
  - shaftway 5y ago
    You're partially right, but at the income level we're talking about the taxes aren't any more graduated. I'd expect someone with these incomes to be in the highest tax grade, and the marginal rate at this point is 41-43%, between federal and state in CA.
    - throwoutway 5y ago
      Many talented engineers do not live, nor want to live, in California
      - downrightmike 5y ago
        The coasts are crazy, the people in the 20th century just dumped all kinds of really toxic chemicals and nuclear waste, I was surprised about just how much nuclear waste is in the waters around California . https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304773104579268563658319196 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304773104579268...

engmgrmgr 5y ago

When employees have high variance, or some other issue, I expect a good manager to debug it. It’s not that hard to figure out your 35% impact is because of your suboptimal juggling of two jobs. We just let someone go for this (proved of course).

dplgk 5y ago
Curious how you proved it/found out about the other job.

ragnot 5y ago

I think the root cause of this boils down to one thing: Smart engineers have been screwed over time and time again by startups who used their talents and didn't reward them. I've known many early, foundational employees work themselves dead only to get a meager payday while founders and executives (always hired when the risk is gone and who are always given more stock and money) get rich. You don't have to look far on HN to see similar stories. So enough people experience that/read that and say, "If I'm not going to be rewarded, why not make more money?". So they do this. After all, the only people who could pull this off are the same types of people who would be those essential early engineers. I'm sure there is some aspect of greed related to this, but I would posit that people who are driven to do this are doing this (deep down) because they feel they want to get back at a class of people who have done them wrong before.

aluminum96 5y ago

It's incredible how controversial this seems to be. Millions of Americans have two jobs, mostly because they must do it to survive. Granted, not in software engineering, but I don't see the fundamental issue.

ramphastidae 5y ago
Those millions of Americans are working those jobs serially, not in parallel. That’s why this is controversial.

Borrible 5y ago

Not remote jobs, but was Einstein a time bandit to the Swiss patent office? https://oxsci.org/einstein-at-the-patent-office/ https://oxsci.org/einstein-at-the-patent-office/

toomanyrichies 5y ago

From the website's homepage: "Overemployed is a community of professionals looking to work two remote jobs, earn extra income, and achieve financial freedom."

GiorgioG 5y ago

I have a friend that does this, has 3 jobs...makes nearly 500k. IMHO, it's not worth the stress though.

toomanyrichies 5y ago
That's my biggest reservation about doing this. I feel like the possibility of one finding out about the other would weigh on me pretty heavily. Not that I think it's unethical, mind you. I'd just be stressed about the worst-case scenario and the impact it would have on my career. Would love the double income though, not gonna lie.
- Flankk 5y ago
  Of course it's unethical, it's time theft. It requires you to be dishonest. You can make money as a con artist in many ways, this is just one of them. You can lie about your qualifications and experience too. If your only reservation with being dishonest is the possibility you might get caught, I think that says a lot about you as a person.
  - frankbreetz 5y ago
    If you are accomplishing your job to an acceptable standard it is not unethical. As long as it is not hourly, you just have to accomplish your tasks.
    - lumost 5y ago
      Most salary contracts prevent moonlighting like this to one extent or another. You’d need to vet the fine print on whether working 2 40 hour per week jobs is ok. Not to mention that both jobs may ask more hours of you at any point.
  - greyface- 5y ago
    If you're salaried, you're not paid for time, you're paid for output.

vanusa 5y ago

This can't possibly be sustainable or worth the reputation risk of getting caught.

throw8932894 5y ago

> Be free from office politics Cheating like this defeats the purpose. Go self employed and charge by task not by time.

chasebank 5y ago

Which job will you boast on your LinkedIn?

toomanyrichies 5y ago
Potentially neither. "I stopped maintaining my LinkedIn due to recruiter spam" would be a believable statement in my opinion.
betaby 5y ago
None? I have LinkedIn account for about 10 years and found it useless for job search anyway. I use it like facebook to connect and occasionally chat with colleagues from previous companies.

betaby 5y ago

How 'powerful' are employed? What is their employment status? At previous company CTO was in boards of another 5+ companies + owned partially another 2. How that works at 'that' level?

jareklupinski 5y ago
last cycle, I had two interviews on the same day for two different startups, and at both meetings one of the people in the room was the same, and yup they were the CTO of both places simultaneously they remembered who I was but insisted on following the script the second time too i did take the offer :) i think they were impressed because the second time they asked "where do you want to be in x years/where do you want your career going" I said "i want to be you/in your chair"
yunohn 5y ago
This is a really important point. While us salaried workers struggle in a 9-5, the powerful get multiple board positions that each pay more than our annual wages.
- sanjayio 5y ago
  To be fair, the 9-5 workers are paid for their hours, the multiple board positioned folks are often paid in equity, sometimes nothing, and have minimal 9-5 obligations. In having fewer 9-5 obligations, often none, it’s less immoral to have multiple board positions. Fwiw, I’m not on a board, just writing it how I see it.
  - yunohn 5y ago
    > 9-5 workers are paid for their hours 9-5 workers (in tech atleast) are rarely paid hourly - neither individuals nor managers. > it’s less immoral to have multiple board positions I would disagree - I find it immoral that you can be part of multiple decision-making boards, each earning multiples of a yearly wage, and somehow have so little work to do compared to a worker.
- rmk 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Untit1ed 5y ago

I see a lot of people talking about reputational risk around this, but I'd be more worried about the legal implications. Most of us have contracts that grant IP of what we create to our employer at least during work hours - if you get caught doing this how do the IP implications unwind given that both your employers have the same rights to what you produced? Would it be legally equivalent to selling a bunch of IP that you never had the right to? This whole phenomenon is just the pinnacle of the privilege that we enjoy as software developers. While warehouse or hospitality workers work two or three jobs to stay above the poverty line and have their every move tracked as they do, we choose to parlay our autonomy into occupying two well-paying jobs at the same time. When our employers force us back into the office 5 days a week, it'll be the people who did this who made that happen.

gamblor956 5y ago
I knew someone who tried doing just this during COVID (taking two programming jobs), and ended up getting fired by both jobs when they found out.
mgkimsal 5y ago
> and have their every move tracked as they do, we choose to parlay our autonomy into occupying two well-paying jobs at the same time... Some folks are possibly writing the tech that is overseeing others...
olliej 5y ago
Right? It seems like you be very quickly in the realms of breach of contract for most high income jobs. I'm presuming this is targeted at already high income earners, because the alternative is simply a techified name for what some huge proportion of all Americans do all the time. I'd also be intrigued about how it interacts with contracts that say everything you do/think in your spare time belongs to the company (a nonsense condition, but whatever)
duxup 5y ago
I had a coworker try to pull the two remote jobs at once thing. Thinking a customer was calling he answered the wrong phone and said the wrong company name, but it was actually his bosses boss. Company fired him, and actually went so far as to threaten to sue the guy until he agreed to pay restitution (one year pay), and they told the other company who fired him. I don’t know if the other company did anything else. Dude was a bad apple / trying to find a way to skirt every rule / do as little work as possible anyway so I suspect if push came to shove they could have proven he really hadn’t done the work he claimed and was busy not working most of the time. I really didn’t expect they would take it that far, company didn’t need his money, but I believe someone wanted to make an example of him. Can’t blame them.

olliej 5y ago

... is this a tech person's equivalent to what a significant portion of Americans do just to pay rent? Only with the added fun of breach of contract, etc tossed in? I thought it was satire at first.

ransom1538 5y ago

It is called "wire fraud" a federal crime. The US has a ridiculous punishment for it [1]. Wire fraud is the favorite of the feds since it is loosely defined and easy to prosecute. Feds also use this law to get people to turn on others due to it's extreme punishments (you will sing). If you sign anything stating this is your only job - don't do this. (1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money; (2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud; (3) that it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and (4) that interstate wire communications were in fact used) "Wire fraud is a federal crime that carries a sentence of not more than 20 years’ imprisonment and fines of up to $250,000 for individuals and $500,000 for organizations." [1]

betaby 5y ago
How that works for folks with CXX titles? Whey often 'sit' in multiple boards. Also recently I was re-checking my contract, and there is nothing said there 'only job', I think that would be illegal to put in a contract.
- ransom1538 5y ago
  All you need to do is be open. Do not lie for money on the internet or mail. State you work for other companies, state you are on other boards, etc. When you lie to people for money is where things go really bad (at least in the US). (wire/mail fraud 941. 18 U.S.C. 1343).
  - betaby 5y ago
    Why one should disclose that? And how and why that's fraud? Do people in US disclose things like 'I flip burgers during the day' - 35 hours/week and also 'work as an office cleaner on weekends and evenings' - another 35 hours/week. Technically those are two times full employments. I'm not from US and may lack some details how it works there. My example above it not theoretical I know person who works like that,non-US location.

aurizon 5y ago

Find 2 companies who both need a remote worker to deal with aspects in common...fill both jobs, and have fewer BW problems, use realfakes avatars to handle the occasional zoom call and use 2 different IP addresses for verisimilitude.

epicureanideal 5y ago

This can only work at extremely dysfunctional companies with incompetent management. I suppose there's an opportunity here for some unethical people to get some money from those companies until they collapse. In any reasonably well-run company these people would be fired quickly. Gordon Gecko might say these people are performing service to the public by helping poorly managed companies go bankrupt faster, but it's still unethical because the goal seems to be to massively underwork at each job. On the other hand, I think that it should be reasonable for software engineers to work two jobs, as long as they are not competitors and there are no intellectual property concerns. Just like any other employee, some people want to work two jobs, and I'm actually disappointed it's not more common to arrange for multiple legitimate jobs (two part time, or one full time one part time) in the tech industry.

honkdaddy 5y ago
This is patently untrue. I have a close friend currently working two SWE positions, roughly 60h/wk in total, and has been doing so for about a year with only positive feedback thus far. Both are publicly traded Big Tech companies, neither of which are known as being dysfunctional or problematic. There are more people doing this than you'd like to think. Check out the Discord for this community if you're still doubtful - you'd be surprised at the combination of companies people are able to perfectly fulfill expectations for.
temp8964 5y ago
> This can only work at extremely dysfunctional companies with incompetent management. Not really. There are many job positions require tons of institutional knowledge of the data system and the code base, but does not require lots of everyday work. And some of the jobs are seasonable. A senior worker can really do tons of outside jobs.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Maybe it's my bubble, but I could maybe do tons of things unrelated to tech but relevant people in tech are aware of who I am and who I work for. (i.e. I could maybe carve out lots of hours to do various things but I couldn't (and wouldn't) actually have another full-timeish tech job.

pauleibye 5y ago

Please don't do this. It's so painfully obvious when people do this and it's an awful experience for everyone involved when you get caught.

s_jack_frost 5y ago
This is survivorship bias. You only hear about the people who are bad workers in general and get caught, not the ones who do both jobs well and only get positive feedback.

Smeevy 5y ago

I had a new hire last year that did this. He interviewed pretty well and we brought him on as contract-to-hire through a placement company. We're a small company, so it was pretty easy to have everything set up for him on day one to begin contributing. The first day was spent getting to know other members of the team and we were working to get him familiar with the codebase of a new application that we were working on. We had identified 10 or so tickets, new data entry pages and some UI bug fixes, that we thought would be a gentle introduction to the new app and walked him through a couple. The first couple of days were okay, but I started observing strange behavior. He didn't contribute in meetings, but he was very outspoken when explaining why this project was substantially more difficult than we'd thought. Also, he kept coming back to the need for us to completely throw out all of the prior work because it was "all wrong." The explanations never got any deeper than that, though. I also noted a couple of exchanges in which I found his behavior towards our project manager to be somewhat belligerent when discussing project details. At first, I just figured he was carrying some of his previous shop with him and that that was how he was used to communicating. I gave him a week to prototype his architectural recommendations and pulled him off of all meetings so that he could focus on it. This also gave me a convenient way to separate him and the project manager from further confrontation while I examined the situation. The week passed and his prototype looked like he'd worked on it for about an hour. I asked him if he thought this was working out and he admitted that it wasn't. I then asked him if he wanted to terminate the contract and he jumped at the opportunity. Speaking with the placement firm later that day, they apologized and said that he had admitted to them that he'd been working another full-time job and that he couldn't keep it up anymore. They offered to forgo charging me for the last two weeks. We still lost a substantial amount of time on the project. Start to finish, this whole episode took a little over three weeks and we were lucky to get out of it so quickly. The kicker was that I was able to replace all of the shoddy code that this guy wrote over that period in one long Saturday evening. I'm more afraid of hiring people I don't know now. There's no coding test that will tell you if someone is just going to lie right to your face every day.

xupybd 5y ago
As an honest worker hoping to go remote one day this guy pisses me off. If you pull this crap you're not just burning yourself you're burning ever honest worker in the industry. This is why people ask remote employees to put monitoring software on their computers. At least in this situation it sounds like good management at the top was able to spot the problem early.

tehjoker 5y ago

I think if an economist looked at this they would say workers have identified areas of inefficiency in the economy and found a way fill the gap. However, if every person takes two jobs, that means there's 2x competition for jobs and will depress wages over time. Limited arbitrage opportunity. If you actually work two jobs at once at reasonable efficiency, the businesses aren't going to be paying for this, we are.

machiaweliczny 5y ago
Currently we are paying for women joining economy as land/house competition ia still same and rich just make more for claims to land. Fuck em, 0 empathy on my end.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  I do empathize and am tempted myself, but I think we have to recognize that intensifying competition between workers isn't going to help us in the end. We have to unite against the business class.
  - lupire 5y ago
    That's what parent was saying. Two-full-time-income families cause wages to plummet dur to excess competition. Working full-time is is stealing jobs from others.

valdiorn 5y ago

Wouldn't you be better off just being a contractor and taking multiple contracts in parallel? That way you're legally covered, and as long as you're fulfilling your tasks, you could in theory keep everyone happy and collect multiple paychecks without breaking any rules.

xupybd 5y ago
And you get to be honest. Taking on an employee is a lot more of a commitment than a contractor. It would feel like a slap in the face to find out an employee was working another full time job. Why not just get a side hustle? Get some contracts and let your employer know what you're doing.
Salgat 5y ago
You're not in the legal clear if your reported hours overlap between the two companies.

mathverse 5y ago

Where do you all find these jobs where you have so few meetings? I feel like even one meeting a day at each company could eventually lead into an overlap and you would at some point need to explain yourself why you are unable to attend. And there are only so many excuses one can use...

Havoc 5y ago

This strikes me as a glorified way of dressing up the American “I work three jobs and barely make rent”. ie it’s not really three jobs but 3x 1/3rd jobs. Often each being zero hour. This seems like the corporate equivalent. Unless the companies in question are utterly incompetent they’re not giving anyone full time salaries with part time expectations. If people are finding examples like that - fair play.