7 ms·

This is how you ruin remote work for everyone. Remote work is about trust.

VRay 5y ago
Not to mention that working two jobs poorly is a lot more work and a lot less money than boostrapping a decent SaaS EDIT: Pretty rich that I'm getting downvoted so much, despite multiple examples of successful SaaS creators showing up in the comments, and this being a forum started by a VC partly to promote and encourage tech startups. If you think that starting a tech business is so impossibly difficult that you're personally offended at the idea of someone recommending you do it, I'd say you should just go back to Reddit or Twitter. If you're bristling at me calling SaaS "easy", I just meant it's easier than running a multi-year scam and probably committing fraud, depending on the details of your employment contracts.
- hwers 5y ago
  Successfully boostrapping a decent SaaS sounds way more challenging in my eyes, got any tips on resources to read to make that be as obvious a task as it seems to be in your eyes?
  - andrewxdiamond 5y ago
    There’s a ton of content out there, but the best advice I’ve seen is simple. 1. Find a (ideally large) group of people you care about 2. Find a problem they have 3. Solve it
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      Can you make it so obvious someone working 2 remote jobs could do it?
  - VRay 5y ago
    My favorite example is the Expat Software guy: https://expatsoftware.com/articles/ https://expatsoftware.com/articles/ Another good one is Daedtech/Hit Subscribe
- granshaw 5y ago
  Oh wow if only any old dev could bootstrap a $400k SaaS – way easier said than done
  - girvo 5y ago
    While it's not easy (and you should never trust anyone who says that it is), I do think that it's more feasible than most developers think it is. I'm not special, absolutely far from it, and I achieved it (in Australian dollars anyway, and focused on a B2B niche rather than B2C)
  - VRay 5y ago
    If you're going to engage in fraud anyway, you can make more than you'd pull in from working two jobs Hell, with all the crypto madness going on right now, you could probably get ludicrously wealthy just doing freelance black hat security testing. You aspiring fraudsters should actually read all the paperwork they put in front of you next time you start a job, and tell me if there's no exclusivity at all in it. Just because Jack Dorsey got away with running two companies doesn't mean it's right or just for you to weasel along and lie to two managers forever. Get your life together and do something meaningful instead of stressing yourself out for the sake of whatever pair of pittances you can earn from this dumb scam.
- newnamenewface 5y ago
  I actually agree with you over the other comments. I think the idea of industriously trying to be the worst worker you possibly can (while not being fired) is one of those self-defeating efforts to do less work where you actually do more work in a lot of ways. You've got to justify to yourself continually that you're not being a drain or a bad person. You've got to juggle context switching between two roles during an overlapping period, making both more difficult than they would be individually and leaving yourself worse able to focus generally. (I suppose you could probably block your schedule to make this work better but I can't see a silver bullet solution for all the time.) You've got to compartmentalize your jobs and your interaction with coworkers. I know that with my personality, these factors would be major drags on my mental and emotional well-being. I would feel like a fraud for a long time before getting used to something like this. With a business, while you deal with some similar issues (compartmentalization, context-switching), I expect they'd feel far less invalidating (again, to me/those with similar personality types) because you'd know you were actually applying yourself to do the best you could.
- xwdv 5y ago
  Absolutely it is not. Most decent bootstrapped SaaS will have trouble getting pure profit that matches the salary of two developer jobs, and it will be a lot of work, a lot more than just engineering.
  - granshaw 5y ago
    Yeah, even matching one developer job is hard... you definitely get better at it and closer as you go, but that's alot of opportunity cost in the process, if you can even survive that long on peanuts
- masterof0 5y ago
  I'm on the fence on this one. Maybe running a freelancer business? Dunno. The thing is boosttraping a decent SaaS is pretty hard tho.
twa999 5y ago
it's about getting paid.
- literallyWTF 5y ago
  No man don’t you understand? It’s better to not be paid and dedicated your life to the ethos posted on the ‘About’ page of the company than it is to play the system.
  - dwaltrip 5y ago
    It's possible to have ethics and also not be a doormat or corporate slave.
zer0354 5y ago
Remote work won't be ruined by this. In fact, it's perfect. The premise is that the average person puts in 10x the effort for a 1% return on investment. You are an employee, sure, but are "investing" the company in terms of life-hours you could spend elsewhere. Naturally, you want to therefore minimize work and maximize salary. The ultimate situation being getting regular raises by doing 20-50% less than is expected to you. If employers don't want this the solution is simple. It's not finding these people and firing them. It's paying people commensurate to their effort like a real meritocracy would. If someone can hold 2 jobs working at 50% brain capacity then they are obviously very talented and quite crafty. You pay this person enough, they will dedicate 100% of their brain to your project. The employer side of the equation is JUST as exploitative as the employee side. It's just far, far, far more common for the employee to be exploited. For example, via pagerduty, poor hiring practices leading to overwork, or overtasking. This is wonderful. Anyone who is truly a libertarian should be encouraging this. It's the perfect free market solution to exploitative labor. You dont get paid past 40 hours for your salary. Why should you reduce YOUR OWN worth to make a company's bottom line bigger? Unless you hold ITM options in the company the answer is you don't and shouldn't. You should be exploiting them at every turn.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway75787 5y ago
  Isn't this keeping jobs from those of us who are limited to normal brain capacity, but need to make the rent?
  - zer0354 5y ago
    Contractors don't really take away jobs from people and I see this as no different. The people capable of this are relatively small in number even in an industry full of talented people.
  - planetsprite 5y ago
    Sorry but the silicon valley ethos is that only geniuses matter. Everyone else, the 99% non-savants, aren't relevant and can be discarded when needed.
nnoitra 5y ago
Bet you 20 bucks that both of those companies would be happy to burn and churn OP. There's no trust left anymore. It's dishonesty all the way down.
- thunkshift1 5y ago
  Its okay for ceos to run multiple companies st one time, but people who think they are capable of doing two dev jobs remotely are dishonest..?
  - HatchedLake721 5y ago
    Because someone else in the world can lie, steal and whatnot, that’s your excuse to do it too? Can you name any CEO who secretly ran multiple companies without board not knowing about it? I think you don’t know what CEOs do along with their legal fiduciary responsibilities + duties.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      I can't give you an example of anyone who's done it secretly, but, Jack Dorsey (and several others) have done it openly. Why did nobody argue they shouldn't be doing that because they owed their full effort to one or another of their companies, I wonder? Why is it only a bad thing if a lowly worker does it?
      - SergeAx 5y ago
        If both your employers are aware and okay with you working two jobs - it is totally morally okay. But I don't know lot of employers like that.
      - HatchedLake721 5y ago
        Do you really think Twitter's and Square's boards responsible for companies worth $100B+ combined are not aware and have not discussed whether their appointed CEO is up to par to do this? Can you name me any employer who hired a full-time employee and is happy to pay them full-time salary while the employee deceives them for financial gain and works part-time and/or outputs the minimum amount of work hoping not to get fired? If you believe you can do more work, go freelancing/contracting/self-employed.
curious_cat_163 5y ago
And isn’t this unlawful? What am I missing here?
- Macha 5y ago
  What's unlawful around working two jobs? Happens at high end (consulting CTO John Carmack, or Twitter & Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and in the US happens significantly often at the lowest end (retail workers in two jobs). It's unethical in that the two employers are unaware of that fact, and he's advising deliberately not doing work in bad faith (whereas the boards of Meta, Twitter and Square were aware of the previous situations, and your retail shift manager knows he's not scheduling and paying a living wage), but illegal probably not.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  There's no law that says you can't work two jobs (obviously) But chances are good that you entered into some form of agreement with your employer that forbids holding another full-time job. You also have NDAs and such agreements that could be argued to be broken if you're working at two companies simultaneously if they have any possible competition with each other. In practice, a company isn't likely to go after an ex-employee for damages in this case unless there really was a trade secrets violation. What happens, though, is that the company that realizes the double-work scheme is happening calls up the other company and they both fire the employee. All of the person's managers and coworkers usually hate the person because they were likely sandbagging and pawning work off on coworkers (as is necessary to put in half time at any halfway competent company), so they can't get a decent reference. Now they're unemployed, without references, and starting over again. Not the end of the world in today's job market, but I expect reference checks for remote work will continue to get much more aggressive to catch situations like this.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Yep, can confirm. Worked a company where a remote employee got a new job but didn't bother quitting. He put in just enough work to pretend to be making progress and gave a lot of excuses about why his project was delayed. Eventually someone figured it out. Management was furious. Remote work restrictions were tightened and everyone suddenly had far more check-ins to ensure we were actually working every day. I heard they also contacted the person's new job and filled them in on the double-work situation. That person was universally hated and I don't know anyone at the company who would give them a positive reference.
- derekp7 5y ago
  The part about contacting their new employer may be illegal, so tread with caution.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    I don't see why it would be illegal.
    - chillacy 5y ago
      Just speculation, but there is a possibility that the old employer sought retribution against an employee who left by lying to the new company to sink the employee’s career? With laws like this it’s often a case of “it happened (at least) once so we wrote a new law”.
      - IshKebab 5y ago
        That's defamation. Already covered.
sanjayio 5y ago
This is ultimately what will drive stochastic based device monitoring. How long was your laptop open? Which apps were foreground with a moderate amount of activity?

VRay 5y ago

Not to mention that working two jobs poorly is a lot more work and a lot less money than boostrapping a decent SaaS EDIT: Pretty rich that I'm getting downvoted so much, despite multiple examples of successful SaaS creators showing up in the comments, and this being a forum started by a VC partly to promote and encourage tech startups. If you think that starting a tech business is so impossibly difficult that you're personally offended at the idea of someone recommending you do it, I'd say you should just go back to Reddit or Twitter. If you're bristling at me calling SaaS "easy", I just meant it's easier than running a multi-year scam and probably committing fraud, depending on the details of your employment contracts.

hwers 5y ago
Successfully boostrapping a decent SaaS sounds way more challenging in my eyes, got any tips on resources to read to make that be as obvious a task as it seems to be in your eyes?
- andrewxdiamond 5y ago
  There’s a ton of content out there, but the best advice I’ve seen is simple. 1. Find a (ideally large) group of people you care about 2. Find a problem they have 3. Solve it
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Can you make it so obvious someone working 2 remote jobs could do it?
- VRay 5y ago
  My favorite example is the Expat Software guy: https://expatsoftware.com/articles/ https://expatsoftware.com/articles/ Another good one is Daedtech/Hit Subscribe
granshaw 5y ago
Oh wow if only any old dev could bootstrap a $400k SaaS – way easier said than done
- girvo 5y ago
  While it's not easy (and you should never trust anyone who says that it is), I do think that it's more feasible than most developers think it is. I'm not special, absolutely far from it, and I achieved it (in Australian dollars anyway, and focused on a B2B niche rather than B2C)
- VRay 5y ago
  If you're going to engage in fraud anyway, you can make more than you'd pull in from working two jobs Hell, with all the crypto madness going on right now, you could probably get ludicrously wealthy just doing freelance black hat security testing. You aspiring fraudsters should actually read all the paperwork they put in front of you next time you start a job, and tell me if there's no exclusivity at all in it. Just because Jack Dorsey got away with running two companies doesn't mean it's right or just for you to weasel along and lie to two managers forever. Get your life together and do something meaningful instead of stressing yourself out for the sake of whatever pair of pittances you can earn from this dumb scam.
newnamenewface 5y ago
I actually agree with you over the other comments. I think the idea of industriously trying to be the worst worker you possibly can (while not being fired) is one of those self-defeating efforts to do less work where you actually do more work in a lot of ways. You've got to justify to yourself continually that you're not being a drain or a bad person. You've got to juggle context switching between two roles during an overlapping period, making both more difficult than they would be individually and leaving yourself worse able to focus generally. (I suppose you could probably block your schedule to make this work better but I can't see a silver bullet solution for all the time.) You've got to compartmentalize your jobs and your interaction with coworkers. I know that with my personality, these factors would be major drags on my mental and emotional well-being. I would feel like a fraud for a long time before getting used to something like this. With a business, while you deal with some similar issues (compartmentalization, context-switching), I expect they'd feel far less invalidating (again, to me/those with similar personality types) because you'd know you were actually applying yourself to do the best you could.
xwdv 5y ago
Absolutely it is not. Most decent bootstrapped SaaS will have trouble getting pure profit that matches the salary of two developer jobs, and it will be a lot of work, a lot more than just engineering.
- granshaw 5y ago
  Yeah, even matching one developer job is hard... you definitely get better at it and closer as you go, but that's alot of opportunity cost in the process, if you can even survive that long on peanuts
masterof0 5y ago
I'm on the fence on this one. Maybe running a freelancer business? Dunno. The thing is boosttraping a decent SaaS is pretty hard tho.

twa999 5y ago

it's about getting paid.

literallyWTF 5y ago
No man don’t you understand? It’s better to not be paid and dedicated your life to the ethos posted on the ‘About’ page of the company than it is to play the system.
- dwaltrip 5y ago
  It's possible to have ethics and also not be a doormat or corporate slave.

zer0354 5y ago

Remote work won't be ruined by this. In fact, it's perfect. The premise is that the average person puts in 10x the effort for a 1% return on investment. You are an employee, sure, but are "investing" the company in terms of life-hours you could spend elsewhere. Naturally, you want to therefore minimize work and maximize salary. The ultimate situation being getting regular raises by doing 20-50% less than is expected to you. If employers don't want this the solution is simple. It's not finding these people and firing them. It's paying people commensurate to their effort like a real meritocracy would. If someone can hold 2 jobs working at 50% brain capacity then they are obviously very talented and quite crafty. You pay this person enough, they will dedicate 100% of their brain to your project. The employer side of the equation is JUST as exploitative as the employee side. It's just far, far, far more common for the employee to be exploited. For example, via pagerduty, poor hiring practices leading to overwork, or overtasking. This is wonderful. Anyone who is truly a libertarian should be encouraging this. It's the perfect free market solution to exploitative labor. You dont get paid past 40 hours for your salary. Why should you reduce YOUR OWN worth to make a company's bottom line bigger? Unless you hold ITM options in the company the answer is you don't and shouldn't. You should be exploiting them at every turn.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway75787 5y ago
Isn't this keeping jobs from those of us who are limited to normal brain capacity, but need to make the rent?
- zer0354 5y ago
  Contractors don't really take away jobs from people and I see this as no different. The people capable of this are relatively small in number even in an industry full of talented people.
- planetsprite 5y ago
  Sorry but the silicon valley ethos is that only geniuses matter. Everyone else, the 99% non-savants, aren't relevant and can be discarded when needed.

nnoitra 5y ago

Bet you 20 bucks that both of those companies would be happy to burn and churn OP. There's no trust left anymore. It's dishonesty all the way down.

thunkshift1 5y ago
Its okay for ceos to run multiple companies st one time, but people who think they are capable of doing two dev jobs remotely are dishonest..?
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  Because someone else in the world can lie, steal and whatnot, that’s your excuse to do it too? Can you name any CEO who secretly ran multiple companies without board not knowing about it? I think you don’t know what CEOs do along with their legal fiduciary responsibilities + duties.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    I can't give you an example of anyone who's done it secretly, but, Jack Dorsey (and several others) have done it openly. Why did nobody argue they shouldn't be doing that because they owed their full effort to one or another of their companies, I wonder? Why is it only a bad thing if a lowly worker does it?
    - SergeAx 5y ago
      If both your employers are aware and okay with you working two jobs - it is totally morally okay. But I don't know lot of employers like that.
    - HatchedLake721 5y ago
      Do you really think Twitter's and Square's boards responsible for companies worth $100B+ combined are not aware and have not discussed whether their appointed CEO is up to par to do this? Can you name me any employer who hired a full-time employee and is happy to pay them full-time salary while the employee deceives them for financial gain and works part-time and/or outputs the minimum amount of work hoping not to get fired? If you believe you can do more work, go freelancing/contracting/self-employed.

curious_cat_163 5y ago

And isn’t this unlawful? What am I missing here?

Macha 5y ago
What's unlawful around working two jobs? Happens at high end (consulting CTO John Carmack, or Twitter & Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and in the US happens significantly often at the lowest end (retail workers in two jobs). It's unethical in that the two employers are unaware of that fact, and he's advising deliberately not doing work in bad faith (whereas the boards of Meta, Twitter and Square were aware of the previous situations, and your retail shift manager knows he's not scheduling and paying a living wage), but illegal probably not.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
There's no law that says you can't work two jobs (obviously) But chances are good that you entered into some form of agreement with your employer that forbids holding another full-time job. You also have NDAs and such agreements that could be argued to be broken if you're working at two companies simultaneously if they have any possible competition with each other. In practice, a company isn't likely to go after an ex-employee for damages in this case unless there really was a trade secrets violation. What happens, though, is that the company that realizes the double-work scheme is happening calls up the other company and they both fire the employee. All of the person's managers and coworkers usually hate the person because they were likely sandbagging and pawning work off on coworkers (as is necessary to put in half time at any halfway competent company), so they can't get a decent reference. Now they're unemployed, without references, and starting over again. Not the end of the world in today's job market, but I expect reference checks for remote work will continue to get much more aggressive to catch situations like this.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Yep, can confirm. Worked a company where a remote employee got a new job but didn't bother quitting. He put in just enough work to pretend to be making progress and gave a lot of excuses about why his project was delayed. Eventually someone figured it out. Management was furious. Remote work restrictions were tightened and everyone suddenly had far more check-ins to ensure we were actually working every day. I heard they also contacted the person's new job and filled them in on the double-work situation. That person was universally hated and I don't know anyone at the company who would give them a positive reference.

derekp7 5y ago
The part about contacting their new employer may be illegal, so tread with caution.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  I don't see why it would be illegal.
  - chillacy 5y ago
    Just speculation, but there is a possibility that the old employer sought retribution against an employee who left by lying to the new company to sink the employee’s career? With laws like this it’s often a case of “it happened (at least) once so we wrote a new law”.
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      That's defamation. Already covered.

sanjayio 5y ago

This is ultimately what will drive stochastic based device monitoring. How long was your laptop open? Which apps were foreground with a moderate amount of activity?