28 ms·

I know there is a growing movement of people who are doubling up on remote jobs, trying to work two of them (or more!) at the same time to hack the income game.

I know there is a growing movement of people who are doubling up on remote jobs, trying to work two of them (or more!) at the same time to hack the income game. Surely some of these people are using deepfakes to help avoid detection that they are doing those things.

moneywoes 4y ago
Why go through all that hassle of faking another persons ID? Another resume etc
- walrus01 4y ago
  People outside the US/Canada who might not be otherwise eligible to be hired as a W2 or T4 equivalent employee. If you have a US resident's stolen PII and can somehow set up a bank account to receive ACH direct deposits, and are a good enough social engineer, can possibly get hired under that name.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Equifax will narc on you. Bow down before your data broker overlords.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    Hireright can also be nasty with the background checks, to the point of asking you to correct irrelevant minor typos (say, a space) in you credit file before validating your identity.
dontbenebby 4y ago
What industry? Over in infosec, they seem to just do courtesy interviews to suss out if I did some ecrime the feds are sniffing about, find out they were incorrect, then not even have the common courtesy to drop the act and offer to pay me as a consultant rather than treat job interviews as fishing expeditions.
- mwint 4y ago
  I’m having a hard time parsing this comment, can you expand on who’s doing what?
  - dontbenebby 4y ago
    Oh, I'd have someone connect me with say, an interview with the Software Engineering Institute or RAND. They'd have me speak to between six and twenty people about say, how I would work to secure CERT's vulerability stockpile. Then they'd refuse to hire me, refuse to address the issues I discussed, and then sometimes one of the interviewers would pass that information to the Russians or Chinese leading to a massive break ala OPM or Solarwinds even after Senator Wyden sent Chris Soghoian or someone of similar skill adjacent to the Omnidynar group to go ask some hard questions. In parallel, folks with non-US passports would obstruct any applications I made in private industry in favor of those with their same passport. It was all super frustrating, since my CV had the appearance of someone with a deep commitment to nonprofit work, when it often more than I made decisions like "Being a PhD student pays slightly better than a Papa John's employee and I'll eventually find something more permanent doing the latter". Lately, looking back, I wonder if I'd have been better off saving up then moving to Thailand like one of my old drinking buddies did. (I don't drink alcohol anymore, and I'm spending the afternoon reading HN as I work on some technical projects I'll probably never put online, since it seems no amount of code publication leads me to a fair interview -- all it does is give tools for others to use in their "work") Happy to reply again if the above is unclear -- I made sure to not use a nym that doesn't include my legal name, for privacy -- I could have been much more detailed :-)
    - ForHackernews 4y ago
      > Happy to reply again if the above is unclear ... > Then they'd refuse to hire me, refuse to address the issues I discussed, and then sometimes one of the interviewers would pass that information to the Russians or Chinese leading to a massive break ala OPM or Solarwinds even after Senator Wyden sent Chris Soghoian or someone of similar skill adjacent to the Omnidynar group to go ask some hard questions. This paragraph is exceedingly unclear and may hint at the reasons why you are struggling to get hired. This reads as some mix of narcissistic personality disorder / conspiratorial thinking. You write like a native (or near-native) English speaker, but your composition is all over the place. I don't mean this unkindly, but have you ever spoken with a mental health professional? Many technical folks are neuroatypical and this can sometimes be a barrier to traditional stable employment.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
The deepfakes and stolen PII discussed in the article are for identity theft: The candidate steals the identity of someone with an impressive LinkedIn background and then presumably hopes that the company takes their background at face value and doesn't ask too many hard questions in the interview. The company then completes reference and background checks on the victim. They might also use this identity theft to qualify for jobs that aren't available in their location due to contractual and/or legal restrictions. The "overemployed" people generally aren't performing identity theft like this. Having multiple jobs ranges anywhere from legal to fraud depending on contracts they've signed or how they've misrepresented themselves (it's not uncommon to see suggestions to take multiple hourly jobs and then exaggerate the number of hours worked, for example). However, adding identity theft on top would elevate what they're doing to a major crime, which is not something that would help them.
- foobar2021 4y ago
  It’s not legal for some people to hold multiple jobs because of visa restrictions. So that could be a motivation for the added risk.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    that's too small a subset people - you should be looking at it from the angle of 'what are crimi at businesses doing at scale for profit"
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    "remote" doesn't have to mean "foreign". It just means your daily "physical office" isn't company premises.
    - foobar2021 4y ago
      I’m referring to people living in the USA on a visa who can only hold a single job at a time.
      - 4y ago
throw10920 4y ago
This seems a little bit odd. Working exactly 40 hours a week is stressful enough - is it really worth it to double both your salary and your hours? I think I'd want at least 4x the salary in order to work 80-hour weeks - or is this practice mostly done by workaholics that enjoy long hours?
- andreilys 4y ago
  The trick is not working 40 hours :-)
- jdironman 4y ago
  Its probably done by people who snag lower effort remote jobs and do the minimum viable to be considered "good enough".
- corrral 4y ago
  I think the idea is you work two jobs that pay for 40 hours but only require 10-15 hours each, not to be noticeably worse than average.
- Kaze404 4y ago
  I used to think this was possible but simply out of what I consider acceptable. Some time ago I worked for a week while interviewing for a company that required candidates to do paid work for them, and it was the most miserable week of my life. I wouldn't do this for an extended amount of time for any amount of money. It's not worth it.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  The people who do this aren't interested in putting in full workweeks and delivering good work. Their goal is to find jobs and managers with low expectations, then sandbag as much as possible ("Gee, this task is harder than I thought. Going to take a couple weeks longer than we estimated!"). Had a team member try this and an old company. We caught on quickly when they couldn't keep up with their workload and were constantly unavailable during the day. Really sucked for the rest of the team who had to pick up the slack this person created by pretending to work full time.
datavirtue 4y ago
"there is a growing movement of people who are doubling up on remote jobs" Citation needed
- paraph1n 4y ago
  Actually, a citation is hardly needed here. 1. People want more money. 2. Remote jobs are becoming much more common as of late. 3. It is (much) easier to double up on remote jobs than non-remote jobs. 4. Doubling up on remote jobs results in more money. 5. Therefore, there is a growing movement of people who are doubling up on remote jobs. QED. I mean, it's pretty unlikely that this argument doesn't hold. I feel like you'd need a citation to counter it.
  - Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
    >I feel like you'd need a citation to counter it. You don't need a citation to counter a baseless assertion. My assertion is that most people who apply for remote jobs are fairly honest (by culture) white-collar types who wouldn't think to 'double up on remote jobs' for the same reason they wouldn't think go out at night stealing catalytic converters, which is that they possess a basic sense of right and wrong. I mean, if you think that the average person is basically a scammer at heart, okay... Maybe you come from a low-trust culture, I don't know. I don't think most people who come from high-trust cultures would behave this way or think that behaving this way is okay.
    - paraph1n 4y ago
      No one is arguing that the average remote worker is doubling up on jobs. But many more are now compared to recent history. Stealing catalytic converters is directly harming another person and also punishable with prison time, it's hardly comparable to working two remote jobs. But sure, some (potentially large) proportion of white collar workers may not be willing to violate trust by working two jobs, but many would. Beyond that, if you think that all knowledge workers are ethical people, I would remind you about all the horrible software that exists in the world for the sole purpose of scamming or harming people. There's a lot of it. And it's all unquestionably much less ethnical than working two normal white collar jobs.
z3t4 4y ago
Some jobs seem to only want you around for your experience/expertise, like baby-sitting and preventing fires. You could theoretically make everything so stable that when something fails a secondary system kicks in, and all you do is to debug when that happens and make it even more stable. Just make sure you have an excuse to not work on site or they will keep you busy with meetings, admin, and reports. But one day there will be the the perfect storm and all systems on your 15 different full time jobs will go down. You could always call in sick that day, but then they would hire more ppl like you.
cj 4y ago
This happened to me, twice, and my company is < 20 people. Of those 20, 2 had multiple jobs. We hired a guy who found us on HN Who's Hiring who turned out to be working 3 (THREE!!) full time jobs, each paying $140k+. He quit when I started putting deadlines on work when he started falling behind. I got suspicious, reached out to his prior company's CEO to ask if he was still employed, and turns out he was! Then came the discovery of the 3rd company... For hiring managers out there: make sure candidates have a linkedin profile that lists your current company as their current place of employment (both employees with 2+ jobs had their LinkedIn hidden for obvious reasons), and always run background checks that include employment verification screens.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  Have you considered your company pays so low as to force people to work multiple jobs? I think we both know that person could get much more than $140k elsewhere.
  - solar-ice 4y ago
    I have no strong opinion on the working multiple jobs thing, but a single person making $140k is not forced to do anything. That is not a low wage. Fucking hell.
    - walleeee 4y ago
      Seriously, a single person making less than that can live comfortably nearly anywhere in the US if they keep expenses reasonable, especially if it's remote and they have no need for a car
      - Firmwarrior 4y ago
        yeah, just a quick reality check for the codezillas here: The median US household income for 2021 was $68,000 There are places outside the SF Bay Area
- ryandrake 4y ago
PheonixPharts 4y ago
I find it amazing how many people in this community don't realize that there is a fairly large number of low income people who work two full time jobs to survive. Sure they're typically hourly not salaried but that doesn't seem to be too major of a difference. I don't even see what the issue is at all. If a person can get both jobs done fine, then who cares?
lordnacho 4y ago
There is in fact a guy right here on HN claiming to have 10 jobs, bagging 1.5m a year.

moneywoes 4y ago

Why go through all that hassle of faking another persons ID? Another resume etc

walrus01 4y ago
People outside the US/Canada who might not be otherwise eligible to be hired as a W2 or T4 equivalent employee. If you have a US resident's stolen PII and can somehow set up a bank account to receive ACH direct deposits, and are a good enough social engineer, can possibly get hired under that name.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Equifax will narc on you. Bow down before your data broker overlords.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Hireright can also be nasty with the background checks, to the point of asking you to correct irrelevant minor typos (say, a space) in you credit file before validating your identity.

dontbenebby 4y ago

What industry? Over in infosec, they seem to just do courtesy interviews to suss out if I did some ecrime the feds are sniffing about, find out they were incorrect, then not even have the common courtesy to drop the act and offer to pay me as a consultant rather than treat job interviews as fishing expeditions.

mwint 4y ago
I’m having a hard time parsing this comment, can you expand on who’s doing what?
- dontbenebby 4y ago
  Oh, I'd have someone connect me with say, an interview with the Software Engineering Institute or RAND. They'd have me speak to between six and twenty people about say, how I would work to secure CERT's vulerability stockpile. Then they'd refuse to hire me, refuse to address the issues I discussed, and then sometimes one of the interviewers would pass that information to the Russians or Chinese leading to a massive break ala OPM or Solarwinds even after Senator Wyden sent Chris Soghoian or someone of similar skill adjacent to the Omnidynar group to go ask some hard questions. In parallel, folks with non-US passports would obstruct any applications I made in private industry in favor of those with their same passport. It was all super frustrating, since my CV had the appearance of someone with a deep commitment to nonprofit work, when it often more than I made decisions like "Being a PhD student pays slightly better than a Papa John's employee and I'll eventually find something more permanent doing the latter". Lately, looking back, I wonder if I'd have been better off saving up then moving to Thailand like one of my old drinking buddies did. (I don't drink alcohol anymore, and I'm spending the afternoon reading HN as I work on some technical projects I'll probably never put online, since it seems no amount of code publication leads me to a fair interview -- all it does is give tools for others to use in their "work") Happy to reply again if the above is unclear -- I made sure to not use a nym that doesn't include my legal name, for privacy -- I could have been much more detailed :-)
  - ForHackernews 4y ago
    > Happy to reply again if the above is unclear ... > Then they'd refuse to hire me, refuse to address the issues I discussed, and then sometimes one of the interviewers would pass that information to the Russians or Chinese leading to a massive break ala OPM or Solarwinds even after Senator Wyden sent Chris Soghoian or someone of similar skill adjacent to the Omnidynar group to go ask some hard questions. This paragraph is exceedingly unclear and may hint at the reasons why you are struggling to get hired. This reads as some mix of narcissistic personality disorder / conspiratorial thinking. You write like a native (or near-native) English speaker, but your composition is all over the place. I don't mean this unkindly, but have you ever spoken with a mental health professional? Many technical folks are neuroatypical and this can sometimes be a barrier to traditional stable employment.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

The deepfakes and stolen PII discussed in the article are for identity theft: The candidate steals the identity of someone with an impressive LinkedIn background and then presumably hopes that the company takes their background at face value and doesn't ask too many hard questions in the interview. The company then completes reference and background checks on the victim. They might also use this identity theft to qualify for jobs that aren't available in their location due to contractual and/or legal restrictions. The "overemployed" people generally aren't performing identity theft like this. Having multiple jobs ranges anywhere from legal to fraud depending on contracts they've signed or how they've misrepresented themselves (it's not uncommon to see suggestions to take multiple hourly jobs and then exaggerate the number of hours worked, for example). However, adding identity theft on top would elevate what they're doing to a major crime, which is not something that would help them.

foobar2021 4y ago
It’s not legal for some people to hold multiple jobs because of visa restrictions. So that could be a motivation for the added risk.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  that's too small a subset people - you should be looking at it from the angle of 'what are crimi at businesses doing at scale for profit"
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  "remote" doesn't have to mean "foreign". It just means your daily "physical office" isn't company premises.
  - foobar2021 4y ago
    I’m referring to people living in the USA on a visa who can only hold a single job at a time.
    - 4y ago

throw10920 4y ago

This seems a little bit odd. Working exactly 40 hours a week is stressful enough - is it really worth it to double both your salary and your hours? I think I'd want at least 4x the salary in order to work 80-hour weeks - or is this practice mostly done by workaholics that enjoy long hours?

andreilys 4y ago
The trick is not working 40 hours :-)
jdironman 4y ago
Its probably done by people who snag lower effort remote jobs and do the minimum viable to be considered "good enough".
corrral 4y ago
I think the idea is you work two jobs that pay for 40 hours but only require 10-15 hours each, not to be noticeably worse than average.
Kaze404 4y ago
I used to think this was possible but simply out of what I consider acceptable. Some time ago I worked for a week while interviewing for a company that required candidates to do paid work for them, and it was the most miserable week of my life. I wouldn't do this for an extended amount of time for any amount of money. It's not worth it.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
The people who do this aren't interested in putting in full workweeks and delivering good work. Their goal is to find jobs and managers with low expectations, then sandbag as much as possible ("Gee, this task is harder than I thought. Going to take a couple weeks longer than we estimated!"). Had a team member try this and an old company. We caught on quickly when they couldn't keep up with their workload and were constantly unavailable during the day. Really sucked for the rest of the team who had to pick up the slack this person created by pretending to work full time.

datavirtue 4y ago

"there is a growing movement of people who are doubling up on remote jobs" Citation needed

paraph1n 4y ago
Actually, a citation is hardly needed here. 1. People want more money. 2. Remote jobs are becoming much more common as of late. 3. It is (much) easier to double up on remote jobs than non-remote jobs. 4. Doubling up on remote jobs results in more money. 5. Therefore, there is a growing movement of people who are doubling up on remote jobs. QED. I mean, it's pretty unlikely that this argument doesn't hold. I feel like you'd need a citation to counter it.
- Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
  >I feel like you'd need a citation to counter it. You don't need a citation to counter a baseless assertion. My assertion is that most people who apply for remote jobs are fairly honest (by culture) white-collar types who wouldn't think to 'double up on remote jobs' for the same reason they wouldn't think go out at night stealing catalytic converters, which is that they possess a basic sense of right and wrong. I mean, if you think that the average person is basically a scammer at heart, okay... Maybe you come from a low-trust culture, I don't know. I don't think most people who come from high-trust cultures would behave this way or think that behaving this way is okay.
  - paraph1n 4y ago
    No one is arguing that the average remote worker is doubling up on jobs. But many more are now compared to recent history. Stealing catalytic converters is directly harming another person and also punishable with prison time, it's hardly comparable to working two remote jobs. But sure, some (potentially large) proportion of white collar workers may not be willing to violate trust by working two jobs, but many would. Beyond that, if you think that all knowledge workers are ethical people, I would remind you about all the horrible software that exists in the world for the sole purpose of scamming or harming people. There's a lot of it. And it's all unquestionably much less ethnical than working two normal white collar jobs.

z3t4 4y ago

Some jobs seem to only want you around for your experience/expertise, like baby-sitting and preventing fires. You could theoretically make everything so stable that when something fails a secondary system kicks in, and all you do is to debug when that happens and make it even more stable. Just make sure you have an excuse to not work on site or they will keep you busy with meetings, admin, and reports. But one day there will be the the perfect storm and all systems on your 15 different full time jobs will go down. You could always call in sick that day, but then they would hire more ppl like you.

cj 4y ago

This happened to me, twice, and my company is < 20 people. Of those 20, 2 had multiple jobs. We hired a guy who found us on HN Who's Hiring who turned out to be working 3 (THREE!!) full time jobs, each paying $140k+. He quit when I started putting deadlines on work when he started falling behind. I got suspicious, reached out to his prior company's CEO to ask if he was still employed, and turns out he was! Then came the discovery of the 3rd company... For hiring managers out there: make sure candidates have a linkedin profile that lists your current company as their current place of employment (both employees with 2+ jobs had their LinkedIn hidden for obvious reasons), and always run background checks that include employment verification screens.

Beaver117 4y ago
Have you considered your company pays so low as to force people to work multiple jobs? I think we both know that person could get much more than $140k elsewhere.
- solar-ice 4y ago
  I have no strong opinion on the working multiple jobs thing, but a single person making $140k is not forced to do anything. That is not a low wage. Fucking hell.
  - walleeee 4y ago
    Seriously, a single person making less than that can live comfortably nearly anywhere in the US if they keep expenses reasonable, especially if it's remote and they have no need for a car
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      yeah, just a quick reality check for the codezillas here: The median US household income for 2021 was $68,000 There are places outside the SF Bay Area
ryandrake 4y ago

PheonixPharts 4y ago

I find it amazing how many people in this community don't realize that there is a fairly large number of low income people who work two full time jobs to survive. Sure they're typically hourly not salaried but that doesn't seem to be too major of a difference. I don't even see what the issue is at all. If a person can get both jobs done fine, then who cares?

lordnacho 4y ago

There is in fact a guy right here on HN claiming to have 10 jobs, bagging 1.5m a year.