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I was surprised that this was a real thing when I stumbled upon the r/overemployed subreddit. Not sure how many of the folks who self-report their success in do

I was surprised that this was a real thing when I stumbled upon the r/overemployed subreddit. Not sure how many of the folks who self-report their success in doing this are LARPers, but it's remarkable that anyone gets away with this. I have a hard enough time attending all the meetings and completing my work in my actual job, I couldn't imagine taking on another and balancing the two somehow.

telchior 4y ago
Anecdotal, but my wife was doing 2.5 remote jobs simultaneously for a while, and apparently performing above expectation in all of them. However -- meetings were her major complaint, and she eventually burned out and quit the two full time jobs due to excessive and (according to her) pointless meetings. One of the companies asked her to stay on as a consultant. They ended up hiring someone full time... who spent all their time in meetings, while my wife did the actual work. For significantly less pay, of course. So yes, overemployed remote workers really exist, but at least in her case it was largely due to incompetent management.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > while my wife did the actual work. For significantly less pay, of course. What kind of consultant is paid less?
  - haswell 4y ago
    That probably depends a lot more on her previous title than the consulting title. I could definitely imagine scenarios where a meeting-heavy middle/upper management job pays quite a bit more than consulting.
  - telchior 4y ago
    Ah, just to clarify: she was also working far fewer hours. The meetings really were the primary time sink.
    - KMag 4y ago
      This is where we figure out that overemployed people are using deepfakes to be in multiple Zoom meetings at once.
- gsk22 4y ago
  > So yes, overemployed remote workers really exist, but at least in her case it was largely due to incompetent management. I mean, incompetent management may have allowed the situation to persist. But your wife "working" 2.5 jobs for (presumably) the expected hours of just one of those jobs can't be blamed on management. She chose to accept all 3 of those positions with the knowledge that she wouldn't meet the conditions of employ. I'm not a "send 'em to jail!" type, and I have little sympathy for large corporations, but let's not pretend it's anything less than time theft.
  - anikan_vader 4y ago
    >> time theft But her time is not their property, and so there is nothing illegal about her doing with it as she pleases. You can’t steal something that is already yours.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    What makes it "time theft", whatever that means? US employers have worked very hard to make many of their workers "exempt" [1] such that they don't have to pay for overtime and can make people work egregious hours without getting in legal trouble. If that's not "time theft", then I don't see why an exempt worker who can do the work of two people shouldn't get paid for doing the work of two people. It would be different if they were hourly workers and they were double-billing for the same hour, of course. But I don't think that's what's happening here. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/exempt-employee.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/exempt-employee.asp
    - gsk22 4y ago
      You can still "double-bill" in an exempt position. Most employment contracts I've seen stipulate an expected work week of 40 hours. If I sign 3 contracts like that, now I would need to work 120 hours to fulfill the obligation. And as long as someone collects the paychecks from all 3 jobs without fulfilling the contractual requirements of those jobs, well, that is sort of the definition of theft. Money gained without performing the work necessary to earn it.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Either your wife is a massive outlier in skills, or the company just isn’t working her hard as they could be. As remote work opens jobs to the broader world, Americans are quickly going to find out that if they can’t generate the business impact of a Serbian or Chinese developer working 60+ hours a week they are going to find themselves in a very unpleasant situation. Some Jeff Dean sorts could do that in 5 minutes a week but most people can’t.
  - telchior 4y ago
    Sure, you're right. I wouldn't say that the problem is that the companies are not working her as hard as they could be; I'd say that what they think is a full time position should actually be part time. But they've refused to see it that way, for one reason or another. We (Westerners in general) would indeed be screwed if you could just replace people with cheaper workers from other countries. It's not that simple, though. Language and cultural differences are a massive barrier. I say that as someone who has worked with a lot of East and Southeast Asians who are brilliant, hardworking people -- but it still takes a lot of effort to figure out how to work together, and that's at a startup scale where you can really pay attention to each person. Larger companies tend to have a lot of outsourcing horror stories.
    - spoonjim 4y ago
      Certainly, today, an on-shore American developer has more ability to generate business impact than an offshore Southeast Asian developer. But I think that's more because of the bias-laden and chummy way that companies are managed, which is an artifact of office-driven culture. Remote work cultures will be more based on written communication and demonstrated results, and then American developers not in the FAANG skill bracket are going to find out that they are not a very attractive buy when someone almost as good is available for 1/5 the cost.
      - telchior 4y ago
        Yeah, I thought so too. Then I started hiring (for my very small startup) in SE Asia. And, well, maybe I'm biased and chummy, but it just wasn't incredibly smooth sailing. This is purely remote, almost all written communication, etc. I have no regrets and still employ the same people today, but it just wasn't so straightforward as you're making it out to be. I think it's actually easier for a startup to have, let's say, an entirely Indonesian team including the founders, targeting an American market, versus a startup having an American founding team then start hiring in Indonesia. (For big companies I don't know, but I'd imagine it all gets even more complicated.)
BizarroLand 4y ago
I ended up in that situation by accident before the pandemic for a few months. Working one remote job while I was in office working another job. That time period was great for my bank account and it made me really aware of how I had automated a 40/hr a week in person job into something I could perform remotely on a lunch break.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  Please name this amazing employer where one can go for months without attending a meeting.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    I don't want to work two jobs but the non-meeting employer I envy.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    I won't name names but it was a small rural community college that had fired all of their IT except me, and they couldn't let me go until they had a replacement so I worked remotely as I had to move out of state for a family issue.
doliveira 4y ago
Indeed, I can't imagine how inefficient a company must be where an employee is even able to do that.
phibz 4y ago
I can't see how this wouldn't get caught in the US without significantly more criminal activity on the person's part. If you're salaried then they're going to need an I9, meaning you need a tax ID number. So then are you going to open a bank account in this stolen identity's name or are you going to try and setup direct deposit without a name or just a routing number/account ID and hope tye name mismatch isnt caught? What about the IRS and employment tax your employer pays going to the wrong tax ID that should be reported to you? I'm sure in some situations it'd work (1099, physical paycheck, lax process), but it seems like you're just setting yourself up to have to break more laws. You'd be better off just using your own name and keeping a low profile online. At least then you'd probably only be in violation of your employment contract. It's stuff like this that's going to make providing recent bank statements and tax records a more common requirement for hire. :-(
- lovich 4y ago
  Is it illegal to have multiple employers? I should inform all of the members of the board of every company that I've worked for that they should tender their resignation at their other companies.
  - oyebenny 4y ago
    True
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Illegal no. But it's usually in an employment contract that the employer must approve of any other employment. For board members it's kinda part of their job but taking on 2 full time IT jobs is not going to be appreciated obviously.
    - lovich 4y ago
      > employment contract I’m in the US. Ain’t got no contract for shit because companies don’t want to be committed to a deal with workers. The closest I’ve gotten to a contract is “don’t slander us and you can have this severance”
jamal-kumar 4y ago
It's amazing how much work you can get done between multiple jobs when you never actually have to do any of that meeting nonsense in what you do. All of my work with all of the people I work with is conducted over text chats and emails on a basis where we reply when we can, and everyone is happy with seeing a link or screenshot to click on to see the work I've been doing is going well. Everyone I work with is always travelling and often in radically different time zones, so coordinating a meeting MIGHT happen a couple of times a month. Why should I stress waking up early just to get right into the most eye-crossing soporific experience imaginable, or expecting the guy in Africa to stay up late? And also, what the hell is employee surveillance software? You couldn't pay me a million to install some creepy boss spyware on my computer.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
ugh. this happening is going to kill remote work for the rest of us.
- someperson 4y ago
  No it won't. Companies will just start measuring and paying for results.
  - astura 4y ago
    If it were that simple they already would be doing it.
  - thesiniot 4y ago
    They've been trying to do that for quite some time. It's no easy feat. https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13 https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13
    - JetAlone 4y ago
      Talk about a perverse incentive, haha "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon" If only.
  - interblag 4y ago
    I always find this to be a funny point in these conversations. The entire discipline of "agile development" exists because it's so hard to have foresight into the requirements of a software product up-front. By extension, I don't see how we think it's possible to define expectations for employees up-front and then pay them only based on results. If you look at agencies within our industry, for instance, about 0% of them will work on fixed-price contracts - it's always time-and-materials. Knowing what we know about software development, I don't see how individual employment can fundamentally be any different...
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  Be a contractor and bill hourly. Remote work is far better suited to being a contractor… especially if you don’t particularly care about the company (and if you are working multiple gigs… you really don’t care)
Sebguer 4y ago
I know at least two people IRL who got away with it for at least some stretch of time.
prefernottied 4y ago
In some programming roles - especially during the pandemic - the amount of work you can get away with doing is significantly below what you think. You probably overestimate how much attention people pay to what you're doing and underestimate how easy it is to make a ticket sound harder than it is. And, here in Europe, you can be paid multiple months' wages between clearly giving up and being fired. Perhaps the most important factor: if you have two jobs, you don't care about being fired. Source: I'm an immoral, lazy, singly-employed person.
danielscrubs 4y ago
Depends a lot on the competence of your manager. If your manager only has taken “management-courses” and have zero information about the domain they are working in how are they supposed to judge efficiency? The glorified babysitter that can only talk about the latest scrum techniques. I’ve seen IT consultants make quite a lot of money from double dipping and they always seem so stressed which further makes management think they are doing a great job. This does seem to be more of an EU issue though where management and economics are still among the highest status competences. Working yourself up the ladder here isn’t that common (they don’t earn that much more than the developers).
sumedh 4y ago
> I was surprised that this was a real thing It can happen mostly when you are working for very big companies, they usually have too many people and projects take a long time to complete because you need to get approval from multiple people. If you already know how things work then you can quickly finish your main job work or sometimes there is no work which gives you time to do your second job.
vt100 4y ago
Yeah, and then the fact that with one tech job, you're already in the top tax bracket, and anything extra you do is taxed at the maximum rate. Diminishing returns on effort...

telchior 4y ago

Anecdotal, but my wife was doing 2.5 remote jobs simultaneously for a while, and apparently performing above expectation in all of them. However -- meetings were her major complaint, and she eventually burned out and quit the two full time jobs due to excessive and (according to her) pointless meetings. One of the companies asked her to stay on as a consultant. They ended up hiring someone full time... who spent all their time in meetings, while my wife did the actual work. For significantly less pay, of course. So yes, overemployed remote workers really exist, but at least in her case it was largely due to incompetent management.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> while my wife did the actual work. For significantly less pay, of course. What kind of consultant is paid less?
- haswell 4y ago
  That probably depends a lot more on her previous title than the consulting title. I could definitely imagine scenarios where a meeting-heavy middle/upper management job pays quite a bit more than consulting.
- telchior 4y ago
  Ah, just to clarify: she was also working far fewer hours. The meetings really were the primary time sink.
  - KMag 4y ago
    This is where we figure out that overemployed people are using deepfakes to be in multiple Zoom meetings at once.
gsk22 4y ago
> So yes, overemployed remote workers really exist, but at least in her case it was largely due to incompetent management. I mean, incompetent management may have allowed the situation to persist. But your wife "working" 2.5 jobs for (presumably) the expected hours of just one of those jobs can't be blamed on management. She chose to accept all 3 of those positions with the knowledge that she wouldn't meet the conditions of employ. I'm not a "send 'em to jail!" type, and I have little sympathy for large corporations, but let's not pretend it's anything less than time theft.
- anikan_vader 4y ago
  >> time theft But her time is not their property, and so there is nothing illegal about her doing with it as she pleases. You can’t steal something that is already yours.
- wpietri 4y ago
  What makes it "time theft", whatever that means? US employers have worked very hard to make many of their workers "exempt" [1] such that they don't have to pay for overtime and can make people work egregious hours without getting in legal trouble. If that's not "time theft", then I don't see why an exempt worker who can do the work of two people shouldn't get paid for doing the work of two people. It would be different if they were hourly workers and they were double-billing for the same hour, of course. But I don't think that's what's happening here. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/exempt-employee.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/exempt-employee.asp
  - gsk22 4y ago
    You can still "double-bill" in an exempt position. Most employment contracts I've seen stipulate an expected work week of 40 hours. If I sign 3 contracts like that, now I would need to work 120 hours to fulfill the obligation. And as long as someone collects the paychecks from all 3 jobs without fulfilling the contractual requirements of those jobs, well, that is sort of the definition of theft. Money gained without performing the work necessary to earn it.
spoonjim 4y ago
Either your wife is a massive outlier in skills, or the company just isn’t working her hard as they could be. As remote work opens jobs to the broader world, Americans are quickly going to find out that if they can’t generate the business impact of a Serbian or Chinese developer working 60+ hours a week they are going to find themselves in a very unpleasant situation. Some Jeff Dean sorts could do that in 5 minutes a week but most people can’t.
- telchior 4y ago
  Sure, you're right. I wouldn't say that the problem is that the companies are not working her as hard as they could be; I'd say that what they think is a full time position should actually be part time. But they've refused to see it that way, for one reason or another. We (Westerners in general) would indeed be screwed if you could just replace people with cheaper workers from other countries. It's not that simple, though. Language and cultural differences are a massive barrier. I say that as someone who has worked with a lot of East and Southeast Asians who are brilliant, hardworking people -- but it still takes a lot of effort to figure out how to work together, and that's at a startup scale where you can really pay attention to each person. Larger companies tend to have a lot of outsourcing horror stories.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    Certainly, today, an on-shore American developer has more ability to generate business impact than an offshore Southeast Asian developer. But I think that's more because of the bias-laden and chummy way that companies are managed, which is an artifact of office-driven culture. Remote work cultures will be more based on written communication and demonstrated results, and then American developers not in the FAANG skill bracket are going to find out that they are not a very attractive buy when someone almost as good is available for 1/5 the cost.
    - telchior 4y ago
      Yeah, I thought so too. Then I started hiring (for my very small startup) in SE Asia. And, well, maybe I'm biased and chummy, but it just wasn't incredibly smooth sailing. This is purely remote, almost all written communication, etc. I have no regrets and still employ the same people today, but it just wasn't so straightforward as you're making it out to be. I think it's actually easier for a startup to have, let's say, an entirely Indonesian team including the founders, targeting an American market, versus a startup having an American founding team then start hiring in Indonesia. (For big companies I don't know, but I'd imagine it all gets even more complicated.)

BizarroLand 4y ago

I ended up in that situation by accident before the pandemic for a few months. Working one remote job while I was in office working another job. That time period was great for my bank account and it made me really aware of how I had automated a 40/hr a week in person job into something I could perform remotely on a lunch break.

sangnoir 4y ago
Please name this amazing employer where one can go for months without attending a meeting.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  I don't want to work two jobs but the non-meeting employer I envy.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  I won't name names but it was a small rural community college that had fired all of their IT except me, and they couldn't let me go until they had a replacement so I worked remotely as I had to move out of state for a family issue.

doliveira 4y ago

Indeed, I can't imagine how inefficient a company must be where an employee is even able to do that.

phibz 4y ago

I can't see how this wouldn't get caught in the US without significantly more criminal activity on the person's part. If you're salaried then they're going to need an I9, meaning you need a tax ID number. So then are you going to open a bank account in this stolen identity's name or are you going to try and setup direct deposit without a name or just a routing number/account ID and hope tye name mismatch isnt caught? What about the IRS and employment tax your employer pays going to the wrong tax ID that should be reported to you? I'm sure in some situations it'd work (1099, physical paycheck, lax process), but it seems like you're just setting yourself up to have to break more laws. You'd be better off just using your own name and keeping a low profile online. At least then you'd probably only be in violation of your employment contract. It's stuff like this that's going to make providing recent bank statements and tax records a more common requirement for hire. :-(

lovich 4y ago
Is it illegal to have multiple employers? I should inform all of the members of the board of every company that I've worked for that they should tender their resignation at their other companies.
- oyebenny 4y ago
  True
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Illegal no. But it's usually in an employment contract that the employer must approve of any other employment. For board members it's kinda part of their job but taking on 2 full time IT jobs is not going to be appreciated obviously.
  - lovich 4y ago
    > employment contract I’m in the US. Ain’t got no contract for shit because companies don’t want to be committed to a deal with workers. The closest I’ve gotten to a contract is “don’t slander us and you can have this severance”

jamal-kumar 4y ago

It's amazing how much work you can get done between multiple jobs when you never actually have to do any of that meeting nonsense in what you do. All of my work with all of the people I work with is conducted over text chats and emails on a basis where we reply when we can, and everyone is happy with seeing a link or screenshot to click on to see the work I've been doing is going well. Everyone I work with is always travelling and often in radically different time zones, so coordinating a meeting MIGHT happen a couple of times a month. Why should I stress waking up early just to get right into the most eye-crossing soporific experience imaginable, or expecting the guy in Africa to stay up late? And also, what the hell is employee surveillance software? You couldn't pay me a million to install some creepy boss spyware on my computer.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

ugh. this happening is going to kill remote work for the rest of us.

someperson 4y ago
No it won't. Companies will just start measuring and paying for results.
- astura 4y ago
  If it were that simple they already would be doing it.
- thesiniot 4y ago
  They've been trying to do that for quite some time. It's no easy feat. https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13 https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    Talk about a perverse incentive, haha "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon" If only.
- interblag 4y ago
  I always find this to be a funny point in these conversations. The entire discipline of "agile development" exists because it's so hard to have foresight into the requirements of a software product up-front. By extension, I don't see how we think it's possible to define expectations for employees up-front and then pay them only based on results. If you look at agencies within our industry, for instance, about 0% of them will work on fixed-price contracts - it's always time-and-materials. Knowing what we know about software development, I don't see how individual employment can fundamentally be any different...
spookthesunset 4y ago
Be a contractor and bill hourly. Remote work is far better suited to being a contractor… especially if you don’t particularly care about the company (and if you are working multiple gigs… you really don’t care)

Sebguer 4y ago

I know at least two people IRL who got away with it for at least some stretch of time.

prefernottied 4y ago

In some programming roles - especially during the pandemic - the amount of work you can get away with doing is significantly below what you think. You probably overestimate how much attention people pay to what you're doing and underestimate how easy it is to make a ticket sound harder than it is. And, here in Europe, you can be paid multiple months' wages between clearly giving up and being fired. Perhaps the most important factor: if you have two jobs, you don't care about being fired. Source: I'm an immoral, lazy, singly-employed person.

danielscrubs 4y ago

Depends a lot on the competence of your manager. If your manager only has taken “management-courses” and have zero information about the domain they are working in how are they supposed to judge efficiency? The glorified babysitter that can only talk about the latest scrum techniques. I’ve seen IT consultants make quite a lot of money from double dipping and they always seem so stressed which further makes management think they are doing a great job. This does seem to be more of an EU issue though where management and economics are still among the highest status competences. Working yourself up the ladder here isn’t that common (they don’t earn that much more than the developers).

sumedh 4y ago

> I was surprised that this was a real thing It can happen mostly when you are working for very big companies, they usually have too many people and projects take a long time to complete because you need to get approval from multiple people. If you already know how things work then you can quickly finish your main job work or sometimes there is no work which gives you time to do your second job.

vt100 4y ago

Yeah, and then the fact that with one tech job, you're already in the top tax bracket, and anything extra you do is taxed at the maximum rate. Diminishing returns on effort...