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The best engineer I ever worked with had 3 full time W-2 jobs remote in the US. It was really unfortunate when all 3 companies found out at the same time and h

• rjbwork 3y ago
  Probably should have paid him triple the salary to be the best engineer you ever worked with then.
  • sbrother 3y ago
    Nah. I know a guy who does this, he views it as a game and all the money coming in is his score. Tripling his salary would just raise his high score and he'd keep playing as hard as ever.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • theideaofcoffee 3y ago
      Isn’t it, though? Why do most people work? For the joy of making their employer richer? Or to take home the bacon and make a better life for themselves and people they care about? I used to be the type to make loyalty to my great exalted employer first and foremost, sacrificing chunks of my personal life beyond what my salary required. Then I wised up and now view it as how much I can extract as quickly as possible. Coincidentally, the quality of my work shot up when I viewed myself as mostly a mercenary, consistent raises, consistently good reviews even though I care less and less. So I see where he is coming from and I wish more people thought like him.
      • sbrother 3y ago
        100%, and I have a ton of respect for how he thinks about work. While I can't bring myself to do the multiple FTE positions thing, I've spent half my career doing freelance/consulting work for multiple clients at once, and I love the mindset since I feel like it gets to the core of what "work" is. In a lot of ways the "overemployment" thing comes down to treating full-time jobs like agency clients. Which I'm all for in theory and I'm a lot happier when I'm working with clients instead of employers. But I can't personally handle the dishonesty required.
      • robocat 3y ago
        > Why do most people work? People work for satisfaction as well as money. You even give your own examples of a non-financial motivation before you got "wise". Only caring about money sounds like hell to me. Look at everyone that chooses a calling or career that doesn't pay well like teaching or much of our health system. Please don't assume they are stupid people making bad decisions - they often know exactly what they are doing (e.g. my extremely smart teacher friends) and part of their gross income is the non-financial payoffs of the job. Personally I think society depends strongly on people chasing satisfaction from their jobs, and sectors which only chase the money have a rather sick ambiance (although perhaps necessary sectors?). Every good tradie is proud of their work. There are a lot of taker/user jobs and bosses - perhaps avoiding those is the trick if you want satisfaction.
      • IggleSniggle 3y ago
        I work because it's a nice way to live. I made enough to retire on a long time ago. I know a (eg) fancy car isn't going to meaningfully affect my happiness. I've been in jobs with nothing to do. It sucks. Work is an important component of a happy life. If I ever get tired of software maybe I'll go garden or something.
  • throwawaysleep 3y ago
    I’d be curious to know if he was paid any meaningful premium at all. “We gave him the max 5% raise” doesn’t come close to cutting it.
• throwawaysleep 3y ago
  How long did he last? As if he gets a job within 2 years after working for a year, he is still ahead. > even though he had all of the skills needed to be extraordinarily productive. Why should he want to be productive? Does your company reward such a thing proportionally? I still think he is ahead of where he would otherwise be.
  • joshuaissac 3y ago
    > Why should he want to be productive? Does your company reward such a thing proportionally? Companies rely on at least a minimum level of productivity from their employees. He had the skills to be extraordinarily productive, but he probably only needed to be 'ordinarily' productive, and according to GP, he was not.
    • throwawaysleep 3y ago
      Depending on how long he lasted, there could be a strong case for being a repeated C player.
• kevmo314 3y ago
  Since he could've been valued at up to 3x what the company was paying him, why doesn't that make the company the con artist?
  • PhasmaFelis 3y ago
    Well, apparently he couldn't have been, because in the end he wasn't actually capable of doing 3x the work.
    • listenallyall 3y ago
      Guessing here, but I'd bet he was fully capable if he could arrange his own schedule, but the companies insisted the work be done (and meetings attended) 9-5 M-F.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • s_dev 3y ago
    Probably the lack of lying in this specific arrangment that seems otherwise straight forward and honest. Also who values an employee based on how well they can work for other companies. This lad just made a bet and lost.
  • kazinator 3y ago
    If you actually get paid 3X, most of it goes to tax. Whereas, every embezzled dollar is yours.
    • PhasmaFelis 3y ago
      Not nearly "most" of it, for the vast majority of us.
      • DFHippie 3y ago
        If you're single in the US, you have to earn over $578,125 taxable dollars in a year to have a single dollar of you income taxed at the highest rate, 37%. So considering only federal taxes there is no way most of anyone's income goes to tax in the US. The highest state tax bracket in the US, a quick search tells me, is 13.3%. In California, any dollars of taxable income you earn over $1 million gets taxed at this rate. So if you earn $2 over this threshold, the majority of these two dollars, rounding up, will be taxed. If you manage to earn enough above this threshold for the extra 0.3% tax to make up for the lower tax brackets you crossed on the way to this threshold, you are a pretty rare individual indeed.
• MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  In the defense and aerospace industry I've known - and continue to know - a number of engineers and specialists who do this. Leadership will often turn a blind eye, because the particular skill is so specialized, they'd need to give up a product line (or the whole business) if they terminate the guy. But, this being a very sick industry, they can't actually pay the guy more, so you get these terrible arrangements.
  • Teever 3y ago
    Why can't they pay people more?
    • munk-a 3y ago
      Stock market go brrr. Since the eighties we've generally trended towards executives making awful decisions in service of the great number in the sky - irrational and arbitrary layoffs, consistent undercompensation, wealth hoarding, underinvestment in long term profits... these are all common place or expected in your standard 9-5 corporate America job.
      • Teever 3y ago
        So it's not a can't but won't situation?
        • Pet_Ant 3y ago
          Yes. If some people get more, other people will ask for more and the company can't ^H^H^H^H won't afford that, so better to lose a few individuals than pay everyone more. So, if you're a project manager, you sometimes need to turn a blind eye to make things work for you.
      • Ruq 3y ago
        This explains Boeing.
    • coldtea 3y ago
      Unless of course one steals company secrets or something, why do they feel the need for exclusivity in the first place? It's so that they are dependent on them and they have the leverage. It's also because no matter what he delivers and how happy they are with it, they always think they could have pushed him to deliver more, if they squeezed more of his hours. Like a crappy restaurant owner who makes the waiters also mop the floor or do whatever when no patrons have arrived yet, because they can't fathom paying them to "sit".
• duxup 3y ago
  I worked with a guy who had multiple jobs like that, was supposed to be on call 24/7 for the job that he had in common with me. One day he finally answered the wrong phone with the wrong company name when his boss was out of town and some director tried to contact him in an emergency. He was highly skilled, but also was not well liked by his peers. He knew how to suck up to no end, deflect blame for his own mistakes, and how to get out of work (presumably so he could do his other jobs) and get it dumped on others. He was hated by his peers and it was no surprise (to anyone who worked with him as a peer one on one) when he got caught. It was a similar situation where his skills were excellent when tried, but he chose to put them to use put to use to shaft other coworkers and honestly not do much at all / work elsewhere. I ran into him later and as usual he was all about the excuses and about how he felt the folks at the company were bad people and so on, but it was like everything with him, a little truism that he bent to mean that he should get his no matter what the cost to anyone.
  • Teever 3y ago
    > but he chose to put them to use put to use to shaft other coworkers and honestly not do much at all / work elsewhere. No. he put his skills to use to maximize his income and a side effect of that was screwing over his coworkers.
    • duxup 3y ago
      I'm not sure what the "No" part is here. Your statement seems very similar to what I said.
      • Teever 3y ago
        They look similar but there's a difference. His primary goal wasn't to hurt those people, his primary goal was to make money. the hurting people was a side effect.
        • duxup 3y ago
          I didn't think of it as his primary goal, but it is who he is / he doesn't care. Work with someone like that and their intent doesn't matter as far as its impact on you.
• jrochkind1 3y ago
  Wait -- being fired for low productivity wouldn't require his multiple jobs being discovered. But you say he was fired when the companies found out. So they (or rather... you, his direct manager?) didn't notice his low productivity until they noticed he was working three jobs? Or perhaps you noticed but weren't sure what to do about it until you discovered the extra jobs? (Incidentally, I don't approve of working multiple jobs simultaneous like this without your employers knowing, I think it's unethical. But also... let's be real, many supervisors and companies don't in fact seem to notice or fire people with low productivity, and productivity varies wildly between people who aren't secretly working extra jobs too)
  • shawabawa3 3y ago
    Being fired for low productivity is usually a long and slow process even in the US Having a solid reason can mean instead of PIPs etc you just immediately terminate
    • listenallyall 3y ago
      When we're talking about a "brilliant" engineer, the "best I ever worked with", the wise manager looks for ways to adjust the employer-employee relationship keep him, not seeks reasons to immediately terminate.
    • jrochkind1 3y ago
      So if they were fired more quickly than they could be fired for low productivity, it sounds like they were fired for something other than low productivity, no?
  • kelnos 3y ago
    > I don't approve of working multiple jobs simultaneous like this without your employers knowing, I think it's unethical. Why is that unethical? I don't think it's my employer's business what I do with my time outside of work hours. Where "work hours" should be a flexible thing, especially for knowledge work, outside of required meeting attendance. Ultimately as long as I get my job done to my employer's satisfaction, that should be all that matters. Seems like that was the real problem with the guy who got fired upthread; the discovery of the multiple-jobs thing was a convenient way to fire him without having to deal with documenting the low performance, a PIP, etc. What I think is unethical is companies making employees sign a "I won't work anywhere else while employed here" thing when they start work.
• fallingknife 3y ago
  You say he was fired for productivity, but you also say he was fired when his employers found out he was working for all 3. It seems to me that the real reason wasn't his productivity, because he would have been fired for that without waiting for his employers to find out about his multiple jobs.
• coldtea 3y ago
  Did he did what you asked him to do? And was that about creating/delivering something specific? Or did you pay him for sitting on a chair for 8+ hours thinking exclusively for you? If one hires an X and he gets the X job done, then why would it matter if he works in 200 other jobs? I see this edit added later: >But he simply didn't have the time to execute because he was secretly splitting his time between 3 companies. So he was fired for low productivity, even though he had all of the skills needed to be extraordinarily productive. That would be a legit reason to fire them! Or it could be a post-facto rationalization ("he worked elsewhere too, so he couldn't have been productive"). Parent already said he was fired when they found out he working at another 2 places, which is different from the new story that they saw "low productivity".
  • fragmede 3y ago
    It sounds like X job wasn't getting done. If one hires an X, and only gets .2 X, it becomes material that there are 4 other jobs trying to happen.
  • rahimnathwani 3y ago
    Parent already said he was fired when they found out he working at another 2 places, which is different from the new story that they saw "low productivity". If someone is seems smart and skilled enough to have high output, but actually has low output, most companies/managers will spend a lot of effort and time trying to improve the situation. Obviously the guy is smart, so perhaps we just haven't onboarded him properly, or $POTENTIAL_REASONS. It might take 2-4 months before you're sure enough it's never going to work out. You hope things will improve. But if, during that 2-4 months, you find out the guy has another job, that hope disappears instantly. This is my most charitable read of what happened, and I've heard of cases just like this.
    • listenallyall 3y ago
      If you've got the "best engineer I ever worked with" in your employ, is firing him really the best option? Was he even asked how to get 100% of his time, effort and attention? Or even 50%? What if instead of trying to squeeze 3 jobs into Mon-Fri 9-5 he was given free reign to schedule his own hours, including nights and weekends? It just seems that terminating the relationship without exploring other options is more of a jealousy/pissed-off reaction than a rational decision.
• e40 3y ago
  Can you say how all 3 companies found out?
• nostrademons 3y ago
  There is a whole subreddit for this with 300,000 subscribers: https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ When I read the stories I question the payoff matrix a bit - it seems like most have 2-3 $150K/year jobs, but if you're really good at one job and aggressively switch to the highest-payoff opportunities, you can easily make into the millions per year. But it makes a lot of sense for people that are stuck at the bottom of the company ranks and want to generate more transactions for themselves that actually result in more dollars.
  • afpx 3y ago
    I sometimes I wish I had the balls to pull something like that off. I'd always been transparent with my employer about my side work so that it was put into my employment agreement. My wife had two poor performers who she fired this year because they were over-employed and doing shitty work.
  • jnwatson 3y ago
    You can make millions in only a handful of careers. Even in software development, making it to principal at a FAANG is much harder than simply meeting expectations at 3 senior engineering jobs.
• hnfong 3y ago
  What do you mean? There are 3 man-days each day, just enough for 3 jobs :D
• karma_pharmer 3y ago
  There's nothing illegal about this, although Hacker News for some reason has the peculiar belief that there is. Any contract purporting to prevent an employee from earning money elsewhere is an illegal restraint of trade. Indeed the company would be the criminal if they tried to write this into their employment agreements.
  • feoren 3y ago
    This is a common kind of belief among rational people about how the world should work, based on a casual reading of early law. In general they fail to take into account the fact that there has been decades+ of many smart and awful people chipping away at these laws with exceptions and loopholes until they effectively apply nowhere anymore. For instance, the idea of "exempt" employees was originally only for executive-level people, but now just applies to everyone with an office job. The law is what the modern courts say it is, not what we wanted it to be 100 years ago.
    • karma_pharmer 3y ago
      Source? "Exempt employee" has to do with overtime, not moonlighting. It's not relevant to this discussion.
• listenallyall 3y ago
  So strange. Was firing him really the best decision for you? Given the challenges of finding and onboarding top-tier talent (this guy was brilliant, the best you ever worked with), couldn't your company have worked something out? There are a million arrangements possible -- agreeing to him working one (but not two) additional jobs (going from 33 to 50% of his time is a 50% increase for you), giving him a raise or some equity component, switching to some sort of contracting/1099 arrangement, allow him to be a "thought leader" on architecture and big-picture but not a day-to-day coder, whatever. The decision to just fire this brilliant guy without considering other options seems so short-sighted and sub-optimal (for the company).
  • feoren 3y ago
    The company I work for has a lot of stupid bullshit. My coping mechanism for this stupid bullshit is to complain loudly about it, and try ineffectually to get it changed. What I will not do, ever, is lie to my bosses and use that bullshit as some justification. Both of these things are true: (1) their company should deal with their own bullshit so they can actually retain top talent, and also (2) firing the liar was absolutely the right move. Lies have no place in the professional world, ever.
    • listenallyall 3y ago
      You're projecting. Nowhere in the story is any mention of lying, or denying that he had multiple jobs.
      • feoren 3y ago
        > He was brilliant. But also a con artist. Yes, it was very clearly stated that he was a liar. A "con artist" is a significantly bigger liar than a mere "liar". > You're projecting. Hmm. "It's not OK to do X. I refuse to do X and you should not tolerate people who do it." That's projecting? I think you need to look up what that word means. Unless you're literally accusing me of being a liar specifically because I am against lying? Some kind of "takes one to know one" Grade-school jab? What exactly are you on about?