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.
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.
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.
It would be great if it worked both ways. Let’s say an employee who is forced to work unpaid overtime (two jobs amount) could use power imbalance to threaten the company into paying one year of their revenue.
If his work quality is really that bad, why not fire him already? What if he was simply super lazy but with one job, why not make an example of him for other slackers?
One of my former employees related a story to me of legitimately needing the money and working two jobs in person, one day shift and one night shift. One of the two wall street employers let him work a year until it was time to payout bonuses and only then said oh we're aware you also have a job with a competitor so you're fired. This doesn't seem much different than defrauding companies by working multiple jobs remotely.
More recently a friend told me of someone he previously worked with who advised my buddy to do what he does and hire onto multiple jobs, not consulting but as an actual full time employee. Apparently this guy is a great talker and somewhat fearless, often claiming skills well out of his area of experience and just faking it until he makes it or gets fired. This guy often has four jobs at once, falling back to two or three only when he's discovered and fired. I guess if you can't actually grab a FAANG job, you may be able to fraudulently reproduce the salary in aggregate.
If the companies that hired him are satisfied with his work (quality, time delivery) and can't even tell the difference on their own, is he really doing them wrong?
In this case the company I worked for wasn’t happy, but dude was adept at moving around to avoid responsibility / not be there when the chickens came home to roost.
But other people had complained / concerns so in this case there were already issues, even if tentative.
The phone incident was more of an “ah ha” moment for the company.
As far as a developer goes I think in some instances it takes a long time to really gauge how someone is doing, more so if they are dishonest.
Yeah think we all want to be in situations where we tell our employers “it’s going to take X time” and “hit some technical hurdles will take longer” and they believe is, and I think many employers want that too…but that has risks as far as those who will abuse that trust.
Yes, assuming he signed an employment contract that disallowed this type of thing, which is very very common.
If you want your contracts to have value, you have to defend them. If you're made aware of behaviour and do nothing to solve it, that's implicitly encouraging the behaviour
>> Most of us have contracts that grant IP of what we create to our employer at least during work hours
That's an American thing. I work in Central European country, and IP that I create belongs to me until I pass the rights to my employer. Conveniently, my contract states that the act of committing my code to employer-hosted git repo is the act of giving up the copyright.
You can easily do that for two employers at the same time.
What happens if you are helping a colleague and need to share a code snippet with them? Or you suggest a change to the code during code review? How does your employer get rights to use that code?
I've never not had a contract that stated I had to get consent from my employer if I wanted to take any other job. And I get the feeling that if you got caught double-dealing like this, a company would take it seriously enough to actually sue you for a serious breach of contract. Especially if the other company is in the same industry - this creates a huge conflict of interest and the potential for data leaks, etc. IP ownership and legal issues make this a very dangerous game.
Maybe you get away with this if you're working for small companies that can't afford the legal procedures, but if you're working for a small company there's also much greater risk you'll be found out because you can't disappear into the crowd.
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)
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?
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.
Board members get equity compensation that can equal that of a pretty good high-level engineer, oftentimes way more. But they are responsible for the financial performance of the company and are also legally responsible for the company. They can also be named in lawsuits personally for breaches of fiduciary responsibility. Although corporations explicitly exist to shelter these people from liability, it is not 100% and there is some degree of risk involved.
But it's a nice job if you can get it. You get to put in 3-4 hours of work a month for some pretty nice dough.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/SB10001424052702304773104579268...
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.
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.
Yep, no cure against people who just lie. In european countries, which i'm in, it's so hard to kick someone who is obviously doing something completely else during work hours, but has a indefinite contract.
Worked with a younger medior, superbright kid, but once the we started working from home his contributions were shoddy code done in max 2 hours a day. Refused to refactor or backtrack on architectural decisions. Kept saying he's really doing this fulltime. We asked him if his, 1-man side-job company, was absorbing too much of his time and he persistently denied that.
Meanwhile there was a complete public record of him starting new companies under his name, nice websites and all. Of course that could all have been done in his own time...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it is unethical if you're lying about the amount of work you do, using fake excuses like "it's harder than I thought it would be", "I got stuck on x" when you're just not working or working for your second company. Yes, you're paid for an output, but how can your manager give you a reasonable output when you're constantly lying and deceiving them about how hard/long something is? People are always complaining that they are not trusted enough by their manager, but when you see the comments here, I kinda feel bad for said managers. A good manager will be able to see through it eventually without resorting to micromanagement, but it can take a while and do a lot of damages until then.
I also see arguments like "some companies do worse to employees". I understand where this is coming from, but this can be used to excuse pretty much any kind of behaviour and just leads to a deleterious environment.
and now you're giving an unauthorized third party access to the company network. Yeah that's a good way to go from simple breach of contract to possible criminal charges.
Nothing worse than other people’s code… or my code I forgot… or worst of all other people’s code that is supposed to be my code that I have no hope of remembering…
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.
Depends on your contract, but I think very few companies can legally expect to "own your time" unless you're logging billable hours, or clocking in (hourly wage). If you're logging billable-hours and double billing, yes that IS fraud. Obviously, if you're clocking in, it's unlikely you'll be working two jobs simultaneously, and if you are, it's unethical.
>The Employee agrees to devote full-time efforts, as an employee of the Employer, to the employment duties and obligations as described in this Agreement.
The template linked above also an option of specifying work hours, so that makes it extra risky from a legal point of view.
That is beside the point. It's expected you will bring your best effort to the job and not do half-ass sloppy work. The article is not recommending you work 16 hour days, they are recommending you bite the hand that feeds.
Of course, if you're an hourly employee and don't (as you mostly shouldn't) have non compete clauses of some sort it's mostly fine. However, as a salaried employer who generally can't also work for a competitor, it's pretty scummy unless it's something unrelated and you're putting in your hours--which it would be hard to do. I'm sure there are "life hacking" people who think this is fine but it's really not.
And if you're anyone other than a low level drone of course people know who you work for and you're publicly visible.
Sure, if you have a full-time tech job and also a "full-time" side gig running a pottery business (or doing some unrelated consulting/writing on the side), very few companies are going to have a real issue. (If you aren't really doing a good job on your tech job that's between you and you employer.)
But these sorts of stories are basically all about people having two full-time tech jobs and time slicing them--including possibly outsourcing some of the work.
ADDED: And maybe it's just a function of the sort of job I have but what are these extremely well-paid jobs where you're some anonymous drone where a wide range of people in the industry aren't very familiar with who you work for.
If a person can do the job that's expected of them I don't find it unethical (assuming they're not working for competitors, utilizing resources of one employer for the other, etc.) They're not hourly employees and double-billing.
Employers are dishonest and unethical all the time. Just because the norm is having one employer (to the primary benefit of the employer) does not make it unethical to have 2 jobs.
Having said that, I wouldn't want to deal with the stress of one employer finding out about the other(s).
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.
There are jobs where you're clearly just trading time for money. And there are jobs where you're basically expected to be working for multiple clients (but presumably not sharing confidential information)--though in some industries that means not taking jobs from multiple competitors. But, yes, taking multiple full-time jobs in an industry and lying about it makes you dishonest. Of course, if the companies are just fine about it that's totally cool.
or working a job and having a hobby that it turns out later can be profitable? Or working a job and working on a startup on the side? Or, hell, working at a job and doing your own, unpaid, yardwork on the side, or childcare?
Staff or experienced senior engineer at a company with stocks or options that have 2x to 3x since getting hired and it's pretty doable. Even large companies like Nvidia and Tesla have gone up significantly in just the last year. Without stock appreciation it's pretty hard though so it mostly comes down to luck.
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.
From the website's homepage: "Overemployed is a community of professionals looking to work two remote jobs, earn extra income, and achieve financial freedom."
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]
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.
It's a "job" whether a lot of board members take it as seriously as they should or not. I'm (unpaid) on the board of a non-profit. But, yes, presumably if a CxO gets an offer to sit on the board of a major company, especially one in the same industry, they would seek the approval of their own board.
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).
I'm very careful about things I do on the side that are related to my day job and I'm very public with my management. In general, those things are seen as positives. But if I created any heartburn, I would generally pull back--or escalate it if I felt strongly.
I'm not going to take a big contracting contract with a potential competitor without discussing it with someone.
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.
Those are not conflicts of interest. (Or shouldn't be.)
Working "full time" for Google and "full time" for some startup in a related area probably is. (If the startup is an unrelated area related to medicine maybe but I'd still expect both companies to be aware of the situation.)
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.
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.
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).
... 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'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.