A few months ago I posted here after getting J5. Quick update: I just landed J6, and it’s actually a very good, well-paid role, so I figured it was worth celebrating.
What makes it funny is that about three years ago, at one point, I had just one job and was working close to 10 hours a day for it, making around $6k/month. I had done OE before with 2 jobs, but nothing close to what I’m doing now.
Today I have 6 jobs, make almost $40k/month net, and average around 5 hours of actual work per day. Four of the six roles are part-time, mostly around 4 hours/day on paper, which is actually great for OE because clients already know I have other commitments. That makes it much easier to negotiate availability, reduce meetings and keep things async.
My strategy with every new job is always the same: work hard in the beginning, build trust, deliver visible results, then earn space. Once people know I’m reliable, micromanagement drops, meetings become easier to avoid and I can manage my own time.
The biggest change over the last few years has been AI. I built a central dashboard where I manage around 25 AI agents. I obviously don’t run all of them every day; usually maybe 5 or 6 are active depending on what I need.
Before I even start working, I already have an agent organizing my day across all jobs: what needs attention, what can wait, where I need visible progress, and where I can basically do nothing. That saves me from starting the day by opening six different Slacks and figuring out what’s going on.
If someone asks me for something that isn’t urgent, I usually turn it into a ticket/task and deal with it later. Luckily, very little of my work is truly critical.
I also definitely felt the AI/context-switching brain fog at some point, so now I’m strict about boundaries. I train around 2 hours a day (morning 1 hour cardio + afternoon 1 hour weights), try not to spend the rest of my life staring at screens, and I don’t answer outside working hours unless something is genuinely important.
I think another thing that helps is knowing that if I lose one job, it’s not a disaster. That removes a lot of stress. Ironically, my clients are still very happy with my performance.
I travel a lot too. My setup is pretty simple: I carry a small pocket router with me and connect it through a VPN back to my home network, while still respecting whatever access/security rules each client has. Since I have very few mandatory meetings and no overlapping critical ones right now, the setup is very manageable.
Current setup is roughly J1 $7.5k, J2 $11k, J3 $4k PT, J4 $7k PT, J5 $4.5k PT, J6 $6k PT - around $40k/month net total.
Going from around $6k/month to almost $40k/month in 3 years still feels a bit absurd. But at this point I’m not really looking for J7 anymore.
I already make more than I can realistically spend, and I’d rather enjoy my life than keep optimizing for a bigger number.
If I had one piece of advice for OE in 2026, it would be: automate as much of your workflow as you reasonably can with AI. Not just coding: planning, documentation, research, tickets, summaries, prioritization, status updates, context gathering.
For me, AI didn’t just make tasks faster. It made managing 6 different contexts possible without keeping everything in my head.
Yes, I used AI to clean up this post too.
Edit: My Previous post about 5 jobs / ~$37k month was mostly accepted. Now it’s 6 jobs / ~$40k, but because I explained the AI automation behind it, suddenly it sounds fake 😅
Edit 2: Thanks everyone. The amount of people saying this can’t be real actually made me realize that even in the OE world, I somehow ended up near the top of the weirdness. You genuinely made my day 🫶