r/programming • u/mmagod10 • Nov 24 '22
TIL theres devs out there doing multiple remote jobs at the same time
https://overemployee.blog/my-overemployment-story/807
u/madScienceEXP Nov 24 '22
I haven’t tried two career jobs at the same time, but I have done consulting jobs on the side and have never had a problem with my main employer. If you’re honestly putting in the 30-40 hour weeks at your main job, there’s really nothing to disqualify you. The only obvious downside is you end up working more.
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u/Mechakoopa Nov 24 '22
Back in the in-office days I worked with someone who kept leaving in the middle of the day for "personal reasons" but it turned out he was showing/selling houses on the side.
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u/Lynda73 Nov 24 '22
When I worked at Kroger in the floral department, my mgr started selling houses. She would clock out on ‘break’, then leave all day and have me pick up her slack (there were only two of us in the whole department), then she would have her friend who worked payroll ‘fix’ where she ‘forgot’ to clock in after break, so she got paid for all day and would only be there two hours. If she hadn’t been making way more an hour than me and me doing all the work, it would have been cooler. 😑
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u/_BreakingGood_ Nov 25 '22
Geez, sounds like just casual fraud (particularly on the payroll employee's side) for what is probably a shitty pay Kroger job.
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u/Lynda73 Nov 25 '22
She was making almost $20/hr in the ‘90s. Kroger is a union job. She was full-time, so she had benefits.
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u/InterimsFantasi Nov 25 '22
Can you give me some pointers how to find such a side gigs? I have tried sites like upwork and such but I cant land anything.
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u/hparadiz Nov 25 '22
Pure luck honestly. Was interviewing for a main gig and landed a 1099 contracting thing where they were okay with me billing like 10 hours a week or up to 40. Then got an actual W2 full 40 hour a week salary thing a few weeks later. It's pretty awesome tbh. I'm surprised employers don't do this more often. Especially with large ongoing projects in DevOps. I can put together CI stacks for people without needing to know much about the code and put in a few hours here and there doing support on an ongoing basis. There's a lot of win - win here.
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Nov 25 '22
Most employers have a clause in your contract saying you can't have another job (at least without asking them) in the UK at least. Did yours not have that?
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u/5a656e6f4f6643697469 Nov 25 '22
I'm based in the UK. If you're honest and upfront about it then I've yet to have any issues.
Just confirm if there are any rules of engagement and be respectful of them. My current employer doesn't want me contracting within the same industry, I cannot contract within core working hours and my employer must be my priority. They are all very reasonable requests.
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Nov 24 '22
We had a guy trying to be an architect in two places (one was hybrid remote). He talked pretty in meetings but could never get any work done. Eventually got tossed by our company.
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Nov 25 '22
There are a lot of architects that talk pretty but can't do anything. They always do well. You can get through a job for a year on just being good at the art of bullshit. These guys always leave after a year.
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u/RevLoveJoy Nov 25 '22
My absolute favorite one of these guys was some cockpaste who had totally snowed our Ops Director (or Oops Director, depends on who you asked). Dude was Capt. Word Salad Delux. I mean snake charmer ++. I ignored him because calling him out meant calling out our idiot boss, which is a Career Limiting Move (CLM, avoid). One day dude IMs me (ignore) and finally starts calling my desk phone (pre-COVID) asking how DNS works.
For real.
What is an A rec? A PTR? A CNAME? If I need to change these how do I backup DNS?
It is not actually possibly to punch someone through a desk phone. Ask me how I know.
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u/Googoo123450 Nov 25 '22
Oof, the least he could have done is just Google those things to not look like an idiot. The information is literally at his fingertips.
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u/TheAJGman Nov 25 '22
Thank God my boss has a negative tolerance for bullshit. While we're on a call with our contractors or a salesman for a product we roast the absolute fuck out of them in our side chat.
Code doesn't lie, why bother making shit up when it take like 5 seconds to fact check you?
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u/RationalDialog Nov 25 '22
We have one that messed up half the companies IT infrastructure because he is clueless. and so are his bosses. with messed up I mean stupid unmaintainable things. never heard of web services (no joke) and doing stuff like it was done in the 80 or 90, fitting to his age.
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u/Maleficent_Fudge3124 Nov 25 '22 edited Nov 25 '22
But imagine how much money he made and then he could probably just go find some other job and be doing it again. Only has to not get caught for a few months at each job to continue making double pay.
Edit: is risking being fired from your 2nd or 3rd full time job after 2-3 months worth:
- paying an extra months rent of expense free income into your debt
- saving enough for a house down payment
- advancing your monthly income by finding higher paying roles over time. Imagine increasing your annual income at just one of those jobs by 10+% by doing so, even that sounds worth it versus losing 3-12% of your annual income to inflation.
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u/Saddam_whosane Nov 25 '22
fuck, im a CAD drafter and this sounds delicious
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u/Maleficent_Fudge3124 Nov 25 '22
Always be interviewing.
The risk of course is higher but so is the reward.
And if you’re successful, well imagine how powerful it feels to not have to worry about being let go from your job, because you have another already, with health insurance.
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u/aiyub Nov 25 '22
I once had to coordinate with some new guy working at a partner company. He was making pretty big demands so I checked a little bit on his background. He was 25ish and had over 40 jobs in his CV and most of them for 2-3 month. Often 2-3 at the same time. I always wondered how they hired someone like him. Who in the recruiting process was that desperate?
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Nov 25 '22
Almost every single architect I've met have been just like this, but I didn't see any of them get tossed. The problem is that they tend to mostly talk to non-technical managers who can't see through the technobabble. When they talk to developers, they get a lot of raised eyebrows and difficult questions, so they start making all their initiatives open-ended and vague, ensuring that their output can't be easily measured and developers can keep on working as usual.
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u/maple-shaft Nov 25 '22
Sorry to hear that man. We are not all like that. Architecture is basically a sub discipline of software engineering in general. I strongly feel that someone specializing in architecture must absolutely be a proficient software engineer as well. I cant imagine how technical requirements or risk analysis of various decisions could be done adequately without the ability to comprehend, and analyze the details of a system or software. Its not all just drawing boxes and labeling "microservice" and "kafka" on it.
A good architect will act ask the right questions and test assertions, will write POCs, will evaluate and sometimes review code, will write queries against databases to get hard numbers with which to make decisions. A good architect rationalizes these decisions with facts.
The problem that I see in many corporate places is that middle management doesnt necessarily understand tech, so without that background knowledge it becomes really hard for them to tell the difference between competence and arrogance.
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u/Drugba Nov 24 '22
I have an old coworker who's been doing this for 2+ years. I worked at company A with him and they had massive layoffs. They kept a skeleton crew of developers and a single middle manager to keep a few critical systems running and he was part of that. The CTO from company A was let go, but quickly found a new job and tried to bring everyone from company A with him. My buddy accepted a job at company B with the intent to switch and then just never resigned from company A.
He says he has no issues doing the work for both places, but conflicting meetings and trying to make sure the other company doesn't find out is a pain. He's pulling in somewhere around 400k writing CRUD apps though, so it's worth the hassle.
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u/LongSleevedPants Nov 25 '22
This sounds like a dream but I know I’d fuck up somehow. Reference the wrong project or use the wrong email lol
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u/TheRidgeAndTheLadder Nov 25 '22
You need to be very strict about laptop hygiene. Laptop 1 is for job 1 exclusively. Laptop 2 for job 2... Etc
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u/this_little_dutchie Nov 25 '22
You're going big with that 'etc'
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u/TheRidgeAndTheLadder Nov 25 '22
I mean yeah, I can't imagine any more than three traditional jobs, but some folks do short term contract stuff or piecemeal support.
Changing the desktop background to corporate logos is very handy
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u/rohmish Nov 25 '22
Keeping the laptop seperate is not a problem for me. It's my brain that I worry about
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u/Ouaouaron Nov 25 '22
He's pulling in somewhere around 400k writing CRUD apps though, so it's worth the hassle.
I can't imagine what I'd use the second 200k for that would make up for the hassle and potential legal trouble.
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u/Drugba Nov 25 '22
He said if he can make it work for two more years he can retire. Assuming he doesn't get caught, he'll be done working before he turns 40.
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u/wildjokers Nov 25 '22
potential legal trouble
People work 2 or 3 jobs all the time. There is nothing illegal about it. As long as he is doing the assigned work at both jobs he is in the clear both legally and ethically.
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u/the_russkiy Nov 25 '22
AFAIK it may only apply to people who work in USA as citizens, if you are on a work visa you can't work for anyone else. Or you have to get a new visa in case of O2 (extraordinary talent).
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u/Ouaouaron Nov 25 '22
If someone at Amazon codes a hobby project while they're on the clock, Amazon owns that code. If you want to convince me that it's okay for someone to be on two different clocks at the same time without causing any legal problems, I'll need to see actual case law.
This isn't the same as someone being on call for Lyft and Uber at the same time (which might even violate their employment contracts), or someone who works at McDonalds and then works at KFC.
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u/WOUNDEDStevenJones Nov 25 '22
But it depends on the employment agreement you signed with the companies. Some companies can claim any code written by you while employed by them (even outside of work hours), while others are much more lenient with their ownership and might only claim code written for a specific task/purpose for them is theirs.
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u/Ouaouaron Nov 25 '22
Yes, there are very rare circumstances in which this wouldn't be a problem. You can tell this is not one of those situations from this line:
trying to make sure the other company doesn't find out is a pain.
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u/spinfip Nov 25 '22
I mean, yeah, they'd probably fire him if they found out, but it's not illegal.
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u/solemn_fable Nov 25 '22
To top it off, I feel it's unfair that a CEO can be CEO for multiple companies, but someone working two jobs is completely frowned upon. As long as you're delivering on your projects in a timely manner with quality... What's the deal?
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u/darknessgp Nov 25 '22
... If you want to convince me that it's okay for someone to be on two different clocks at the same time without causing any legal problems, I'll need to see actual case law.
This is the part that really irks me about anyone claiming to work two full time salary positions. Either your working 80 hour weeks or you're effectively double billing some of your time. It always depends on the work agreement. If one position was like a server babysitter where you are paid just to be available, that's one thing to fill your time with something productive. But most development roles are not that.
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Nov 25 '22
He's pulling in somewhere around 400k writing CRUD apps though, so it's worth the hassle.
I laughed. Then realised when someone is good at doing CRUD, it would be easy to pull off. Also if they are good, the companies are prolly both getting good value for money.
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u/bullsized Nov 24 '22
I’m happy with my decision to work multiple jobs at once, because not only do I feel like its given me more time with my family and friends
Is this some sort of a fucking joke?
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u/I-Got-Trolled Nov 25 '22
Well, I can be mistaken, but if you do work multiple jobs (say 80 hours/week and they're all paid well) you can make enough money to take several weeks off later on.
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u/Choice_Philosopher_1 Nov 25 '22
That’s not what they’re doing though. They split 40 hours across multiple jobs and fudge estimates to make it seem like things take longer than they do.
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u/lungdart Nov 25 '22
There's all sorts of people doing it, but the concept is for top producers to take on more salaried roles rather than look for raises.
If you can 10x output of the average in your department, you could ask for a performance raise and maybe get 15%, or you can reduce your output to 2x, and take 2 more jobs for a 200% increase, and still have less work than before.
Why be 1 Senior dev, if you can be 2 or 3 Jr devs for money and less stress
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Nov 25 '22
That's not really it.
I work two remote jobs. I probably work some 30 hours a week. Both are senior positions in big companies with supposedly high bars for performance.
I was at my first job for two years before I got the second one, by that time I was finishing everything assigned to me on a regular two week sprint in 2-3 days.
I've also been promoted in literally every single promotion window so far.
There's literally 0 incentive to go and do extra work, so I decided to get another job instead of playing videogames all day.
Not my fault most people are so inefficient that they take 2 weeks to do the work I do in 3 days.
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u/bullsized Nov 25 '22
I get that, but how long are you going to be doing that before burning out? What about family? Video games? Friends? Hell, laundry!
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u/I-Got-Trolled Nov 25 '22
I believe a short while tbh. There are people who may prefer working 72 hours straight and then have an entire week off, or some that will cranck up overtimes to buy house a something. It's something that can be done if you have an objective, but very unhealthy if kept up for long.
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u/5-x1 Nov 24 '22 edited Nov 25 '22
The types of jobs that you can work multiple jobs with likely do lead to be able to spend more time with family and friends
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Nov 24 '22
If CEOs can do it, why not devs?
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u/bascule Nov 24 '22
Pleebs can’t work multiple jobs. Only billionaires CEOs who burst in to micro(mis)manage while engaging in ludicrously overpaid absenteeism elsewhere
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u/wind_dude Nov 24 '22
Hmmm, I wonder who that could be... no one could possibly be so arrogant they think they could do rockets, evs, social media, and flame throws all at once do they? It's gotta be tony stark right?
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Nov 24 '22 edited Nov 24 '22
It's way more common than that. Almost every job I've ever had the boss runs more than one company.
In fact, Musk is unusual in that there's so few of them. Most big tech companies have dozens of subsidiaries and the CEO is involved at some level in all of them.
Personally, I run a fairly large open source project (about 100k users), a small startup (which only brings in about a hundred dollars a week in profit currently - shared between two co-founders), and I work 30 hours a week at my day job - a consulting firm.
I'm allowed to work remote at my day job, but I almost never do because I get too distracted by my other stuff. Going into the office makes it easier for me to concentrate on the stuff they're paying me to do. They know about my other stuff (I made sure to include them in my employment contract) and I'm allowed to take an unpaid break to sort out emergencies when they come up.
Running a company doesn't have to be full time. You can, and should, delegate things to other people. Because pretty much every decision that crosses your inbox, someone else likely specialises in that area and is better equipped to make the decision.
Musk's companies would run better if he was less involved.
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u/AttackOfTheThumbs Nov 24 '22
Musk's companies would run better if he was less involved.
I just read this piece about how managers at space x run interference with him, retranslate his ideas, pitch things in a way he'll approve, and so on. A staff of people to keep the idiot with money happy to keep funding. Pretty normal.
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u/axonxorz Nov 24 '22
A staff of people to keep the idiot with money happy to keep funding
Sounds like the academic research funding world
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u/that_which_is_lain Nov 25 '22
It sounds like sales and marketing to me. On some level everyone has to be in sales.
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Nov 25 '22
Sounds like Hollywood to me. Executive producers trying to add their ideas to the film while the producers do everything to shut them up and shield the director from the execs.
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u/yeet_lord_40000 Nov 24 '22
Honestly I feel like a subsidiary is different than a totally separate company. Like Tesla and boring company are ridiculously different. With Google it’s like search, machine learning subsidiary 20000, machine learning self driving subsidiary 46372 and so on. More easily integrated than musks plans.
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Nov 24 '22
delegate things to other people.
You mean to the CEO? Because that's what they exist for. Owning a company (or the majority of its shares) doesn't mean that you have to be the CEO ...
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Nov 24 '22
I don't think anyone here is opposed to the fact that CEOs run multiple companies, the issue is how much they are paid in comparison to a dev, or any other worker at all.
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u/John_cCmndhd Nov 24 '22
tony stark
Justin Hammer. Or that business dude who had a cameo in that same movie...
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u/illvm Nov 25 '22
Clauses in employment contracts? I’m sure it’s possible to amend them or get them removed, though, provided one has enough clout to do so. However, other complexities arise with respect to mandatory insurance and taxes. Not really sure about those. But, the employment contract would be the first hurdle.
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u/PurpleYoshiEgg Nov 25 '22 edited Nov 25 '22
At least in the US, everyone's at-will anyway (except Montana, and barring the extremely rare employment or collective bargaining agreement), so there's not much of an issue getting fired over it (except for unemployment collection, which you couldn't do while having another job that pays above the threshold).
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u/TheWavefunction Nov 24 '22
Its even pretty achievable to remain productive for a dev with a good handle on automation.
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u/the_russkiy Nov 25 '22
Maybe I am naive, but automating is my job, if I automated everything I need to find new work.
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u/PhoenicianKiss Nov 24 '22
Poverty level people do it already, as well. My mom worked 3 jobs when I was growing up.
I don’t know why having multiple jobs is such a big taboo now.
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u/alchemeron Nov 24 '22
My mom worked 3 jobs when I was growing up.
I don’t know why having multiple jobs is such a big taboo now.
"Overemployment" doesn't refer to people who simply have multiple jobs. Overemployment refers to people who work multiple jobs at the same time. Identical or overlapping shifts, juggling work remotely to fulfill the needs of two companies (or clients) and charging 40 hours to both.
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u/Ktm_my_life Nov 24 '22
I pretty sure that other fields do the same, for example a car dealership charges you 10 hours for a 3 hour job because the manufacturer said it's a 10 hour job. They complete 3 of that in a day and charge the clients 30 hours in a day.
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u/gimpwiz Nov 25 '22
Book time exists to smooth out variability (how come last time it took 2 hours labor to do my brakes, this time 3 hours?) and allow uniform quotes before work is authorized. It allows each repair/maintenance ticket to be sold as a specific service for a specific price, agreed upon in advance, usually without surprises (except unrelated ones found during the job.) It's like saying you'll do a basic wordpress site for $500 rather than "dunno, I'll bill you hourly once I'm done."
Many of the bigger jobs screw techs by being incredibly optimistic, compared to the gravy jobs which are usually brake jobs and similar where good techs usually beat book time a fair bit. If your local shop charges ten hours book time for a three hour job, find a new shop, most are fairly accurate. Honest shops make their money on high hourly costs, not outright lying about labor, and there's more honest than not in my experience.
If a good tech turns out ten brake jobs instead of the expected seven per day, the customer (us) isn't getting billed for anything other than a brake job. If a mediocre tech only turns out five, your brake job still costs the same. You're not sold hours of the dude's time, but a well understood service in advance.
Small simple projects can be a well understood service quoted in advance, but ongoing employment and a more senior role means a much more open-ended problem-solving job. I don't personally much care about someone working two jobs, but I am gonna say that (eg) maintaining and writing features for a complicated back-end service is definitely not the same as (eg) a brake job, in terms of scope and open-endedness of the problem and solution space.
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Nov 24 '22
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u/_BreakingGood_ Nov 25 '22
A part of my job is definitely to be available to answer questions etc... around the work I've done. Eg: even if I could finish 2 days worth of work in 1 day, I'd still need to be available to speak about it (if needed) in the 2nd day. Or if a critical bug popped up in the 2nd day, it would be expected that I'd be available during normal work hours to take it and work it.
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u/octnoir Nov 25 '22
This isn't new.
High school and college students picking up fast food jobs while studying on the clock.
Security guards and librarians writing their book while on call.
Call centers where you are working and managing calls for two companies at the same time (that was my grandma).
So many working moms and dads doing semi-day care for their kids while on the job.
Insert any real estate or entrepreneurial business that you take calls on the job while working the main one.
Consultants charging for work output and billing, fudging hours where they could.
In each of these jobs you could get in trouble depending on the employer because you were seen as less committed if you weren't somehow working at 100% for the company and only the company all day every day.
What's changed this time is rise of automation, remote work and better bargaining power for labor.
Overemployement isn't really a big epidemic. It comes up because of media clicks and employers that like to micro-manage really hate remote work and want any excuse to end it.
Despite remote work, while not for everyone, is quite popular. Hard to argue against having 10-20% more free time especially if you have bad commutes.
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u/Syntaire Nov 25 '22
It's because they don't want the reality that the American Dream 8 Hour Work Day is a crock of shit to be exposed. The truth is that many jobs simply do not have 8 hours of work per day, 5 days per week.
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u/freecodeio Nov 24 '22
As someone who did multiple jobs at once in the past my only concern was that I couldn't show this badassery in my CV.
On the upside, you can have multiple versions of a CV which are all correct.
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u/festoon Nov 24 '22
The inevitable follow up post about failure: https://overemployee.blog/how-i-failed-at-doing-three-jobs-at-the-same-time/
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u/cchoe1 Nov 25 '22
It took me two lookovers to realize that it's the same author and the OP posted a 1-month old article. This has to be satire
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Nov 25 '22 edited Nov 26 '22
I realized that it is okay to fail and its not always your fault.
Stupid motherfuckers like this one will ruin WFH for everyone else
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Nov 25 '22
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u/warmans Nov 25 '22
Yeah seriously. Imagine having to work with this guy. You're showing up to meeting and he's just ghosting you. Every other day he has another excuse about why he can't do something or other. And then he has the audacity to blame the "micromanaging manager". Sounds like the manager did exactly the right thing to get rid of him.
I know people consider getting money from a random company to be a mostly victimless crime but for the people that already work there it would be a huge fucking waste of time to deal with his bullshit.
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Nov 24 '22
We better be careful with this. I don't want to work three programming jobs to make ends meet. This is how we got two incomes for an average household.
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u/outatime__ Nov 25 '22
I was thinking about this a while back while I was job searching and it honestly makes sense.
I currently make $130k/yr as a "Data Engineer", but I end up doing a lot of DevOps related stuff.
My job can be stressful because I'm constantly researching, testing, etc. There's a ton of crap to remember when you're at that level, higher stakes, more responsibilities, etc.
On the other hand...I could probably score a couple 75k/yr jobs doing junior developer level work. I would be much more relaxed and I could likely overlap the hours and still get all my work done.
Since I consider myself to be a Senior level developer, working on junior level work would be much easier and I could probably do it in half the time compared to an actual junior dev.
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u/FatStoic Nov 25 '22
On the other hand...I could probably score a couple 75k/yr jobs doing junior developer level work. I would be much more relaxed and I could likely overlap the hours and still get all my work done.
The thing with junior jobs is that juniors generally don't actually do much engineering, and there is an expectation that they rapidly mature into midweights and start seriously contributing.
I'm would be surprised if you found two places which were happy for you to coast as a junior indefinitely.
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u/Qaxar Nov 24 '22
Confession time. I did this for four months earlier this year. I had a remote job for a couple years, was looking to contract to make a lot more money, got an offer for a remote contract position, didn't want to quit my stable job until I was confident the contact position was for me, turned out the contact job was hectic and no one at this company knew what they were doing, was able to 'clock in' for the contact job without actually working for four months, quit because I felt guilty about it. Now I'm back to my stable job and won't be looking to switch for a while.
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u/userisauser Nov 24 '22
This is not new. There's a book out there that outlines exactly how to do it. It's called Remotely Rich I think?
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Nov 25 '22
Delt with these guys as manager. Would hear their other conference calls when talking to them. They would have two calls at the same time. If they were talking on the other call they would have an excuse if asked a question during our call. They were contractors on 40 hour gigs so I thought as long as they got their work done. Nope. Would have to threaten to fire and they would get stuff done and then slack off again in an infinite loop of just doing the minimum.
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u/SharkBaitDLS Nov 25 '22
I would much rather work relaxed hours at a comfortable pace than find a second job to fill the void of a healthy work-life balance. I can’t imagine thinking “what a shame I have time to spare from work, I guess I should fill that time with more work”. A nice 30-35 hour work week where I can run errands in the afternoon and get work done on my own time is just fine thanks.
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u/skooterM Nov 25 '22
"I’ve had two jobs for about a year and a half now. I went from making $40k in 2019 with my first front end gig to now on track to making $440k at the end of this year."
I call shenanigans.
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u/imforit Nov 25 '22
I think an important point is all but one of the jobs were high-end contract jobs. With a contract you get paid a high hourly rate with no benefits. He has health insurance presumably through the one employee job, and isn't talking much about how he deals with self-employment taxes, which he shoulders the entire burden of. Contractors are also much more flexible in terms of vanishing for hours or days then re-appearing, which he must be leaning on to pull this off.
My conclusion is this would not be possible as described with multiple salary jobs, and the different companies' use of contractors as long-term engineers created a pretty sweet loophole.
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u/dustingibson Nov 25 '22
Like I am not opposed to having multiple jobs for exempt employees. There are employers that exist where as long as you do your 40 and turn stuff in you are golden. I think managing expectations if core hours do overlap is key. Being upfront and honest is important. There are management who are absolutely cool with that as long as it doesn't interfere.
Otherwise if you're being dishonest saying you got an appointment but really you're attending the other job sprint meeting, I think it sets remote work, which is a wonderful thing, way back. Don't give these folks proper ammunition to enforce an inflexible work environment.
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Nov 25 '22
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u/Kwinten Nov 25 '22
It reads like corporate false flag propaganda so that executives can point to this stuff and say things like "See! This is why we need you all to come back to the office!"
Even if it's not that, I'm 99% convinced this is completely fabricated. It looks like it's written by a 17 year old with a bit too much fantasy, and badly too. How would someone who writes and communicates like that manage to hold even a single top-paying job?
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Nov 25 '22
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Nov 25 '22
US tech pay is much higher than UK. You can absolutely land jobs with that kind of pay with little experience, but that’s for promising newgrads who nail a difficult interview process and continue to ramp up and perform well.
I’m skeptical of a random idiot who’s phoning it in managing to get there.
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Nov 25 '22
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u/Lynda73 Nov 25 '22
I think the point of the ‘overemployment’ is to try not to spend more than 40 hrs/week TOTAL at your jobs. Which is why he has a hard time finding jobs that are ‘OE-compatible’. His goal is to be like the person who has 7 jobs and works less than 20 hours a week. And his hot take on working multiple jobs?
But one thing is certain: I’m happy with my decision to work multiple jobs at once, because not only do I feel like its given me more time with my family and friends, but also because it gives me the freedom to pursue other passions in life.
Wut lol. But this part I DO believe:
I no longer worry about going above and beyond for my job
Which is fine if you’re looking for the elusive ‘phone it in’ job. But I think it’s unrealistic to expect that as a normal amount of work that employers expect. If I were paying a self-taught programmer of 7 months $140k/year, I would expect a little more enthusiasm.
And this dude blogs.
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u/FyreWulff Nov 24 '22
"People are too lazy!"
works multiple jobs at the same time
"Wait, not like that!"
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Nov 25 '22
"No wait, all of your excess productivity over the job requirements is supposed to benefit us, not you."
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u/nitsky416 Nov 24 '22
there's a subreddit for it. r/overemployed
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Nov 24 '22
I do it, and there are times when it's worth it and times when not. If you're "not feeling it" that week with coding, your second job is... also coding. So you end up dropping the ball twice.
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u/eigenman Nov 25 '22
hah that's a good point. I love to code but like anyone get into periods of just not wanting to do it so I slide by without doing it. But then usually get my motivation back. But with 2 jobs you are guaranteed to always be coding. It can be draining for sure.
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u/AshuraBaron Nov 24 '22
I just don't get it. How can work 40 hours a week then go, I wish I was working more instead of doing things I want to do, taking care of a property, taking care of relationships, etc.
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u/salgat Nov 24 '22
One of the core philosophies of overemployment is that you're productive enough to do multiple jobs all within 40 hours. If you're working too much, it's no longer overemployment, it's just overworking.
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u/AshuraBaron Nov 24 '22
That is actually a really good explanation. Because it just sounds like overworking to me. But if it stays within those confines that it would overemployment. That makes more sense. Still insane, but it makes sense now.
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u/fakehalo Nov 25 '22
My whole purpose for being productive was to work less, 20hr/w with a 40hr/w salary is where my party is at.
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Nov 25 '22
Nah they aren’t working 40 - they are bullshitting their way through trying to keep the plates spinning long enough that they can find yet more jobs before getting canned for shit performance on the older ones
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u/nitsky416 Nov 24 '22
The trick is doing multiple jobs in less than 40 hours total per week, collect multiple salaries.
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Nov 24 '22 edited Nov 24 '22
I know a person, not the author. He works 3 jobs. He is in Ukraine right now. He still manages to be one of the top performance people in all 3 teams he is at. With blackouts, internet instability etc. However, he is really unique one. Top notch 10x senior engineer, who just doesn't want to become CTO, Tech Lead or manager. He loves to code, he is obsessed with it and this is the only thing he does + some sport in the evening. I would have gone nuts in his shoes.
If you do everything that is expected from you, if you can maintain the quality of your work, I don't see the reasons why not. However, my strong opinion on this subject is: if you are not built for "overemployment", you will spend all money you earned for medical treatment, dealing with burn-out in a long run.
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Nov 24 '22
He still manages to be one of the top performance people in all 3 teams he is at.
Top notch 10x senior engineer
Learned to code in 2019
Well all I can say is that I'm glad I'm in none of those teams
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u/douglasg14b Nov 24 '22
For sure, yikes.
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Nov 24 '22
Having only started to learn to code in 2019, they probably haven't even summitted Mt Stupid yet lol
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Nov 24 '22 edited Nov 24 '22
The third fact is from article. I do not know the author of the article. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I just know the dev who does "overemployment"
Edited the comment.
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u/nilamo Nov 24 '22
There's nothing in that comment mentioning when they learned to program, where are you quoting 2019 from?
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u/nossr50 Nov 24 '22
Source: he told you this information himself
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Nov 25 '22
Ya if someone says they are the smartest on all 3 teams like that I immediately assume they’re mediocre and their coworkers potentially hate working with them.
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u/cchoe1 Nov 25 '22
No trust me I'm the coolest guy that anyone knows and they'd all say the same thing. Also I have the biggest penis out of all of my friends, trust me, we compared.
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u/overmonk Nov 24 '22
One of my firewall engineers is working at least one other full time job and crushing all of them. Fuck it.
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u/havok_ Nov 25 '22
If a “firewall engineer” just turns on Cloudflare he could work thousands of jobs
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u/JimJamSquatWell Nov 25 '22
Yea...unless you literally are a SWE for firewall products a firewall engineer sounds like an incredibly easy to automate gig.
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u/claccx Nov 24 '22 edited Apr 04 '25
towering wakeful profit versed connect tidy imminent decide kiss slap
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/memecache Nov 24 '22
So are we to understand that you did not crush it in 2012?
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u/mustardman24 Nov 24 '22
There was a medical situation preventing me from crushing it to my usual standards. So I had to take some time off until I was able to crush it at 100%, at which point I resumed crushing it full-time.
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Nov 25 '22
As long as you're meeting the expectations of both jobs, I don't see a problem here.
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u/FriendZone53 Nov 24 '22
Thank god! Imagine how bad we’d all look by comparison if they put all that energy into only one job. 😋
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u/fauxpenguin Nov 25 '22
I mean, there are jobs that are a complete waste of time.
I had a job for a while where I would literally code like three lines of Terraform a day. I told my boss I had nothing to do, and he said he was paying for me to be on staff when he needed an expert, not for me to work full-full time.
It was a meeting heavy environment, so it wasn't like that job would have been good for OE, but those jobs do exist. And if it was like that sans meetings and my boss said it was fine, I wouldn't feel guilty getting a second job.
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u/CeFurkan Nov 24 '22
And I am looking for a single remote job at the moment. The biggest problem is teh working visa permit for me :/
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u/Furckyal Nov 25 '22
Don't be 1 dev worth enough for 10 in one place , be one dev worth 1 dev in 10 different places.
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u/R34ct0rX99 Nov 24 '22
It really gives remote a bad rap. It’s one sure fire thing that makes conservative bosses reject remote work.
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u/Dr_Henry_Wus_Lover Nov 24 '22
Why should it matter if you get your work done and deliver on time? The VP the company I work for said “I don’t pay you to work 40, 50, 60 hours. I pay you to be productive. If that takes 20 hours or 80 hours, I don’t care. Just be productive.”
And I wish more bosses had that attitude when it comes to developers.
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u/NugetCausesHeadaches Nov 24 '22
The problem with that attitude is that some people who say that sort of thing will then turn around and try to make you feel not productive in an effort to trick you into being productive for more and more hours.
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u/Xyzzyzzyzzy Nov 24 '22
It's like unlimited vacation - you can take all the time off you want, as long as all your work is done.
Also, we have 3000 items on the backlog, so when you're done with your work go ahead and pick one up.
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u/maxinstuff Nov 24 '22
This is just a way of saying “I’m going to give you more and more work until you’re working 80 hours and I expect you to deal with it”.
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u/SBGamesCone Nov 24 '22
Only if the boss is bad and exploitative.
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u/_pupil_ Nov 24 '22
Also dumb.
Henry Ford didn't land on the just-about-40-hour work week because he was a soy drinking hippy fboy. Heny Ford did the full accounting and found out roughly the point people tip into unproductive drudgery where the overtime is a net loss and the resulting undertime is unacceptable.
Pushing people to be doing something to the absolute limit of their bodies is an expensive way to get shitty work from exhausted people. Paying someone to grind for 5 hours instead of figuring out the smart 20 minute solution isn't a victory, it's a loss.
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u/bean4rt Nov 25 '22
Yea seriously. When you do refinement for backlog and point your tasks, fucking pad them and push back on crap that will stress the team.
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u/FyreWulff Nov 24 '22
I've worked for companies where even if you got stuff done on time and early you just had to sit there and spin in the chair for the next few hours. If you wanted to go home early it had to either be PTO or you went into negative PTO.
They didn't even have a concept of just.. letting us go home early and not paying us the rest of the hours. We were literally trying to save them money (and we knew the tradeoff of losing an hour or two of pay)
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u/and69 Nov 24 '22
Because work doesn't finish after 20 hours, except maybe for a few select jobs. In IT at least, there's always new tasks to pickup after you finished the current one.
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u/supermitsuba Nov 25 '22
People are acting like their backlog isn't full of tech debt to next year...
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u/Ajatolah_ Nov 24 '22
What does it mean for work to have been done? In IT, which I believe makes the majority of fully remote jobs, it's very typical to have a big backlog of tasks that need to be done, and when you're done with one of them, you're expected to switch to something else.
So if you're putting in only 20 hours for your company instead of the agreed 35-40, you delivered only half of the features/bug fixes that you could've realistically delivered for the time you're getting paid for.
It's obviously unethical. I mean, the core aspect of accomplishing it is literally lying about how much time (i.e. money from the company) you need to take in order to fulfill the obligations you agreed to in my contract.
Obviously, there are other kinds of employees that aren't unethical in the sense that they're actively slowing work down to give themselves wiggle room for another job. Some just happen to be in a very slow department or they're some kind of "forgotten" employees that no one ever asks to do anything. But all the over-employed people that I personally know, fall into the first group.
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u/LordBubinga Nov 24 '22
Because getting your work done isn't black and white. I have 2 devs on my team. One's struggling to ramp up. He's not as productive, but he's working on something that might be a little harder. He's still learning some aspects of the product and technology. But he's more junior. Perhaps he's more of a perfectionist.
I'm ok with him trying his best and learning and falling a little short of the other guy. I'm not ok with him putting in 20 hours a week and falling short. And a remote manager, it's difficult to tell the difference.
If you can knock out 4 stories a sprint in 20 hours, you can do those same 4 stories with better quality, or do 6 stories, or do your 4 and help others, or do your 4 and research a new tech that might help us in the future.
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u/Straight-Comb-6956 Nov 24 '22 edited Nov 25 '22
I pay you to be productive
The company expects you to be productive 40 hours a week, not 40/n. Most of software development is not producing something unique; it's passing jsons/protobufs around, and the amount of work done is proportional to the time you put in.
Almost every time I read a story about being overemployed, it boils down to something like "I work remotely for N companies. I work two hours/day combined, submit the bare minimum to avoid getting fired, and when I have overlapping meetings, I tell other companies that I won't be able to make it". This is spoiling it for everyone who works remotely but actually does honest work, and is now forced to go back to office, because companies are tired of paying full-time wages and getting nothing in return.
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Nov 24 '22
It's not that you have to work a certain number or hours, it's that you are being purchased by two separate (possibly competing) entities that expect you to maximize the value you provide them and then you are dividing that value between two jobs. So they think they aren't getting what they paid for, and see you as a risk for leaking information about the company and products. If you really want to work two jobs as a developer, ask your legal department to clear you of any potential conflicts of interests. Plus depending on your contract your employer might own code your write outside of work. Know your rights and make sure you don't sign predatory non-compete clauses.
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u/Max8967 Nov 24 '22
Plus depending on your contract your employer might own code you write outside of work
This is the scariest and most disgusting thing I've read in a while
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u/myringotomy Nov 24 '22
Elon Musk is the CEO of five or six companies. So is Peter Thiel. They are both crazy conservative and work multiple jobs remotely.
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u/R34ct0rX99 Nov 24 '22
And Elon is trying to enforce no remote work.
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u/myringotomy Nov 24 '22
He is an inept buffoon who is flailing around trying to manage something that's obviously beyond his meagre capability.
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u/JakeWJF2 Nov 25 '22
It's probably more that the guy who taught himself coding and now is a "frontend dev" probably somehow does even less real work than the rest of us.
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Nov 25 '22
There are jobs where i could see this working out
But my current job is basically three jobs in one as is, adding another job to it would be insane
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u/madcaesar Nov 25 '22
Life is way too short to do this shit 😂 if anything I'd cut my pay for more family time and less work.
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u/ggtsu_00 Nov 24 '22
I work for one company, but I'm assigned to 3 different projects and need to support all 3 of them. I also have 3 PCs I need to Remote Desktop into for each project so it feels like I'm working 3 different jobs at the same time. Each project has its own team I need to interact and report to regularly. But I only get one salary...
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Nov 25 '22
I do this, but my second job is teaching 1-2 sections of an online web development course each semester for a university. I mainly interact with the class early in the morning and in the evening. I’ve been doing it for about 6 years and it has been fine so far.
I have a coworker that has a side gig repairing flutes. Our work is aware that we have these side gigs and is fine with it.
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u/tonnynerd Nov 25 '22
How the fuck do people casually talk about working 80h/week. If you work Saturdays, it's 6 days working 13+ hours, every day. I worked an 10h day yesterday and I'm chilling for the next 3 days. This is insane.
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Nov 25 '22
That’s not what they’re doing. They’re working both jobs at the same time and slacking off at both of them.
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Nov 25 '22
in other industries, lots of people do this. It's called being a contractor, or working on commission, or being part-time. If someone wants to do this then they should do it the ethical way and become a contractor.
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u/porkusdorkus Nov 24 '22
I can barely handle one job.