[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290518
What I liked about this arrangement is that he was highly incentivized to ensure that he would have to do the least amount of work, so his deployments were highly automated (including the back end monitoring), and pristine, by the book. I'm pretty sure his other manager knew that he was working two jobs, but because his work here didn't interfere with his job there, everything was kosher.
And no service credits, he was just an extraordinarily talented DBA - we were happy to have him set our architecture/monitoring/database deployment mechanisms. I'm guessing he worked around 100 hours for that 50K over a year, or about $500/hour, which, if you think about it, for someone at the very, very top of their Oracle (or Cisco, or Java, or Hadoop, etc..) technical game is really quite reasonable - particularly when you are only paying them when they are absolutely needed, and the rest of the time your staff DBAs can handle the day-to-day.
There was a guy who worked an 8-5 job in my building and the building next door simultaneously. He would show up, look busy, then run next door and do the same thing. He did this for about 8 months before one of his managers caught on and told his other manager. He ended up losing both jobs at the same time.
My greeting is usually short: "Hi, this is Mike."
so he lost both jobs. but oddly, the on-site manager felt guilty mentioning it during reference checks, and he went on to be a fairly well paid manager.
As a company we don't care. As long as they are getting all of our work done in a timely and effective manner what they fill their time gaps with is not our concern.
Note that our remote workers are not hourly workers. If they were, then we'd take a much different approach to time management and dedicated focus.
Workaday without overtime (and working that much is too little I was told by people here) is 8 hours. Assuming you work it twice plus take 2 hours a day for shopping, food and shower, you have only 6 hours sleep remaining. With such persistent sleep deprivation, you wont be able to produce all that much for each employer - your productivity will go down. Then it is just a question of whether either management finds out.
But we're not really talking legal here, we're talking ethical. And ethically, I'm not sure why dishonesty on paper is worse than dishonesty in a 1-on-1.
You'll find all kinds of notions/norms in our culture that are inconsistent with each other. Usually it takes a standup comedian to point out our own hypocrisy.
Given those I think the norms in our society are very much consistent. It's just that we assume we're all employees here, and therefore there is no need to lie to each other.
But we'll lie to our employer, or at least leave stuff out. And our employer will lie to us, and leave boatloads of stuff out.
This is the norm. It is also the norm to lie about it.
Yes it is wrong.
"Is it okay for companies to pay people they claim internally have the same pay (for the same work), but pay them differently based on things like location ?"
It is ok to pay different amount of money to workers living in different states (if that is what you mean). Assuming the company did not mislead the worker before accepting the job at lower paid location.
If you can only work 5 days a week, and need to put in 40 hours per week per job, then yeah, sleep is going to be a problem. If one or both of the jobs are such that you can do less than 8 hours some weekdays and make it up with some weekend work then two full time jobs should be possible without sleep problems.
168 hours per week - 40 hours per job x 2 jobs - 8 hours sleep per day x 7 days - 2 hours for shopping/food/shower per day x 7 days = 18 hours. You could almost take on a third half time job!
Our Seattle/Bellevue based startup hired VP & Dir of outside sales in Silicon Valley. Expensive hires, big payout to recruiting firm, then these two proved extremely difficult to get on the phone, schedule meetings with, et al.
SVP Sales flew in unexpectedly, called & had them pick him up at San Jose Airport. When he threw his bag into the trunk he noticed they had not only our sales & mktg materials, but SEVEN other companies' materials as well. He grilled them on what work they'd accomplished, clients called / met, et al, then ended up firing them before he flew home.
We passed along info to authorities, who later shared the recruiting firm had been in on it, and they were trying to collect evidence to persecute. Sounded like they were collecting recruiting fees & salaries, then sharing among all 'co-conspirators.' FBI was pulled into it, so I assume it involved fairly substantial cash.
If ever were in such an enviable position, these are the potential pitfalls I might see.
- The companies schedule mandatory meetings at the same time.
- The companies schedule on-site days that make travel arrangements impossible.
- Conflict of interest between companies.
- The companies don't actually care, but you hide it anyway, and they care about that.
- The companies do care, but you tell them, and they retaliate for the embarrassment.
- Tax withholding comes out wrong, and you are fined for it.
- Someone you met through both companies outs you.
- One of your companies is acquired by or merged into the other.
- Your life is converted to an 80s-style sitcom script, and you aren't even credited.I haven't stopped applying, but my expectations have fallen pretty far since the first one I tried in 2008. That was Universal Mind, and they told me I didn't have enough experience in Adobe Flex to interview with them. I had worked with it for about 8 months at that point, which isn't bad for something released in 2004. So from my perspective, a lot of those companies seem to think that since they can hire from anywhere, they should only hire the top quintile of everyone, and my resume definitely doesn't radiate that rockstar aura.
Of course you could probably get away with having two remote jobs at once.... for a while. Unless you're monstrously productive, it seems like either it would get noticed eventually or you would get burned out. But everyone is different I guess. I'd rather have a life that isn't so stressful and complicated.
I was working two full time jobs in two different startups. Scheduling meetings between different parties was not an issue at all, I did scrum meetings in the morning in the first contract which happened every other day on the same hour, and I would make sure to schedule the other meetings in the other contract towards the end of the day. What I did notice is that, although I could pull it off if I really wanted to and needed both jobs, and although I love working, I had to trade off creativity in my work, as in I couldn't pull an all-nighter working on new idea for an aggregation framework or try to get ahead and impress anymore, and only felt like working to get the work done and get through the day. I believe that the quality of my work remained the same, but I lost all the fun in it, and strongly felt that my time wasn't my own anymore. Needless to say, it kills all your time and [depending on the nature of your job] you gravitate towards robot-like behaviour and lifestyle.
Wouldn't do it again, I can afford to make less, but happy I got a glimpse of what was humanly possible for me to do, even if it's only for a span of two months!
1 - You'd be bored (so?)
2 - We only allow remote work for people who've worked remotely full-time before (always enjoy a good Catch-22).
3 - You haven't actually worked with language X (Clojure in the most recent case) professionally (only on personal projects), so we'd want you in the office (on the other side of the country) so you're closer to help as you learn to code in a new language (a particularly insulting thing to say to a senior software engineer).
4 - Oh, why did you turn down our offer for 40% less than your current pay?
and my personal favorite:
5 - :static: the interviewer just goes dark after I spend an entire Saturday afternoon completing a homework assignment and then go through a 2 hour live coding interview.
Eventually one stops trying. My experience interviewing leads me to believe there is a gross oversupply of good software engineers looking for remote work (If I may be so bold as to call myself a 'good' software engineer).
2) start and learn everything needed in about a week and work fast after that
3) be open to become full time - and you'll likely get an offer 1 to 3 months in, or more like they'll switch you fte.
My current employer about 60% of the employees are remote and my entire team is remote. Almost everyone has their own on-the-side consultancy and is very public about it. Team members swap stories about their after-hours clients. The after-hours work allows us to diversify into new stacks, experiment with tooling that might not be available to us during the day hours, and then bring a lot of this experience back. Since we're all on very flexible schedules, meetings during normal the normal 8-5 rarely conflict. As long as we don't compete in our employer's industry (which is a very niche industry), we're generally trusted to keep our client/employer work separate, prioritize our employers meetings over client meetings in scheduling, then really it's quite kosher.
I'm a little surprised more medium-to-large businesses aren't more encouraging of it. Free training, keeps the engineering team sharp, and definitely keeps a lot of the more ambitious engineers from getting bored with the pace of building boring business software.
I did that twice, once at a dying company when a coworker quit until I lined up a new job in a couple weeks, and another time was a horizontal transfer where two engineering managers were rather vocal about my working solely for them. In both cases I just kinda did what I wanted, knowing there was nothing they could do.
I suspect the question they meant to ask was who was getting paid for two jobs. I have a really boring story about that revolving around a company that paid out severance gradually instead of lump sum, which given the time of year was financially advantageous for me WRT marginal income tax rate.
Here in Japan, where I live, this is one of the reasons that people can't take all their accrued vacation, even when quitting their jobs. When you leave a job, your accrued days are paid out as if you were still working. So if your last day in the office is June 30, but you have 30 days saved, your last day as an employee is ~August 15.
This sometimes means you can't start your new job until after that, and because employers typically want people to start ASAP, people end up forfeiting the vacation time they never got to take while working. The new employer wants them on July 7, so they take just the one week and then start at the new place.
And given how hard it is to take time off, the typical employee has lots and lots of unused PTO. My workplace has a cap of 40 and I am always at the cap.
What's the surprise?
Plus, why have the stress of two jobs and two sets of potentially colliding meetings? Mrs Doubtfire for the corporate world sounds like a funny movie, terrible life.
I occasionally do 1099 work for friends, but always on evening or weekend hours. I always use my own time and computing resources for the work.
If it's a salaried position, you're presumably not filling in an hours sheet dishonestly.
Is it truly cheating if both companies are happy with your work and you're not breaking either company's rules? Even if you don't explicitly tell them you're doing it?
As an "at will" employee, the one and only consequence I have to fear is being fired. There is no contract to breach. And in that situation, I would feel a lot more comfortable about going from two jobs to one than from one to zero. The incentive is overwhelmingly in favor of doing it and hiding the evidence, rather than not doing it at all.
If you do everything that is expected at both jobs, neither has any reason to investigate.
Not really a good idea as far as developing a reputation for trustworthiness.
Next. . . he's working maybe 10-15 hours per week. Telling one person one thing, and another person something else, about where he is. (business is multi sites, so they do travel a bit). Many times he claims he's "working from home" - but a check of the AD Server's audit log shows that he hasn't even logged in for days.
(also: he's a terrible boss. Bullies people into working overtime, screws them out of billing hours, and takes credit for other's successes, and blames others for his screw ups).
This goes on for months until he up and resigns.
Then, HIS girlfriend, on FB, starts promoting the book he wrote and is selling on Amazon.
(The book is called "IT Management" - and yeah, it's as stupid as it sounds.)
Sounds like you're trying to get paid a full time salary for part time work. Unless you're actually going to moonlight, you're depriving one or both companies of the time they're paying for.
It's stuff like this that makes it hard for remote workers. Stop it.
All said though, if the work is getting done and in a timely manner, then it shouldn't matter. In reading through this thread, I've been thinking, if I could get two mid-level dev positions, I could pretty easily do both at a mid-level quality/pay which combined would be more than my very senior level is currently.
Ha! If this person isn't meeting expectations then fire them! Posting here like this says more about your dysfunctional org and management than anything.
Having two jobs or two gigs is not double dipping.
Double dipping is typically a form of cheating by getting paid 2x for 1x amount of work.
Say I was being paid to create a website for two clients and it took me 100 hours to finish it. Then I used the same codebase for another client, spent 5 hours modifying it, and then delivered it to them billing another 100 hours.
That would be double dipping.
Indeed. I initially thought that this was working remotely for a company twice via two personas. As in, appearing as Alice and Bob on the company Slack, etc.
(I'm not sure your example is double-dipping or cheating, but that's another thread...)
If I tell you that I'll produce a certain product for $15,000 and you're OK with that, does it really matter in the end if it took me 5 hours or 150? Either way, you pay the same amount.
Now, if you have a contract that specified time & materials and I pad the hours, then I can agree we could have a problem.
Cost of living between Mexico to San Francisco probably in the neighborhood of 4x, depending on which part of Mexico. 500000 MXN rounds to $25k, which is 1/4 of $100k.
Again, if it's just the cost-of-living bonus (like, all our engineers get $80K, plus $X/month where X is average rent and groceries, plus Y% for taxes) then it's fine. Otherwise it's valuing someone less purely on their geographical location.
Edit: Also, really, overpaying so they might be unhappy? "We're giving you less money for your own good!" Presumably if they're a world-class engineer and can work remotely at one place, they can find another remote job, too...
Let's face it. As an employee, you want to earn as much as you can. As a company, you want to make as much profit as you can, which means that you base your target pay on market rate (be it above or below market rate).
Market rate is set by the competition. Really it's "we're going to pay you enough that you don't leave to work for someone else", and that's it.
If an employer gives you a cost-of-living bonus for high-rent areas, the reason is that they're competing for you against other companies who do the same thing. The same applies to any pay difference based on locality, whether local or remote. It simply depends on who they're competing with for your services.
This isn't evil. It's how the market works.
Just saying that, aside from "well, we can get away with it", it's not that defensible.
OK. But I'm saying it's not wrong either. It is exactly how our economy works. Other large scale economic systems have not been successful. We know no better way of arranging things. If companies didn't compete, the economy would not be functional and we wouldn't be able to have nice things.
Our entire economy relies on free actors being able to buy goods and services from their choice of supplier, based on price, quality, or most other factors.
It's clear that this is required for our economy to function. Therefore it can never be "wrong" for some entity to do this unless you can identify some other unfair distortion in a particular case, but you haven't.
An employer not offering more in a particular region is just exercising this ability to choose, the general form of which we must grant to have a functioning economy.
If you want to argue that it's wrong, then the onus is on you to explain why the general case of free market competition should not apply in this case. But you haven't.
That said, what's stopping remote engineers starting to work in expensive regions (say Vancover/Toronto) and then moving to cheaper regions (Saskatchewan/Manitoba/Alberta) for example - would salaries be adjusted every time someone moves around?
In my opinion, one of the biggest benefits of working remotely would be the ability to travel the world!
Gitlab people on here have previously said yes: pay gets adjusted when you move.
Someone living in SF will have many high-paid opportunities so they have to match that.
On the other hand they know someone not willing to relocate won't have the same opportunities locally or with remote jobs, so they can afford to pay them less.