I've never thought of doing this, but it's genius.
(Note to programmer types, though; you might have signed something that says you won't do this. Recommend legal advice or at least a backup plan for if you get caught ;)
ANy non-compete would be the same if they were concurrent or sequential.
Where I work, a side job is legit (with the obvious caveats, of course!)
If they ask, tell them it's simple risk mitigation on your part (just like theirs). If they absolutely want you to start early, come up with an egregious cash cost to terminating you within the X length of employment for any and all reasons including conditional background checks (they likely won't do this, but it aligns with your financial risk story)
Then, some inconsistency came up. Apparently, on her application she checked the box for never having smoked weed. But on a second document she checked the "Yes" box. This is California 2015, they asked her to do a polygraph test. She failed.
Couple days later, she called the first job to see if she can come back. They were bitter that she left, but because of an extremely high turnover rate, they let her back in. It was never the same for her.
So yeah, have a guarantee at the new job before you quit the first one.
Presumably your example was for a federal job.
There is also a similar federal law but it exempts government jobs.
Its intentionally designed to be intimidating for three very non psudeoscientific reasons. Will you break under pressure? Some fraction truly believe and will confess in terror and can be filtered out. A weak effect is its an intelligence test, obviously it is not magickal and if you're smart enough you'll see thru it. It hasn't been gotten rid of because there really is no downside.
It is cheaper than the expensive labor intensive alternatives like interviewing more people or trying to find more records.
Much like astrology or prayer or swearing on a bible in a court of law, it is cheap and effective enough with minimal cost.
Break? Break what? This makes no sense. It’s not like they have verifiable information to see if you break too easily.
You’re making it sound like they were hiring a spy. Polygraph test are common in the public sector.
They simply do this for bureaucracy reasons. Government agencies need to comply with a bunch of old standards so they can demonstrate they performed all possible verifications in case they go under investigation.
Agencies don’t want to be in the position where a security clearance they granted is scrutinized only to find that they didn’t do a polygraph test while all the other agencies still perform polygraph tests.
Everyone knows polygraph tests are bullshit. They do them because they have too, not because they find them useful.
I once had a similar situation happen at a very large (150k+ employees) company. Security showed up and escorted one of our contractors out the door. It turned out he had worked for the company previously and stolen documents that he used to try to extort money from the company. When he was being brought in for this contract position he had changed the spelling of his name on the form and used a social security number for someone with that spelling. During the quick background check everything looked good but the discrepancies were discovered during the more in depth check a couple months later.
Either way, I agree with you - pretty BS.
The background check company called all of my previous employers. One former employer gave them incorrect dates for my employment, contradicting what I put on the form. I never heard anything about it from Google.