Overemployed – Work Two Remote Jobs
overemployed.com
overemployed.com
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.
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.
Some folks are possibly writing the tech that is overseeing others...
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)
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
And there are only so many excuses one can use...
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.
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.
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...
At least in this situation it sounds like good management at the top was able to spot the problem early.
Why not just get a side hustle? Get some contracts and let your employer know what you're doing.
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.
Working full-time is is stealing jobs from others.
Would love the double income though, not gonna lie.
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.
>Duty to Devote Full Time
>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.
And if you're anyone other than a low level drone of course people know who you work for and you're publicly visible.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Granted, not in software engineering, but I don't see the fundamental issue.
(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]
(wire/mail fraud 941. 18 U.S.C. 1343).
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.)
I'm not going to take a big contracting contract with a potential competitor without discussing it with someone.
And almost all contracts include a conflict of interest section. Perhaps a lowly startup might not.
Cheating like this defeats the purpose. Go self employed and charge by task not by time.
I thought it was satire at first.