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Comment by Untit1ed | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of people talking about reputational risk around this, but I'd be more worried about the legal implications. Most of us have contracts that grant IP of what we create to our employer at least during work hours - if you get caught doing this how do the IP implications unwind given that both your employers have the same rights to what you produced? Would it be legally equivalent to selling a bunch of IP that you never had the right to?

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.

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I had a coworker try to pull the two remote jobs at once thing.

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 the companies that hired him are satisfied with his work (quality, time delivery) and can't even tell the difference on their own, is he really doing them wrong?

Clearly they could tell; he told customers from one company to go to the other

Yes, assuming he signed an employment contract that disallowed this type of thing, which is very very common.

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

In this case the company I worked for wasn’t happy, but dude was adept at moving around to avoid responsibility / not be there when the chickens came home to roost.

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.

No one really assesses work quality.

And I don’t think we like when they try.

Well I can definitely blame them.

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?

If you’re working unpaid OT and don’t like it, you know it and quit.

Or you do something to get back. Glorious karma. Employers should just pay overtime.

One of my former employees related a story to me of legitimately needing the money and working two jobs in person, one day shift and one night shift. One of the two wall street employers let him work a year until it was time to payout bonuses and only then said oh we're aware you also have a job with a competitor so you're fired. This doesn't seem much different than defrauding companies by working multiple jobs remotely.

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.

>> Most of us have contracts that grant IP of what we create to our employer at least during work hours

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.

What happens if you are helping a colleague and need to share a code snippet with them? Or you suggest a change to the code during code review? How does your employer get rights to use that code?

I've never not had a contract that stated I had to get consent from my employer if I wanted to take any other job. And I get the feeling that if you got caught double-dealing like this, a company would take it seriously enough to actually sue you for a serious breach of contract. Especially if the other company is in the same industry - this creates a huge conflict of interest and the potential for data leaks, etc. IP ownership and legal issues make this a very dangerous game.

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.

I knew someone who tried doing just this during COVID (taking two programming jobs), and ended up getting fired by both jobs when they found out.

> 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...

Some folks are possibly writing the tech that is overseeing others...

Right? It seems like you be very quickly in the realms of breach of contract for most high income jobs. I'm presuming this is targeted at already high income earners, because the alternative is simply a techified name for what some huge proportion of all Americans do all the time.

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)

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