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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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