This is how you ruin remote work for everyone. Remote work is about trust.
Corporate America is fundamentally amoral and the rot is spreading to the rest of the world.
When dealing with such entities "screw them before they screw you" is just beating them at their own game.
Don't criticize, praise people doing this.
And just because they do this to employers, that does not mean they are living by this philosophy.
A good person will take the corporate scumbags to the cleaners so they can spend the rewards on family and loved ones.
Now there's a moral philosophy to live by ...
I can't see much room for "good" in spitefully exploiting a flawed organization that likely many innocent bystanders depend on for their own livelihood, all to help yourself and kin. If you could say with some certainty that sabotaging the org actually led to a better outcome for everyone involved, that'd be different, but I doubt that situation comes up much.
The real world isn't like Fight Club, and we don't get to be heroes by blowing things up. I think the appeal of that kind of fantasy is precisely how it lends bad behavior a plausibility of goodness. It helps people rationalize, as you seem to be doing, and as execs of exploitative employers must also do, in order to not feel guilty.
I'd say a good person will divest themselves from scummy corporations and find their own avenue to honest work. They'll seek to expose bad behavior by others and set a moral example for them to follow. "Get yours and screw those jerks" isn't that moral example. It's just more of the same.
The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a little better. It's still just a toy model, of course. However, you might be interested to find that those who only screw everyone else over don't fair well in the iterated version.
Can you name any CEO who secretly ran multiple companies without board not knowing about it?
I think you don’t know what CEOs do along with their legal fiduciary responsibilities + duties.
Can you name me any employer who hired a full-time employee and is happy to pay them full-time salary while the employee deceives them for financial gain and works part-time and/or outputs the minimum amount of work hoping not to get fired?
If you believe you can do more work, go freelancing/contracting/self-employed.
Eventually someone figured it out. Management was furious. Remote work restrictions were tightened and everyone suddenly had far more check-ins to ensure we were actually working every day.
I heard they also contacted the person's new job and filled them in on the double-work situation. That person was universally hated and I don't know anyone at the company who would give them a positive reference.
But chances are good that you entered into some form of agreement with your employer that forbids holding another full-time job. You also have NDAs and such agreements that could be argued to be broken if you're working at two companies simultaneously if they have any possible competition with each other.
In practice, a company isn't likely to go after an ex-employee for damages in this case unless there really was a trade secrets violation.
What happens, though, is that the company that realizes the double-work scheme is happening calls up the other company and they both fire the employee. All of the person's managers and coworkers usually hate the person because they were likely sandbagging and pawning work off on coworkers (as is necessary to put in half time at any halfway competent company), so they can't get a decent reference.
Now they're unemployed, without references, and starting over again. Not the end of the world in today's job market, but I expect reference checks for remote work will continue to get much more aggressive to catch situations like this.
It's unethical in that the two employers are unaware of that fact, and he's advising deliberately not doing work in bad faith (whereas the boards of Meta, Twitter and Square were aware of the previous situations, and your retail shift manager knows he's not scheduling and paying a living wage), but illegal probably not.
The premise is that the average person puts in 10x the effort for a 1% return on investment. You are an employee, sure, but are "investing" the company in terms of life-hours you could spend elsewhere. Naturally, you want to therefore minimize work and maximize salary. The ultimate situation being getting regular raises by doing 20-50% less than is expected to you.
If employers don't want this the solution is simple. It's not finding these people and firing them. It's paying people commensurate to their effort like a real meritocracy would.
If someone can hold 2 jobs working at 50% brain capacity then they are obviously very talented and quite crafty. You pay this person enough, they will dedicate 100% of their brain to your project. The employer side of the equation is JUST as exploitative as the employee side. It's just far, far, far more common for the employee to be exploited. For example, via pagerduty, poor hiring practices leading to overwork, or overtasking.
This is wonderful. Anyone who is truly a libertarian should be encouraging this. It's the perfect free market solution to exploitative labor. You dont get paid past 40 hours for your salary. Why should you reduce YOUR OWN worth to make a company's bottom line bigger? Unless you hold ITM options in the company the answer is you don't and shouldn't. You should be exploiting them at every turn.
It's just that the participants always paint rosy pictures to the point that Media buys it and sells it.
EDIT: Pretty rich that I'm getting downvoted so much, despite multiple examples of successful SaaS creators showing up in the comments, and this being a forum started by a VC partly to promote and encourage tech startups. If you think that starting a tech business is so impossibly difficult that you're personally offended at the idea of someone recommending you do it, I'd say you should just go back to Reddit or Twitter.
If you're bristling at me calling SaaS "easy", I just meant it's easier than running a multi-year scam and probably committing fraud, depending on the details of your employment contracts.
With a business, while you deal with some similar issues (compartmentalization, context-switching), I expect they'd feel far less invalidating (again, to me/those with similar personality types) because you'd know you were actually applying yourself to do the best you could.
Hell, with all the crypto madness going on right now, you could probably get ludicrously wealthy just doing freelance black hat security testing.
You aspiring fraudsters should actually read all the paperwork they put in front of you next time you start a job, and tell me if there's no exclusivity at all in it. Just because Jack Dorsey got away with running two companies doesn't mean it's right or just for you to weasel along and lie to two managers forever.
Get your life together and do something meaningful instead of stressing yourself out for the sake of whatever pair of pittances you can earn from this dumb scam.
Another good one is Daedtech/Hit Subscribe
1. Find a (ideally large) group of people you care about
2. Find a problem they have
3. Solve it