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Comment by froaway4job | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely love the rise of performative work culture.

I am someone who spent years frustrated by the performative BS at my workplaces. Actually being proactive was not as important as achieving some superficial engineering task that didn't actually solve anything.

So, I flipped the script and leveraged this silliness into a 7 figure salary by working multiple remote jobs. I work 4 SWE jobs, spend about 10-15 hours per week per job, act like I'm "working" for the rest of that time, get paid. Works for me, works for them!

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Sounds like you can scale that by having multiple employees helping you pretend to work. You can call it 'a consultancy'.

Genius! Except that level of pretending to work is almost too much work.

I have a question for you!

How do you secure additional SWE jobs? Are they FTE roles? How's the recruitment process work?

For example, you may be asked "So froaway, why are you leaving company X?" During an interview or such.

Likewise, how do you promote yourself? Surely you can't have all four roles on your CV given the overlap? So do you choose the most relevant for the upcoming new job?

How close have you come to screwing up and mistakenly spilling the beans? I would never keep my stand ups straight.

Never come close at all. Been doing the multiple full time job thing for several years. As long as you're getting work done and communicating fairly well people don't seem to question things.

Getting the right meeting cadence down is the toughest part. I make sure to understand the company's meeting culture well before taking any offer. If the meeting schedule doesn't work I leave, it's the biggest factor in any job for me.

Do you have specific questions you ask during the interview process in order to understand the meeting culture?

Impressive. I suppose you don't have a linked in profile?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nice-try

In all seriousness, I create a new profile whenever I get a new job and would not be sharing any details here.

Understandable! I was just curious how you'd handle your manager(s) trying to connect with you. Would make sense to just say your fundamentally against such things. Be Ron Swanson.

So, fraud then?

Employer hires one person to do the jobs of four people - smart business sense

Employee is one person doing the jobs of four people - fraud??

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We need to stop praising businesses/execs who work the system while condemning people who do it. Uncaring, amoral corporate culture sees people as mere resources, to be mined for value until they're depleted.

If this is fraud, then expecting somebody to do the workload of multiple people while only receiving one person's salary is also fraud, and that's a conversation I'd be very willing to have.

I have been arguing with people on Blind about this. Not actually fraud!

However, you are likely in violation of employment contract. Where I currently work, and my previous job, you could actually find a way through the official channels by just not being totally accurate about the other job(s).

If challenged it comes down to the details. Moonlighting is a perfectly normal activity for driven people (I did tech blogging for a previous employer once while employed by someone else, so I have navigated this system at one company), and by structuring your disclosures very strategically you could likely avoid any legal impacts.

All that said, working multiple jobs like that will definitely get you fired if you are found out. Even in a state with strong worker protections.

And again, all that said: Don't do this.

Yep, I've asked before and consulted a few lawyers. Not actually fraud. Kind of a grey area unless I'm explicitly stealing trade secrets or IP.

As for getting fired, I've never been fired but I've also never been caught. Getting kind of good at it, doing this for the past 5+ years. I would assume the nice thing about getting fired in this situation is having multiple incomes to fall back on. I've never had trouble finding new jobs.

Then once you've finished juggling 4 jobs you have lucrative guru royalties for years if you write a book about it...

Maybe call it the "144 Hour Work-week"

https://theworknumber.com/ would be an easy way to find an employee who is making a second full-time salary.

None of my employers have sold my info like that... yet. Also, it's not illegal to have another form of income, even a W2 income.

True it may not be a crime, but every company I've worked for (mostly "big tech") has a clause in my contract saying that I can't work another full-time job. If I were, and they found out, I'd probably get fired.

> True it may not be a crime, but every company I've worked for (mostly "big tech") has a clause in my contract saying that I can't work another full-time job. If I were, and they found out, I'd probably get fired.

I don't doubt that some contracts state you can't work another job, but I would consider rereading some of your contracts. Especially in work friendly states, it's hard to enforce those types of clauses and companies are really good at wording things like it's a restriction when it's really a legal suggestion.

> and they found out

How exactly would an employer easily find out? I also worked multiple jobs at FAANG level big tech, you would have to explicitly say something to get found out. In fact, the big tech jobs I've had were genuinely the most administratively bloated and least likely to find out.

“Fire me. I have 3 other jobs.”

Bingo. I think people have a hard time understanding this. I always get asked, "What happens if you get fired?", I have 4 jobs... I certainly don't want to lose a job, but it's not a big deal to me.

Also, finding a new job has never been that difficult, especially in this market.

I don't know, "act like I'm "working" for the rest of that time" sure sounds like there's intentional deception for financial gain.

That's literally what the article is describing, and most people wouldn't consider that fraud, merely incompetence or poor corporate incentives. I'm just leaning into the expectations and ironically doing it better?

Contrast this with most of us guilty of slacking off most every week...

How did you achieve that? How do you allocate your hours?

I have to work at places that have staggered standups and meetings. 7am standup here, 10 am standup there. That kind of thing. I miss the occasional random meeting but I let people know.

I also underachieve in terms of moving up the corporate ladder. I've been asked to move into management for more money, and I always reject those types of promotions since it usually means more unavoidable meetings. Also, I don't bother working on difficult projects, I choose to work in roles where I have clear expertise and can complete work in 2-4 times the expected timeline.

Flipping that script is bad ass! Sounds like stuff for a separate post.

Or a sitcom.

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