Ask HN: How do you deal with remote people working multiple full-time jobs?

Hey folks,

I noticed pre-covid that businesses tend to make internal decisions such as spending and hiring, that even when not directly related to my department, ultimately affected the compensation they were available to offer me. Now with the pandemic closing a number of businesses it seems the issue of bad business decisions is even higher.

It's simply a matter of trust. If an employer is not providing the absolute maximum hypothetical compensation then we can all agree that is a truly disgusting and untrustworthy employer. I don't have exact numbers for my employer yet.

First of all, I'd like to figure out how I can identify an employer making business decisions I am unaware of. Generally it would be fine for me what businesses do internally but when it affects my salary, then it's not acceptable.

Secondly, if one has figured out that a business is taking private actions that one doesn't like, how should one handle that? I would need to quit that job the next day, but from a personal finance perspective I cannot easily afford leaving and acquiring new jobs from one day to another.

I'm looking forward to your experiences and ideas.

A colleague of mine took up a second job, not because of money, but he (we) literally had nothing to do. Every day I’d ask my team lead, every day he’d say he’ll find some work for me. I thought it was unethical for my colleague to do two jobs, but is it though?

You know the irony? He didn’t have much to do even in his second job. So he was collecting two paychecks for doing almost nothing and was bored/irritated. Whose fault is that?

I think your effort and time would be better spent in making sure your employees had enough, interesting work to keep them occupied, instead of spending time playing detective. Let’s say you found one or more of your employees are doing multiple jobs. What can you do about it, other than getting upset and firing them? What happens after you fire them? You’re gonna hire again, and play detective again, with the new employees? It is just a waste of time.

Overworking your employees is bad. So is underworking. I’d rather spend time keeping my employees happy than snooping on them.

> making sure your employees had enough, interesting work to keep them occupied,

Fully agree on that. It's not always under our control (client's provide the task packages), but at least as a communication part we can raise awareness of such situation on the client's site.

Why do you care that someone has more than one job? If you can’t easily identify if someone has multiple jobs from decreased productivity then how does it matter? Do you have clear milestones and performance metrics? Do you pay your developers well enough that they don’t have to take on other jobs?

Think about what actual problem you have if some of your remote developers have two jobs. Can you measure the costs or risks? Or do perceive it as a betrayal or lack of control?

Ed Zitron wrote “If someone gets their work done to a high quality and on time and also happens to be working another job, you do not actually have a problem, and if anything, you’re lucky to have them.”

https://ez.substack.com/p/the-two-jobby-problem

I'll tell you why I care, and why I resent it: it's rent-collecting without risk-taking. It's a shining example of the frivolousness of modern office work. That the majority of it is filled with Bullshit Jobs. That if these positions disappeared tomorrow, the world would keep turning (and might even be better off).

That said, I myself am trying for such an arrangement, that is, multiple remote (bullshit) jobs.

Good questions.

> Do you have clear milestones and performance metrics?

Milestones yes, performance metrics not so much. Main reason here is that we serve different clients and we extend their existing strategies/work flows. So some times it's hard to measure stuff. Nonetheless in the past we did not pass milestones on time and thus questions were raised (esp. from clients).

So I guess we should start to build up some metrics. Any suggestions?

> Think about what actual problem you have

Main argument is about trust. We want to have provide an open work culture, so that everyone can openly speak about anything. If there are troubles (e.g. with performance) we try to encourage everyone to speak openly about it and to find solutions.

Secondly some times people are not as responsive (in terms of communication) as we initially agreed and usually re-negotiate every now and then.

And third: yes, there was decreased productity - and still is from time to time - so we openly try to find a solution with the affected people to increase it again. Unfortunately decreased productivity is not backed by a lot of data, but by day to day

So I'd guess confirmation bias is also some factor for the company.

> Do you pay your developers well enough [...]

I'm not in the position to know exact numbers, but what I've heard so far is that they are compensated well. Nonetheless I don't know exact details. But I know that they don't get a compensation like people in Europe.

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Yes, one could boil this down to control (as mentioned in another comment), but I don't think it's that easy. If we agree on a contract, then I (personally) expect that each site of the contract is fullfilling their duties. And our contract clearly states that the company must be informed about side-projects and other work. There is no direct penalty if one works a second job, but there will be a huge trust issue.

I have freelanced for about 15 years. I normally have multiple customers and projects simultaneously. I rarely manage other programmers so I’m only responsible for my own productivity. My customers know I have other jobs, they have to trust me that I don’t disclose their secrets or work for a competitor. It’s never presented a problem.

With my customers I am continuously negotiating goals, milestones, expectations, costs, and risks. I want my customers to understand what they are paying for and what I am committing to. As much as possible I try to charge for deliverables rather than for my time, but sometimes customers prefer to pay by the hour, or on a retainer. However we work that out I try to always make sure my customer and I are clear about what they expect from me and how much time that will take and what it will cost. That comes down to communication, and generally we iterate on their goals.

Measuring productivity is a hard problem, and even harder for creative people who may have large variations in their own productivity over time, and aren’t directly comparable to other individuals. I would start with setting clear goals and measurable deliverables and then getting the employee to commit to those. That means breaking the work down into measurable pieces, which will happen one way or another, so it’s probably best to do that work up front so no one gets surprised.

Communication is something you can set clear expectations about. For example I commit to my customers that I will answer routine emails the same day, and urgent emails or phone calls immediately. I ask my customers to respect my time and if everything turns into an emergency with them we’ll have to talk about that.

You should have some idea of what fair pay or market rate looks like for the people you employ. Personally I don’t believe it’s fair to pay people less because of where they live — everyone should get paid according to the value they add, whether they live in London or Bangalore. If you don’t pay people enough they will take on other jobs, or look for a job elsewhere.

I would not sign a contract that obliged me to inform my employer or a customer about other work. Sometimes issues of competition and intellectual property come into play. If someone is inclined to act unethically or break the law a contract clause isn’t likely to stop them. If you ask employees to agree to inform you of outside work, what do you agree to in return? Do you inform your employees about all of your customers? How much the company gets paid by customers? Whether the founders have other business commitments?

Bottom line is you pay people for their work, period. You can’t expect loyalty or openness or trust, especially if it’s one-way in the company’s favor. People are loyal to employers who treat them well. They trust employers who trust them and treat them with respect. How open someone is with their employer is really up to them — they don’t owe that to their job.

> I want my customers to understand what they are paying for and what I am committing to

That's what I'd like to see from everyone (generally spoken). Anyhow, thanks for your thoughts and sharing your experiences! There is a lot of value in it.

I guess communication is - as usual - a huge factor in all of this (from each party).

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> For example I commit to my customers that I will answer routine emails the same day, and urgent emails or phone calls immediately.

That's very valuable and honest from you. But it's you who is doing that. Not everyone acts like that (from my experience). So how would one be able to create a proper adherence for such a commitment (that was agreed on while signing the contract)?

I don’t know how your company works, so I’ll make general comments. People who manage, including those who manage programmers, too often don’t actually do the work of managing. A big part of managing a team or project is making sure everyone knows what they are expected to do, how long that will take, how much it will cost, what risks it involves. It also means discussing alternatives and fallbacks.

At all times the manager should know what people are working on, when to expect delivery, and know how to detect schedule/cost slips early on. The programmer(s) should know exactly what they are supposed to be doing, and what “done” looks like — what their deliverable is. What I actually see most of the time is vague requirements like “make an e-commerce site in six months” from management (or in my case, customers), and the programmers left on their own to figure that out. Then the team spends five months arguing about programming languages and tools and the “best” approach to edge cases while nothing gets delivered, and their manager is not paying attention. If the manager set the deliverables the team could work to deliver in a clear way. “Site structure with navigation but no content or functionality in two weeks,” for example. Give the team a few days to decide on language and tools and so on then move forward.

With short iterations it should be obvious fairly early if the tasks are too vague, or the estimates are way off, or if the team is not working on the agreed-to goals. When those problems become apparent the manager (or customer) and the programming team identify the cause and adjust so the next iteration (call it a sprint if you want, same thing) goes better. The team should be delivering all the time — manager should not allow 80% of the schedule to go by without seeing continuous progress. In my case I’m putting something in front of my customers every few days, and my deliverables are easy-to-measure things like (for example) import these CSV files into a Postgres cloud instance, or verify that the addresses users enter have valid ZIP codes. With a more experienced and “gelled” team you can make the deliverables a little broader.

I’m describing Agile development, but not the rituals and nonsense that have made the term almost meaningless. Iterative development with clear tasks and deliverables, and a feedback loop with the customer, right from the beginning.

As for communication, you can set those expectations and if the programmer is not talking to the team, or the manager, or customer, within the time limits you both agreed to, you have a performance issue to deal with. Poor communication sinks projects more often than not understanding binary trees. From my own customers the number one thing I hear is “The last developers stopped answering my emails and phone calls.” I make a point to always answer and keep my customers informed, which puts me in the top tier of freelancers even if I’m not the most technically awesome programmer.

If you're freelancing then the issue raised by the OP is almost solved :)

Yes, my customers know in advance that I have other jobs, though I don’t tell them any details. I get paid based on delivering, not for eight hours a day. And no one has a problem with it. All of the worries that get expressed about employees working multiple jobs just disappear for freelancers, even if I’m doing the same work.

why? the answer is simple ... control

you need to hit them with low salaries and high taxes, when they try for a better life quickly squash that crap with overly broad non-competes

welcome to Europe

how about paying employees adequately to a point where they don't have to work multiple full time jobs at a time, such an outlandish idea

I suspect it’s mostly about control, or maybe some misguided idea that employees owe loyalty to their employer. People trade their work for money. It’s not like getting married, forsaking all others.

If the employer sets clear performance expectations and has some way to measure performance, then employees either meet expectations or they don’t. If they don’t the employer can take remedial action, up to letting the employee go. It doesn’t really matter if the poor performance or low productivity was caused by another job or the employee playing video games or watching TV all day.

There’s some irony in the business the OP describes hires programmers out to multiple customers. That means the owners and managers of the company are working multiple jobs.

> There’s some irony in the business the OP describes hires programmers out to multiple customers. That means the owners and managers of the company are working multiple jobs.

Interesting point. Didn't thought about that yet! I wouldn't say the situtations are exactly the same, but they share a lot of details.

> There’s some irony in the business the OP describes hires programmers out to multiple customers. That means the owners and managers of the company are working multiple jobs.

nailed it :) its fine when we pocket the US cost / EU dev salary difference, but its not ok when you try to go solo and do the same

its not exactly breakthrough idea, don't get weird when someone else tries to have a go at it

> how about paying employees adequately to a point where they don't have to work multiple full time jobs at a time

We aren't talking about people holding mulitple low-paying jobs to make ends meet. It's mostly people in well payed positions taking advantage of being remote.

Those "well payed positions" have had flat salaries for decades, same as every other non-C-suite job, at least until recently (and now we have inflation eating salary increases). Working one job to support kids, a house, and a stay-at-home partner used to be possible. Not any longer. If your partner can't work or you'd prefer to have more attention paid to raising the kids, then two simultaneous jobs for the wage earner seems like a requirement today. Or you could choose to live like a common laborer, cheap old house, beater for a car, having to shop carefully on a budget. The middle class is not what it used to be, although you are encouraged to think it is [citation needed :-)]

Seems to be a local minima in Europe that for a family to have enough resources, both partners need to have careers and full-time jobs. However two careers do not mix very well with a family perspective and having kids. Then some people wonder why the birth rates in EU are falling rapidly..

Explain how that changes anything. Does an employer somehow have the right to limit the income of employees because they are supposedly well-paid? If someone can get two jobs done successfully who exactly are they taking advantage of?

I don't think they have a right to limit the employees' income but they do have a right to demand full time work when they're paying for it.

It's a tricky problem that I don't necessarily have an answer to. My point was that it's misleading to compare people who have to work multiple jobs to survive with people who are making hundreds of thousands at each job.

Example from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784608:

> As far as the money goes, my math goes like this:

> - 1 job: 250-300K cash, 250-300K equity (at the high end, higher if I moved to management)

> - 4 jobs: My current situation is 225K avg cash (including bonuses) per job, 100K avg equity per job

You can't look at this and say (like the GP comment did) "how about paying employees adequately".

The employer can reasonably expect to get the work they pay for. Professional and creative employees usually get paid for results and meeting goals, not for warming a chair for eight hours. The employer can use cameras and keystroke loggers to make sure they get their eight hours a day — Upwork offers this “service” and I’ve heard of employers doing it. That would be a big morale booster and show of trust from the employer.

It’s up to the employer to set clear performance expectations and measurements, then handle employees who don’t meet those expectations as a job performance problem. If the employer can’t do that basic management work, preferring to pry and control and intimidate their employees into submission, they deserve what they get.

I don’t understand the argument “They are already well-paid so they shouldn’t look to make more money.” Try that on the C-suite execs who sit on multiple corporate boards.

> It’s up to the employer to set clear performance expectations and measurements, then handle employees who don’t meet those expectations as a job performance problem.

Yes, and that's the question that OP is asking - how do you set those expectations and measurements. It's a starting point for the whole conversation, not the end of it.

> I don’t understand the argument “They are already well-paid so they shouldn’t look to make more money.”

I've never made this argument or seen anyone else in the thread make this argument.

The OP didn’t ask how to measure employee performance or set expectations and goals. They asked how to identify employees who had multiple jobs.

> First of all, I'd like to figure out how we can identify someone working more than we are aware of. Generally it would be fine for me (/us) what people do in their non-work time, but if it affects our work, then it's not acceptable. So how can we identify such a situation?

The question indicates the OP doesn’t have a way to measure performance, and instead focuses on identifying employees who might have other jobs.

> I've never made this argument or seen anyone else in the thread make this argument.

I must have misunderstood what you meant by this:

> We aren't talking about people holding mulitple low-paying jobs to make ends meet. It's mostly people in well payed positions taking advantage of being remote.

One could read “taking advantage of being remote” more than one way, but in the context I read it as people already paid well taking advantage of their employer.

> The OP didn’t ask how to measure employee performance or set expectations and goals. They asked how to identify employees who had multiple jobs.

While this statement is true, I'm nonetheless interested in a good ways to measure and agree on performance metrics. But please metrics that do not affect (especially the remote) in a negative way. Personally I'm not so much of a fan to put number of people's performances, especially in development, which makes it really hard some times.

I have an idea of a metric. Upon regular schedule working hours, percentage of calls missed (i.e. you wanted to call them to have a meeting, but it failed, they weren't available)

That’s surveillance, not performance measurement.

If they promise you 8 hours per day but you can't contact them, they're not really there so they don't keep up their promise. I'm not saying it's a good solution though

Committing to eight hours a day is what Walmart and McDonalds expect of their employees. We’re talking about programmers, who should get measured and paid based on delivering value to the employer, whether that takes eight hours or four, and whether it happens during normal business hours or at 3 am. Interrupting creative and technical employees randomly during the day to check that they will answer only confirms they have their phone nearby, not that they are working, or working for you.

If your performance metric comes down to “Employee has blocked out eight hours per day exclusively to me” then you’re a terrible manager and employer.

I would almost play along with bullshit check-in calls like you describe if I could call my manager and the company executives randomly to check if they’re actually working too, and not golfing or buying NFTs with my withheld taxes.

I didn't say it was a good idea. I am arguing that either you give full freedom for employees but they have to commit to one job, or you do freelancing with very specific measurements and they can have multiple jobs. Read my others comments. I was suggesting a new measurement that is less worse than others. Not saying it is good in the absolute sense

   whether that takes eight hours or four, and whether it happens during normal business hours or at 3 am

So they could very well only work 2 hours and say that's all they can work and call it done, work 3 others jobs

   I could call my manager and the company executives randomly to check if they’re actually working too

I didn't say it was random calls

The only measurement that matters is, does the employee deliver the expected work on time? Checking up on them with phone calls is just a little less oppressive than using cameras and keyloggers. But surveillance doesn’t measure productivity, it enforces presence or the appearance of work. The employer could monitor heart rates but that doesn’t tell them anything about productivity. If the only measure of productivity the employer can manage is counting people at their desks eight hours a day that’s just terrible management.

Employers can’t give employees “full freedom.” Nor can they prohibit the employee doing whatever they want on their own time. Forcing employees to commit to one job is just coercion unless there’s some clear business rationale behind it, not just control and an attitude that the employer owns the employee.

the definition of "expected work" is up to the manager. I'm not talking about prohibiting but voluntary agreements

I was writing in the context of Europe as OP mentioned the company is located in Europe.

In that context you can take your math and divide by 10 to get the mainland EU average for software engineer salary (~40k). With up to 50% tax rate gives incentive to have multiple jobs if your diet consists more than of plain yogurt and bread.

I do believe your estimation is more correct than the numbers usually thrown around (80k-100k). Those are for shiny new job openings, and the majority of SWE in EU (just my gut feeling from personal observation) do not like to (or cant) switch jobs very frequently, driving the effective average much closer to 40k gross income per year.

I'm a CTO and I have been programming for a couple decades.

I don't care as long as I have the results delivered. I cannot imagine myself doing just a single development project during the week. Sometimes you absolutely have to switch contexts and think of a completely different task, perhaps in a different language/framework. I actually encourage that in a similar way Google encouraged people to work on their personal projects back in the day.

Having said that, it must be clear and transparent to all parties.

> as I have the results delivered

And how do you define the results ? What if the employee gradually slows downs working like one hour less per week every month, in a year they can go from 40 hours per week into 28 hours per week with normal work expectations.

And that wouldn't necessarily be a "bad employee trying to get more from you by doing less". For example, maybe your team performance is getting worse. Let's say you have a coworker that is sick and gets normal pay for less quality work, and another coworker that just got a baby and got less time for work. The teams got less focused on work gradually in time and the employee feels "entitled" to work less on you and do something else with his/her time

It boils down to working with people with inner motivation to deliver.

I guess my experience is more relevant to small and highly integrated teams.

Also bear in mind: results of software developers are not defined by hours spent coding.

> less focused on work gradually in time

This might happen. It's a leader's job to keep in touch with the team and watch out for morale.

Makes sense. But it's well-known that software delivery estimates have huge error bars.

I frankly would have limited insight if a skilled engineer reduced output by 30% in order to work a part-time job.

Ultimately, the challenge here is that managers and engineering leads just don't have a great ability to know how expensive a project should be, which is sort of bizarre given that for a lot of software the development costs are the primary costs!

I strongly believe that software development estimations are futile.

Right, but my point was that if you can't reliably estimate how long something will take, you can't estimate how long it ought to take, and, by extension, can't estimate if it's taking longer than it should.

So, as a leader, how do you know if someone is over or underperforming?

Unfortunately, there is no algorithmic solution to this. It's like porn: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

Saying it's the manager's job to deal with that doesn't solve the issue of helping managers deal with that job. The question remains open.

I gave a specific example where a manager can't "Keep in touch" because the work was gradually slowed each month, in a way that the manager can't see that time spent declined, he can only think that it's the employee's normal productivity

some companies don’t even get you need 2 monitors and you want everyone to be aware?

Mortgage rates just hit 5%+ here in US. CPI is up hugely in that last year. Some people are probably doing this out of necessity. I don't think you should be caring about this, it will come off like being a control freak to your employees. If they're not performing well, just fire them or focus on their perfomance in the ccontext of their job, but you don't need to address the why or how that you think is causing it. When someone performs poorly due to mental health reasons, do you delve into the reasons they're feeling bad and performing badly, and tell them what to do? No, that's not your job -- if anything you should help them get help. The same thing applies to work performance, focus on improving their performance but don't try to control what they do in the free time. The problem is, for every 1 person you tell to stop and accuse of abusing your generosity, you'll have someone else who isn't abusing it but simply working in their free time to make ends meet--yet you've now accused them. You will build a culture of resentment of people you falsely accuse and that could be damaging.

Aside from legal issues, this is a complex topic I'm also interested in, specifically for programmer / engineers, or in general people in tech, they are 1) knowledge workers 2) in high demand (market lack of such skills). 1) implies that working is not just about scheduling a certain number of hours per week to a task, it's a mindset thing. You're hiring their brains for an extended period of time on long projects, to achieve a bigger goal. 2) means they have tons of opportunities at a lot of others places. 1 and 2 together in general means they are pretty independent strong minded people (which is a good thing), that they can't be really controlled (which is a good thing) and they can do pretty much what they want in the time allocated to the employers.

Clever people on the internet will tell you it all comes down to trust between the employee and and employers.. Of course there is more to it, that's just the starting point of the discussion. How do you create and sustain that whole work relationship is a full time craft for a manager.

And then there is the debate between freelancing and employing. Freelancers are perfectly fine with multiple clients, it's part of the thing. But with knowledge employees, they are expected to be dedicated to your company (they don't have specific hours but a general goal to perform and a certain expectation of commitment), otherwise they're just playing the same game than freelancers, in disguise.

If you're going to tell me that "its just about setting some KPI / performance metrics, if you cant do that then you're not a good manager" then please don't also tell me at the same time "engineers should be free of all constraints, let them do their thing without any surveillance that's bad for their morale !" in others situations. We have to choose. Either we trust the person is going to be dedicated to us (or will come forward that they want to work with another company at the same time) without hard surveillance, or you're treating them like resources that we can manage, track and fire easily if the performance review is bad. No side of the spectrum is best, where to stop the slider is highly dependent on the situation and people too

"Generally it would be fine for me (/us) what people do in their non-work time, but if it affects our work, then it's not acceptable. So how can we identify such a situation?"

I feel like you just answered your own question. If you say you'll be fine with someone working multiple jobs if it doesn't affect their output then why would you need to "identify such a situation"?

Just let people do what they want and evaluate people's output and performance.

it’s not your problem. pay them more so they don’t need to juggle multiple jobs?

If you pay them more to do the same things, why would they change their behavior ? They'd just get more money

because juggling multiple jobs is stressful and a hassle