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> ...They stick some unfair contract on you and underpay you.

Mr. Article Writer is making $440k/annum from 2 jobs. Somewhere before hitting $200k/annum jobs that excuse goes away. Those sort of earnings aren't what someone can command from a powerless position either.

And the reason it is being called fraud is because he is probably misrepresenting his circumstances - lying directly, in other words. Unless his employer has a sloppy lawyer. He doesn't get a moral pass for lying because there is unfairness in the world. That logic could excuse any crime.

If you read the other articles, there more certainly is misrepresentation going on(mouse jigglers to fake being online). The second job is an 80 hour a week contract. So you’re looking at 120 hours on paper and a person who is saying that doing so has allowed for more time to do things in their private life…

> And the reason it is being called fraud is because he is probably misrepresenting his circumstances

The reason it's being called fraud is because it is fraud. How could it not be? Every full-time contract I've ever had had a clause stipulating that it would be my only employment. If I'd had another job and my boss found out, that would be grounds for instant dismissal.

My wife works in the legal department of a FAANG company and she says this has actually become a big problem for them since the pandemic and the shift to remote work. They've fired a bunch of people after discovering they were "overemployed", and they're increasingly vigilant about it and on the lookout for employees who might be doing it. So if you want to try it yourself, don't assume you won't get caught.

In many countries terms of what you are doing outside of contract as long as not as it does no harm are null n void. YMMV

Breech of contract isn’t the same thing as fraud.

A full time employment contract doesn’t preclude other things which take up significant time such as volunteering, or parenthood. Companies want exclusivity to increase their bargaining position, but they simply fire most of these people rather than sue for damages because it’s difficult to prove any harm.

If you are charging two companies for 40 hours per week of work, while only working 20 hours per week for each of them, then that is fraud by any reasonable definition of the word.

So I guess all those companies paying for 40 hours and getting 50 or 60 should be charged charged with fraud?

If your employer expects you to work 50 or 60 hours while only paying you for 40 hours then that is indeed also illegal.

I take it you've never had a salary pay job in America. One of my recent jobs had me working 100 hours per week for $130k (base salary). Every job I've ever had expected overtime without extra pay. One job had me working through every holiday without bonus. I've had some shitty jobs, but it wasn't illegal for them to demand this out of me.

For anyone working crazy hours and getting paid salary while having zero sense of control, it's worth checking if you're misclassified as exempt:

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/exempt-and-a-non-exempt-empl...

If you work with computers, or are above 100k and any part of the job is executive, administrative, or professional, you're probably not, though.

have looked into this for myself and i'm definitely exempt from being paid overtime.

i now take these unreasonable demands as a sign that the employer wants me to quit.

My contract says that I'm expected to work Monday to Friday 9am to 6pm with a one hour lunch break (so 40 hours) but it also has some vague, ambiguous language about "occasionally" working "additional hours" as business demands it. So they can make me work 50-60 hours in one week and it wouldn't breach my contract.

Are we suddenly counting people who show up and only give a partial effort? I am not sure you are prepared for how deep this rabbit hole goes.

That assumes you are working 20 hours at each, plenty of people work 80+ hour weeks.

fraud: wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.

If you sign a full-time contract and claim that you are only working a single job, while holding down multiple jobs then you are lying for financial gain.

But it’s such a vague statement that it could actually apply to lots of things.

Like say advertisements.

Say dating.

Say pretty much everything that happens all the time.

The definition of fraud you use is overly general.

Perhaps you could provide another reasonable definition of fraud to support an argument that this behavior is not fraudulent?

I'm pretty sure a lot of what is described would fall under fraud in most jurisdictions if these things are in either of the contracts, as they tend to be in mine.

1. Length of hours worked per week and work start and end - if you are supposed to be working in times between 8 and 17 with a total of 37.5 hours worked per week if you do a couple 1 hour meetings between 9 and 16 for employer B every day then you have defrauded employer A because it would be impossible for you to make that 37.5 hours between 8 and 17 they are paying you for. You have deceived the company that you are working for them and receiving compensation while working for another company. It's pretty open and shut in legal terms and no but what about lying to a date pontificating is going to change that.

2. Do the contracts with companies have clauses about how they own everything you product technology wise while working for them?

on edit: changed time usage from American to Military Time / European in one instance so all usages were aligned.

I don’t care what the contract says. If all of my employers are satisfied with my work, I don’t feel any remorse.

Employment contracts are part of the game. Overemployment is part of the metagame :-)

Until you fail to deliver something on time, employer gets angry and either fires you or worse finds out about you breaching contract and sues.

Then you would be paying through the nose and lawyering up. I know exactly of one such case only, though. I live in EU, and heard it was resolved by mediation but expensive for the party who breached it.

I heard about a few more cases where someone was caught illegally subcontracting. These also tend to be much cleaner.

If you do it smart they won’t be able to prove any wrongdoing. E.g. your second job should be contract work through your own offshore LLC, so you won’t show up in The Work Number and similar databases.

A different evasion tactic could be getting paid in crypto.

Well now we're just arguing semantics, but here's Dictionary.com's definition of fraud: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage."

I don't know if getting a second job wouldn't be fraud in a strict legalistic sense, but it definitely meets the above definition.

Anyway, if you wanna do it, go ahead. I'm not going to risk it myself, but I've worked at plenty of companies which were badly-enough run that I can imagine getting away with this kind of behaviour. I've also worked for employers who treated me like garbage, so I can understand why some people might have no objection to treating their employer like garbage.

When someone is saying 'fraud', I think most people are talking specifically about a criminal offence of some kind.

2 out of 6 of the engineers we hired this year were overemployed and never mentioned it till we worked it out. One was just straight up kinda useless, the other was manipulative and a smooth talker and was good at claiming having a hand in others work when he did very little, think he was working at least 3 jobs.

Not sure if it’s just our hiring is kinda useless but I’d be very reluctant to agree to anyone full WFH after being burned, risk isn’t worth burning time or money for.

How did you find it out? Were you able to unambiguously prove that they were doing it?

I imagine it also opens up legal issues if a person was employed by both Company A and Company B, and Company A decides to sue Company B.

Also, how can a company be sure that ideas an employee gave, was developed by the employee and not just copied from another company?

> Every full-time contract I've ever had had a clause stipulating that it would be my only employment

I'm not a lawyer, but I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of clause isn't legal in California and maybe even other states.

> Every full-time contract I've ever had had a clause stipulating that it would be my only employment.

I, the opposite. I'm explicit that I plan to work other jobs and work it into the contract. Nobody really cares; or at least aren't in a position to display care. If you're paying $200k-type salaries, you've already shown your cards that you're desperate!

The only time I experienced a little back and forth was one organization that had obligations to their customers for the workers not be engaged in work at other companies for data security reasons, with a formal rule that workers not work anywhere else to cover their bases, but as I like to do my other work in unrelated industries it was crafted as an exception without much trouble.

> Mr. Article Writer is making $440k/annum from 2 jobs.

That is less than the top 1% nationally[1]. And he's working two jobs to not even be in the 1%. Waaaah!

So . . . how can he cheat the rest of us enough to be in the 1% while only having one job? That's the most amicable way to help him avoid your "fraud," isn't it?

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/24/how-much-money-you-have-to-e...

A job is not really supposed to get someone into that top 1%. The "capitalism" thing isn't a secret, to be wealthy you need to own capital. If we organise so that people who are shrewd with resources get power, the results are better. The obvious alternative is people who work hard which which sounds good and that is about all the idea has going for it. It leads to poor outcomes for everyone.

The amount of good someone can do as an individual caps out pretty quickly but can get someone into a solid 10% top earners if they are exceptional. Beyond that, wealth and income come from how well a body deploys resources. Top 30% incomes are more than high enough to start buying in to assets - or they were before the central banks started tilting the board. But the response to that shouldn't be more lies.

> Mr. Article Writer is making $440k/annum from 2 jobs

He only claims to do this, but it could be just some fiction. I find it hard to believe that he is able to do this with a year of self taught practice to land two jobs paying 220k or he's extremely lucky to pass technical interviews.

> or he's extremely lucky to pass technical interviews.

We had some articles about people supposedly acting as standins for Zoom interviews posted on here recently...

I really understand your perspective, in the US companies are quite close to feifdoms with only minimal oversight and with the only real added benefit over being a serf that you can traverse to some other fiefdom that treats you the same or marginally better.

It strikes me though, that this comment is very US-centric. In parts of Europe (I'm talking about Sweden specifically here): employee protections are very strong.

> All employment contracts are one sided. They have more power. They stick some unfair contract on you and underpay you.

I can't give examples off the top of my head, but it is widely accepted that if an employment contract omits a certain topic: then whatever that topic is will fall on the side of the employee in a court of law, it is absurdly hard to fire people.

All these things have pros and cons, but it does mean effectively that once you're employed then you have a social safety net that even banks recognise and provides a lot of psychological safety too.

I'm just saying: your perspective feels contra to my experience so it's at least not universal.

You could write a million words trying to justify this.

However, if you are selling the same hour of effort to two or more people then you are lying to, stealing from and defrauding them. That is totally black and white.

People are entitled to respond to the unfair state of the world in many ways, but it doesn’t justify theft.

As an aside, I am amazed at how sites like HN can virtue signal with the best of them, then conduct mental gymnastics to claim that double billing isn’t fraudulent. Cmon guys surely anyone can see this isn’t right?

IT is not so clearly "hours in = work getting done" type of job, most of the time you are paid to have your knowledge and skills available for when it is required, but day to day work is a big cruise.

I totally agree, but most people sign a contract for hours and get paid per hour or per day. They are therefore selling hours.

If you are contracted and paid on outcomes then of course take as many jobs as you can fit in to your day.

Everyone knows the difference so this is no justification whatsoever.

Theft is justified when the playing field is not fair, and when one party has vastly more leverage. You can't say the hungry are not justified in stealing when the rulers take their labor by force.

I think this sort of argumentation stops working with a starving $200K earner being forced to fraud to earn a meager livable $440K.

That 200K earner likely produces much more than 200K in value. They are a victim of theft from their employers, who steal their excess value.

Livability has nothing to do with it.

It's not "theft" to pay someone the compensation they agreed to receive, any more than it's theft to buy an item for what the shop agrees to sell it at (which will also be less than you actually value it at, unless you're very bad at purchasing decisions...)

There are situations where people accepting a certain job at a certain wage might do so with somewhat less than free choice (that's where livability comes in), but that doesn't include ones where they've got another job paying $200k.

> That 200K earner likely produces much more than 200K in value.

Of course, the business has to live from something, accept the risks.

The point is that these are not people driven to the corner who have no other option to survive than to steal. These people have enough funds to start their own businesses, but I guess defrauding is easier.

At what point do we stop cheering on businesses that find ways to extract more value from their employees?

I am not selling one hour of effort, I am selling the result of what an average employee could accomplish with one hour of effort. If I can accomplish in half an hour what someone expects to take a full hour, then I have another half hour left to sell and by all rights should do so.

What does your contract say?

If it says hours, selling the same hour to someone else without their express knowledge and agreement is theft.

If the hours are important, then why would CEOs care if their employees work at 50% or 100% of effort?

Unless, the whole point of employment is to own the person for the time being?

The employment contract is an outdated relic from factory work, when it was actually reasonable to measure work in hours and an 8 hour shift made sense.

There are no ethical obligations for employees to follow employment contacts because there is a massive power imbalance. Workers are forced to accept humiliating and ridiculous terms, like peeing in a cup to pass a drug test, just so that they can survive.

2-3 hours a day of productive work is standard for office jobs. There's no reason to work more than that; you won't get paid more, they will just take advantage of you. There is nothing wrong with working another job in that case, so that you are paid proportionally to your output.

If you can convince your employer to write that into your contract, then absolutely. (If you're at the $200k dev salary skill level, you absolutely should be able to get paid very well as a contractor based on milestones, not for hours, and have a lot more lifestyle flexibility if you're productive)

But of course one reason for preferring regular salaried employment instead is actually not being able to accomplish the work in double the time but having a certain amount of skill in persuading people you're just ramping up or other people are holding up your productivity...

Are you selling hours or outcomes? If you're meeting all your assigned deliverables on time then you're satisfying your employment outcomes.

If you're stalling or failing on your deliverables, then it becomes unethical.

Merely warming a chair is not ethical.

This whole argument falls apart because there are perfectly legal and honest ways to work multiple "jobs". Do contract work or create your own company and offer IT services. Get your own employees and "stick some unfair contract on them and underpay them". See if it really works.

And for being sympathetic: are you towards the rest of the people in the teams this fraud is part of? Do you want to poison the market so it rejects remote work? Do you want more employee surveillance?

"Elon Musk is bad so I can do whatever I want!" - Think about the kind of world this brings about.

This comment feels like some misplaced copy pasta. It doesn't land right in the land of huge salaries paid to developers and other IT staff in the sectors that attract hacker news readers.

Twitter contractors got holiday pay? Maybe it's an American thing, but here in the UK I've never heard that. You either work or don't get paid.

just to add, is not that the person is stealing money. The person is working for it, the bare minimum, but the employer still happy to pay that salary or else they would have the person fired.

now imagine being paid the same for busting your ass 14 hours a day, and someone doing the bare minimum being paid the same? People should stop overworking. People's salary represents the minimum amount of money that their boss is willing to pay for the work, so to the minimum amount of work required.

Questions like "what are your expectations?", usually can be read as "how low can you go?".

You put a very nice argument there.

Could it happen that someone has to bust their ass 14 hours a day because someone else works 4 hours?

If someone is slacking off then they need to be performance managed or fired. That's management's problem.

If so, it shouldn't happen for long since the person working 14 hours a day would inform their manager/boss to

1. Readjust estimates/expectations because a team member has stopped contributing (happens all the time if someone gets sick/hospitalized, there should be processes for this)

2. Address the problematic employee to confirm they will contribute, or fire them

If the actual-worker is still overburdened, then it's a management/company problem and the overburdened should be looking around for new employment.