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Comment by gk1 | Hacker News Reader

People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.

I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.

It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.

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> People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.

It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.

I had the same experience as you with an "overemployed" person: Working with them is really bad for everyone else. They lie, play extreme politics, throw teammates under the bus, make you work harder for everything, and they don't care if it causes you harm because you're just a temporary coworker at one of their "Js"

There's nothing to celebrate about these people. They screw over their teammates far more than the company they work for.

> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs

What blows my mind is people think overemployment of an engineer is bad, but it is more than acceptable for CEO to held top positions in different companies.

CEOs get fired too when a board with sufficient power doesn’t feel like they are performing.

The difference is in most cases the CEO owns the business or a good chunk of it so they’re actually capital owners and employees in name only. If you own the business you make the rules.

> If you own the business you make the rules.

To the extent.

I own my skills and I make the rules. To the extent.

I mean, most of my experience with large companies is that things are usually better for my team when the executive team is leaving us alone. A note here and there is nice; but any more focus and it's not great... better for everyone if they're busy doing something else. :P

It’s not acceptable

I think you just described most of the C level executives in the tech industry. They leave companies behind destroyed, with a big pay check. But it’s unethical if simple engineers do it. Sure.

Not sure what your direct experience is, but the difference I've experienced first hand is that C-suite are INTENSELY focused on the single company but only for a relatively short period of time. They're not spread too thin; they're motivated solely by short-term incentives. An OE engineer is both, and we can agree they all suck for people who want to do meaningful work and build an awesome team - but they seem very different to me.

> It blows my mind that overemployed people have become folk heroes. They're obviously not putting full effort into two jobs.

What about people that put full effort and then some into jobs with long hours and loads of stress just to get hit with a PIP or get caught in the latest round of layoffs?

If that's how companies treat people, what's so wrong with 'overemployed' people having a fallback, especially in today's market?

Simple: Two wrongs don't make a right.

Most people are not putting full effort into their jobs, which is why we are considered heros.

So you could fight us, but plenty just join us in playing games, lowering expectations, and collecting their check and going home. We are awful colleagues if you have ambition, but if you do not, we get along fine with people.

How often do people put full effort into even one job? I do enough to move my career forward and to keep myself employed. Everything else is just working for free.

This is a really good perspective, and I've seen a similar impact from "under employed" members of my teams. We have group-level product managers who have several scrum team-level PMs under them. The idea is they keep broader alignment and bigger-picture consistency, but when they don't spend time with each of the scrum teams, or miss planning meetings and important discussions the teams pay the price from lack of communication, coordination and a shared understanding.

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