Ask HN: Who here is juggling two or more remote jobs? How is it working out?
For more context that made me ask this question, please see this video: https://youtu.be/clqUs5ZAUEU FWIW, a lot of US employers report your current employment status, role and salary to databases like Equifax's 'The Work Number' - and nearly any organization that subscribes can view this data. HR departments DO look at this info and occasionally spot-check it to catch moonlighting employees. You can request your own data here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/ Do your moonlighting under a single-member LLC with an EIN. You can generally do this for less than $100 per year in your home state. It can be a challenge to get the IRS to issue an EIN to such an entity, but if you read the rules you can find the exact flowchart of yes/no questions to force them to do it (pro-tip: do that first, so you actually create the business properly). As a bonus, you'll probably end up with a 20% discount on your income come tax time ([1][2]). [1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/2018ntf-twenty-percent-small... Not going to work for the sort of use case this discussion thread seems to be aimed at - people that are working 2x (or more?) run-of-the-mill 'day jobs'. You mean to say 2x W-2 jobs? Yes, you are likely correct, though it may actually work out if you can convince one of them to switch you to a 1099 status. Part of your benefits as a W-2 employee don't really do you any good to have 2x of them. 401k plans - your max contribution is the total, not per employer. Health insurance? Well, maybe some people would be better to have two policies (but then you'll get demands for the rest of your life to document whether or not you have two policies for the purposes of coordination of benefits). Honestly, having one W-2 and one or more 1099 job is better than one or more W-2 job - if you can get it that way. 20% deduction not discount so more like 6-10%. Then it gets cancelled out by SE tax. Yes, you are correct (deduction vs discount). But SE taxes - you pay those too if you are working with a W-2. I thought it was understood that working on a 1099 basis rather than a W-2 basis involves a different rate to make up for the "employer-paid taxes" that a W-2 person does not see. To provide a little more info. It is possible to request a freeze on your info, but of course they make it annoying. They appear to be sourcing the data from payroll management systems like ADP. Your organization might not even be aware that they're sharing and selling your paycheck information. I especially distrust companies using outsourced payroll and benefits startups for this reason. Payroll and benefits are complex and hard to administer. Complying with overtime and income tax rules across jurisdictions alone make outsourcing payroll and benefits a sensible decision for many organizations. The problem isn’t outsourcing a difficult and error-prone requirement that is never part of the core business (payroll and benefits). The problem is those outsourcing companies selling that data or using it for purposes other than managing payroll and benefits. Unfortunately we live in a world where anything we participate in, voluntarily or otherwise, potentially exposes us to data harvesting and our information sold to the highest bidder. I have literally never worked at an org, large or small, that didn't outsource payroll. So much for keeping salaries secret. Amazing. You should never believe the elites follow the rules they put on the proles I was on the other side of this: We had a remote worker who got a new job but then tried to hide it, collecting paychecks as long as possible. For any manager paying attention, it wasn't difficult to spot. He would swing between being eager to please and virtually unreachable. We didn't have many meetings or phone calls, but he had more scheduling conflicts than anyone else. On the rare occasion that we had high urgency tasks, there was about a 50% chance that he would obviously be not working on it at all until the evening, despite being online all day. Eventually we let him go for non-performance, which wasn't too hard to document. Now he has a problem where his resume start/end dates don't match what he's claiming on LinkedIn or (presumably) putting on his resume. He also burned the entire team (they figured it out) so he's not getting any positive references from anyway. It may work if you can find two jobs with two incompetent managers who aren't paying attention, but I don't think it's as easy as people suggest for any reasonably well paying engineering job. It's not a problem, he's just going to lie about ever having a second job and only report his first job. That's how this works, you have a primary job which is your "real job", and others which feed you more paychecks until they realize you're underperforming and you get fired. FWIW I'm not doing this, I'm just on the /r/overemployed subreddit. > He would swing between being eager to please and virtually unreachable. We didn't have many meetings or phone calls, but he had more scheduling conflicts than anyone else. On the rare occasion that we had high urgency tasks, there was about a 50% chance that he would obviously be not working on it at all until the evening, despite being online all day. I think a few periods in my career could be accurately described like this. It was actually just a flareup of some severe mental illness but you can (and my employers certainly did) fire for it anyway, obviously. But I'm not sure your confidence in your understanding of the situation is truly warranted here. > Now he has a problem where his resume start/end dates don't match what he's claiming on LinkedIn or (presumably) putting on his resume As a non-US person this is the most ridiculous reason to inherent anything. > Now he has a problem where his resume start/end dates don't match what he's claiming on LinkedIn or (presumably) putting on his resume. He also burned the entire team (they figured it out) so he's not getting any positive references from anyway. Or he only lists the J2 from which he hasn't been fired. so why didn’t you pay him more so he would not need to juggle jobs? Why do you think this is the case? Some people can never get enough, i know some people who complain so much that you'd think they were living in the streets but their household income exceeds 500k, it is just a mentality thing. you don't know what financial challenges they are facing, so there is no point in arguing that 500K is enough for their household. If 500k/yr isn't enough to meet your household needs, you don't have a financial problem, you have a personal problem. like I said, none of your business Totally agree unless they want to complain about it to me. If a peer or employee tried to sell me a sob story about 500k not being enough I would tell them to hit the road again, you have no idea what’s going on with their life or finances. people find themselves in situations all the time they think would never happen. hope you never end up there. I don't care what's going on in their life. If I'm ever in a position where I need more than 500k/yr, it will be my problem, not somebody elses. As a company, if their financial troubles exceed 500k, why is that my problem? Especially if I can get an equivalent resource without the excessive financial troubles for 200k that isn't moonlighting? just because you want money doesn't mean you get money As long as you can fire them and find a replacement for the same price, why would you ever increase pay? Especially for a worker that is underperforming? more power to you if you can as easily replace people as you describe. It doesn't take much to replace a dead weight. "You're massively underperforming and we can never contact you - have a substantial pay rise" isn't really how these things work... I currently have 1 full time job, 1 full time contracting, and 4 clients that pay me a retainer for a set amount of hours they can use week to week. It's going fine; I measure that based on my performance reviews all being excellent, my clients all paying the bills on time, and all work is done in a timely fashion. I do individual contributor infrastructure engineering at the senior+ level. Managing the calendar is the toughest part, making sure things don't overlap is difficult. My full time calendar is relatively light, the contracting gig on the other hand is starting to get on my nerves with the amount of meetings they're pushing me to attend. Couple of other important points: * the full time and contracting gigs are in separate time zones, which helps time management. * I only actually work ~45-50 hours a week total, but all work is complete. * I only take on work that aligns. I use several extremely standard tools and ALL gigs are all the same, which lowers my cognitive overhead a lot. Thanks for sharing. If you don't mind a couple of questions: - is the compensation worth it?
- do you think this is going to be a long term thing for you (burning the candle at both ends)? Cash comp is around 800K pre tax, to me it's worth it; I'm able to push tons of cash into my retirement accounts and do things like purchase a vacation home. I've been doing it for the past few years, and it hasn't had a negative effect on my mental well being or family relationships. I work extra here and there, sure, but so does everyone, and it has more to do with "we need to do this at this specific time" than any actual extra work needing to be done. Not the person who asked the question but thanks again for sharing this. I'm in a similar situation but without the full time job -- I can understand the retainer, but with the contracting do you charge per hour? I'd imagine you charge per day/week but that also feels a bit hard to balance evenly with a full time job. I charge a flat retainer every 2 weeks that gives a client the ability to give me work if they need stuff done, and the ability to call me in the middle of the night if things go down. I've never had an issue balancing it; after the initial work of bringing a client on board the infrastructure handles itself. I've put a lot of work into automation and tooling, so the engineering teams I work for are able to self service on 90% of the things they need, and only need things directly from me rarely. This isn't software engineering, it's infrastructure, which means I'm not on the hook to work on new product features sprint to sprint. There are times when I only have to do an hour or so worth of work for a client. Thanks for sharing -- this has been eye opening for me. I do a lot of infrastructure for myself and others. Great to know that rewards for competence and skill like this is out there for ICs. You've inspired me -- I'll be looking to try and make some more contracts like this in the future. > This isn't software engineering, it's infrastructure, which means I'm not on the hook to work on new product features sprint to sprint. There are times when I only have to do an hour or so worth of work for a client. Great, and I think it's honestly a very high ROI improvement as well, enabling a team of 5 developers to commit, deploy and generate value faster is absolutely worth it. The only things I've considered in that space that could be as lucrative as you're doing now has been reducing cloud costs (and taking % of cost saved over 6mo). Thanks for sharing. Do you find the clients and contract work through your network or from your full time job? I'm at a startup that has some customers which need extra work that I can do but the optics of it might look bad if coworkers find out. All my clients come from my network, not through my full time job. That is impressive. Do you have an email address or a contact method? I made a new email if you're interested in chatting imbusyonhackernews at gmail Do you use any drugs other than caffeine ? Nah, though I should exercise more, but that's mostly just me being lazy. So I am currently juggling a 9-5 and a freelance gig and a couple of side-hustle type roles and I am about to ditch the 9-5 because it completely gets in the way of everything else. My work goes best when I have time flexibility - duh - and the 9-5 remote keeps me trapped at my machine. Gigs based on delivering a thing have always been best for me - if I'm selling my expertise, it's ALWAYS better than selling my time. I do but one of them does know, basically I got a job offer, but my previous(and current employer) really needed me since they have a legacy backend written in a relative niche language and I was the only one left to maintain it while they migrate it to python, so they offer me to switch from full time to part-time with the same salary. so half of the day with my old employer and the rest with the new one. I'm only doing it to pay for my house faster and when I finish with that by the end of the year I will quit, so far It had worked pretty well(minus some super long days). > so they offer me to switch from full time to part-time with the same salary I'm not sure of the specifics where you are, but contractors/part timers are usually drastically cheaper to hire than full time employees. Your consulting rate should be 1.5x or more (I'd say 2x+) than your FTE rate. I find it hard to believe the statistic in the video that 37% of remote workers are working multiple jobs, with the implication that means full-time workers. Is that statistic actually for full-time workers doing overlapping time, and is there evidence? Or does it include all the people whose remote work is an hour here and there in random gig economy freelance tasks, where it's perfectly natural to have multiple commitments? This seems to be the source: https://www.resumebuilder.com/7-in-10-remote-workers-have-mu... The implication is certainly that these are two full-time jobs. I don't have data to counter it but, I'm sorry, this just doesn't pass the sniff test. Sure, lots of full-time workers may earn a few dollars on the side now and then but that's not what this article seems to be saying. I've been working multiple remote jobs for the past 4 years. I'm currently working 4 full time engineering roles and a part time contract. It's been tough but a great experience. The main struggle is scheduling and making sure you can make all the meetings. It's also tough finding the right job which gives you autonomy to form your schedule. The main perks are obviously money and not caring about getting laid off. In this market it's pretty hard to get laid off, we shall see how it plays out over the next few years. TC or GTFO. (Am I doing that right?) Currently at 1.8m ish total comp: More power to you, man. I find 0..1 of these startups provides enough daily aggravation. (Though that could argue for throwing a pile together and ending it quickly.) I also dislike working at these places. This is something I'll be doing for a few years and then leaving corporate life with a big pile. jeez, where are you getting jobs where you can work like 2-3 hrs a day and get paid 250k + ? Are u a leetcode god or a 10x programmer? Senior to Staff positions at medium to large private or mid cap public companies expect little from their engineers :). Definitely not 10x and I suck at leetcode style problems. I'm probably a 2xer who acts like a 1xer. That's the real secret. Don't overachieve. You are actually the living proof there is a 5x to 10x difference between some programmers. Since you have 4.5 jobs. Thanks for coming forward. I guess technically the math works out that way :) In my opinion I'm seriously mediocre as an engineer. Slightly above average at best. I'm just good at managing my time, which is more of a business/personal skill than any engineering skill. sometimes i won't feel like starting a task for like 3 hrs into my workday, you must be a god at sticking to a schedule. Series D companies above 1B valuation? How did you make it to senior staff without leetcode? How many years YOE to get there? I did a lot of leetcode when I first started. Nowadays, and especially in this market, it's not hard to find companies not doing any leetcode style interviews. If you have a decent GitHub profile and years of experience you can outright say in interviews that you won't be doing any leetcode style problems. It's an engineers market, take advantage of it! How many years in a number? Which kind of companies are you talking about? Lifestyle business or seed stage or Series A / B / C / D / E? Nobody really looks at GitHub though. A/b tested it and only very few looked. Do you have an email interested individuals can contact you on? For my own sake I'm probably going to be completely anon, but you should check out the following site for a community of overemployed folks: Could you make a protonmail address? It is good to have a circle of non-public capable people. Will be good if you can be contacted. interested in knowing how do you manage your time at 4 FTE roles ? I also would like to understand the systems / machines that they provide I purposely job hunt for low performing teams/companies who are willing to pay for experience. Also, managing my calendar religiously is a must. Where do you look for them? How many YOE did you have when you first started being overemployed? What do you see to know that they are low performing and willing to pay for experience? is this even legal? Depends what you mean exactly. It's almost certainly a breach of all of the contracts, unless they were quite sloppily drafted, but it's probably not a crime [1]. The repercussions would be as determined by the contracts — likely just termination. [1] Not legal advice. It could maybe be fraud depending on the details? It may be against his contract, but none of the employment contracts I've ever had stipulated that I couldn't hire out my services elsewhere. Why do you think it'd be illegal? Maybe, which means yes it is legal. Will anybody come after me? Doubt it's worth it to come after an engineer making 250K and will work at your company for less than 2 years. It's interesting that a lot of people here seem to consider a second FT position as immoral/illegal.
How about instead of a second FT job - studying FT for an unrelated degree? The time needed is arguably the same as a second FT and context switching is still there. I think that people are assuming fraud—working two jobs at the same time (eight hours a day), rather than two full-time jobs (16 hours a day). Which is a fair assumption - putting 16 hours of work a day seems much less likely than someone working remotely and doing the bare minimum at 2 jobs for as long as they can get away with it. Doing the bare minimum is both legal and ethical though. If it wasn't it wouldn't be the minimum. Legal, maybe. Ethical? Not to me. Think of it this way: would you tell your employer you were planning to work two jobs, and put in the minimum effort into them? Would you be above-board and transparent about your conflicting responsibilities and schedules? If not, you're committing fraud: "intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value." (The value, in this case, is the fruits of your labor.) And fraud is most certainly unethical, even if not illegal in this case. Employees trade their hours for the company's money. If you want to trade deliverables for money, you have to be a contractor on a deliverable-based contract. It's a lot riskier, which is why it pays more... sometimes. If you are in a full-time job, and not putting in full-time hours, you're defrauding your employer. I'm not particularly making an assertion about whether working two jobs is ethical, just that doing the minimum is. Again, if the minimum isn't the least it is acceptable to do, then what is, then what does that word even mean? What exactly an employer is paying for with a salaried employee is fairly nuanced and specific to the work. "They're paying for your time" isn't wrong but it's insufficient to explain a lot of the real dynamics there. Specifically that would make every time you look away from the computer a privilege purely at the discretion of your employer. Not a condition many of us would accept given other options. So it seems to me either this isn't the pure moral reality of the transaction, or we're all transgressors here. > I'm not particularly making an assertion about whether working two jobs is ethical, just that doing the minimum is. Sure, I'll agree with that, up to a point. And I think, for me, that point is "would you behave differently if your employer had full knowledge of your actions." Ultimately, people who work two simultaneous jobs are abusing the trust of their employers, and if it becomes commonplace, it's just going to hurt the rest of us. Instead of trusting employees to do the right thing, employers will put draconian employee tracking measures in place. They're going to do that anyway whether we preemptively placate them or not. The solution is solidarity and organizing, not trying to infer their invisible demands on how we allocate our time around the workload. And why would my employer ever have full knowledge of my actions during the workday? Even in the hypothetical it's extremely invasive. If I need to pray five times a day several of those are landing during the workday. Fuck a boss who thinks they need to know about that. It sounds like you haven't been part of a healthy workplace environment, and have so much anger about employer/employee relationships that you're straw-manning my hypothetical. That's too bad. But healthy workplaces do exist, and they involve mutual trust. (Up to a point. I'm not advocating blind trust and obedience.) Workplaces where everyone thinks everyone else is out to get them are hell. Don't contribute to it... just get out and find an employer you can trust, if you can. This entire industry is in a hiring frenzy, and even before it, job-hopping for wealth and experience was very common in places like Silicon Valley. In such an environment where employees and employers both treat each other as fungible, it's easy for everything to be highly transactional, low-trust. I work contract so I’m not hiding it from anyone. I juggle two clients simultaneously by design (it buffers me in case a contract ends). I’ve currently got four active clients and a compelling side-project (I also have 3 colleagues helping with those things). Keeping it all straight is a challenge. I lean heavily on my calendar and I take extensive notes. I have low patience for things taking longer than they should. And I’m having moments where I know I should remember a detail but it is just gone. I thought for a while that my memory was deteriorating, but I suspect I just have a lot going on and am reaching my natural limit of long term attention.
I’m not sure I recommend it. > I thought for a while that my memory was deteriorating not juggling multiple "jobs" but still juggling a lot. i thought perhaps my memory was/is deteriorating... perhaps this is the reason!? If you do this with direct charge government work, you're within hailing range of felony territory. Granted, you probably won't get caught, but if you do, it's going to be a bridge burner for you in this industry basically forever. Is that entirely a bad thing, though, considering this industry? Discussion ongoing. Only if you falsify your timecards, right? I'm not doing it, so I don't really care. But the felony would be falsifying billing paperwork? Do you have a source for this being considered a felony? I wonder how the legalities of working more than 1 (remote) job are. You'd think you'd run into some conflicting clauses in your employment contracts. Risk / reward Nobody should ever think in absolutes regarding these topics, only consequences, specifically the value of those consequences. Of course consequentialism is a two way street, like, is a potential $100 fine because an employer asked a personal question in an interview a deterrent? For an employee though, the stakes are technically way higher, but do you want that $3 million house or not. Lots of employees do it. Their 9-5 jobs suffers but pay over there is guaranteed. I know more than few startup employees who work with other startups on hourly contract basis. Part of the reason for managers to start pushing for return to office since its harder to cheat this way from office. 9-5 jobs suffer from a lot of things all the time, it's sort of what managers already expect of employees, to be actually productive maybe 3-4 hours a day. Whether one is using the rest of time on water cooler politics, checking Instagram, playing games, or doing another job, it's not necessarily as visible in the overall productivity as you may expect it to be. Especially with well organized people smart enough not to set the bar too high in the beginning. > Part of the reason for managers to start pushing for return to office since its harder to cheat this way from office. Are they that many people doing this? > Their 9-5 jobs suffers If they do it this way, they are doing it wrong. At my current job I can squeeze all my daily tasks in maybe one hour (mind you, this is after 10 years of doing a very similar set of things). It becomes longer when a significant change comes or an emergency happens but after a few weeks it's all the same. I study new things and develop my competences during the spare hours but I can imagine I could earn money as well. The pay is good so I don't have motivation to take an extra job but I can totally understand people who are more ambitious or earn less. There's a huge difference between coasting a bit and using available time to learn, do side projects, read books, even earn a bit doing some freelance non-competitive work--and working two jobs where the expectation of each is that you're working full-time. (And, in all probability violating various confidentiality etc. agreements.) What is the difference? The 2nd one is the side project isnt it? Why would they be violating confidentiality? They are not going to tell the 2nd company about their 1st company. Also not going to share trade secrets since there is no need to. I take a lot of issue with you framing this as "cheating." How is it cheating? How do you know the 9-5 necessarily suffers? I'm old enough and I have done this exact thing enough to know that of course it suffers. A lot more than you want to admit too. Even if you don't ever mix the 9-5 time with the freelance time, (Which FYI is nearly impossible in practice.) you just aren't going to be at your best when you show up the next day to work your 9-5 8-hour day after having worked a full day and moonlighted for another 4-6 hours afterward the day before. You're lying to yourself if that's what you think. And if you're working weekends, you're going to get burned out in a way that only punishes your 9-5 employer for not giving you a higher workload. People get fired all the time when their weekend or after work binge drinking interferes with their work the next day, why should spending your discretionary time burning yourself out be any different? Human beings can only do one thing in any moment. Worse, this truth has some applicability over longer time scales as well. Human beings require substantial periods of recovery in order to perform optimally. Often, what you do during that recovery has dramatic implications on how well you're going to do when you get back at it. (Ever solve a difficult programming problem only after taking a break? You won't get those same eureka moments if on your breaks your loading entirely new problems into your brain all the time.) You do the math. I work design/construction/commissioning engineering industrial machinery and plant, including automation/controls software. On site standard days are 12 hours, crunch time 14's become normal. Depending on project this might be month on month off, 5 days on 2 days off, 8 + 6 days, sometimes every day 3 months straight, or more. You do get used to it and can be overall productive for the hours - usually company is paying (big) by the hour so they wouldn't be paying if they are not getting. Not everyone can do it, or wants to, but different people have different capabilities. I've been doing it for decades. Yea if the performance is under expectation then it is not good. If the employee is meeting expectations or exceeding expectations then it is ok? > Human beings can only do one thing in any moment. But not all things are equal. Some might be less than "one", and not require a full 8-hours. Sounds like he never did the zoom meetings :D because by definition you're being paid for your time. I've never seen a non-contract tech position scoped as "here's an exhaustive set of responsibilities; you'll be paid 40 hrs/week to accomplish them but if you finish early the time is yours". According to your profile you're a new EM; can you honestly say there's a point in your day when the job is done-done and you can jump over to your other job? Depends on the manager and the type of work. When younger I was working as a part of junior admin team for big ISP. Every day we'd all get the roughly same amount of maintenance tasks to do - but since, unlike other guys, I was into programming I automated a lot of it (and probably was a little faster and more focused in general) - so I'd finish it in about a half of the time they needed. Now I was quite clear that I will not do more work than others unless I get paid more, and the manager wanted to keep me, but because of bureaucracy and syndicate I couldn't get the raise. So we stroke an internal deal that once I clear my tasks I'm free to do whatever I want with my time, as long as others don't know about it. Now, I wish I could say I did something smart with that time, but it was a long time ago, so I mostly spent that time playing Starcraft or chatting on IRC :) Then the people who coast should be fired? The ones who only have 1 job but spend some hours at the company recreation room and less than 40 hours on work should also be fired? Not doing this myself, but I've worked a couple of contracts over the past few years where the workload and expected outputs were so small that they could easily have been handled as a second job alongside a more regular job with regular workloads. Think 1 hours work a day. In both cases I resigned the job out of boredom, but I could easily have kept them on and worked a full second job with no one noticing. You should check out r/overemployed New account not to dox myself here. I'm doing it. I very recently took on a second full time job. I work as a Release Engineer for both. It hasn't been too bad so far. The biggest thing is managing your calendars to avoid conflicts. Do you often get into sitcom-like situations where you are in two different meetings at once and have to make sure you avoid any unmute mishaps? I'm specifically thinking a case where you have to respond in a way that would make sense to both calls at once. In would love to see the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza tries this. Perhaps it exists? I don't think George Costanza ever had two jobs at the same time. He did have two girlfriends at the same time once. He found it exhausting, so arranged for both of them to meet in the same place(Monks), in order to sabotage the relationship(s). Neither of them were willing to break up with him. I'm still pretty new to it. But that hasn't happened yet Do you have an email address or a contact method? It can be a new email address. Did it legitimately over the pandemic because I'm a solo consultant/contractor and don't have exclusivity clauses so I manage multiple clients, however, it has come up in interviews when they look at dates because I put them all on my CV. Key observations to share are: - the more different the jobs are, the more managable they are, as the complete context switch is as good as a break. It's not task context switching which is costly, it's role switching, which can be uplifting because there is a "you" in between the roles that is separate from each of them. Most highly successful people have intense hobbies for the same reason. - Lying destroys your mental health. You don't need to lie if you set and relate with clear personal and professional boundaries. It's a kind of moral identity you have to set. Lying is weak, and indicates you've made some upstream errors that you just don't make when you are a pro. I asked a mentor for advice about something once and he said, "I don't get into the kinds of situations where this is even a question." If you are lying, for your own sake, stop. - Stress really only comes from failing (nobody gets tired of winning, maybe just bored), so having another source of success improves your attitude and that pays off on both gigs massively. Success gives you a refreshing vibe to be around, and most jobs don't provide enough of it, so bringing exogenous success to relationships and work is huge. - Working as a consultant in large institutions, there are employees and managers who make sabotaging and undermining consultants a kind of sport, so you need the durable skills for handling those people, as if you are doing multiple jobs, your biggest risk comes from people who won't respect your boundaries. That's a general life lesson as well. - Realistically, nobody questions anything if you are succeeding, so if someone gets "suspicious," it's really that you aren't delivering value for them and it's time to improve or move on anyway. - Have a plan to invest the increased revenue and don't spend it. You are giving up so much of your life to do the extra work, blowing it on representative and symbolic pleasures is just remedial, and becoming enslaved to the hedonic treadmill is a recipe for burnout. There is no there there. Luxury mainly makes up for impostor syndrome and blowing money satisfies a self destructive urge. If you wouldn't buy it if nobody else could see it, don't buy it. - Have a plan to outsource or compensate for all the personal balls you are going to drop like new relationships, home and vehicle maintenance, accounting, gym time (get a home gym), nutrition, pet care. If you can do a master's degree while working, you can do a second job, and people with families manage, but if you don't have commitment and buy in from your partner, consider that the additional revenue is just going to become a bigger support obligation when you destroy your marriage making it, so take care. Agree with telling the truth. How did you tell full-time employers who interview you that you have clients on the side? Do you just tell them the truth that it is none of their business? In interviews I just tell the truth, which is that I'm a consultant, I usually have more than a single client, as otherwise it puts them at risk of me being classed as an employee. My observations were from how to manage multiple clients together using the extra time from remote work, as the experience is close. The actual mechanics of the moonlighting employee part sounds like a lot of grey to me, but it was common even before covid and I saw it a lot in unionized environments. Typical calls I'd overhear would be people running charities, managing other consultants on other gigs, doing side of the desk startups, etc. It seems pretty normal. I could never. If you make enough money at one job working remote then there’s no need. If you don’t make enough then use your spare time beefing up your portfolio and applying to crazy-high paying jobs. Eventually you’ll land one. For me, working two jobs adds a level of secrecy that’d be difficult for me to maintain long term. Also could be hard to do simple things like take PTO. I am so confused with comments in this threads. Since when did tech employees became so submissive and scared? As far as I know, having 2 jobs is not illegal, not unethical. Many, sadly, low income families have to work two or more jobs. We in tech make enough but what if you are bored and need more challenges. My current second job is family but I know multiple single engineers (or in one case, with grown up kids) with 2 jobs. They work 16+ hours each day but with pandemic there was nothing else to do, so might as well do more work. At least, one guy is pretty open about it with both of his employers. Others hide it but they get the work done. Also you can list 2 jobs on your resume. When I started my career, I didn't had very high paying tech job, I did freelance work on the side and listed on my resume. Never been problem. Your company doesn't own you. Having 2 jobs isn't inherently illegal. But pretty much every single full-time employment contract for an SWE that I've seen, stipulated that I am not allowed to have any other full-time job for the period of my employment. To add an opposing anecdote, after 30 years in the biz I've never seen this. Not once. In both of the contracts I had signed so far, there was an exclusivity clause saying that I would only work (as a software engineer) for the company I was signing with. Legal or not, if you tell your manager that you are also working for another company half the time (unless you work odd hours), will they be OK? If so then good. If not then it's a matter of transparency and trust. Also doesn't the contract has something about the number of hours? It may not be enforceable, but it's on paper. Do you tell your employer you are looking for a new job? I do not tell my employer everything, that is a scenario to demonstrate that you doing a second job violates basic trust, or even the contract. That is different than you looking for a new job, which should always be at the back of any manager's mind. Who cares about this “basic trust”? Except the employer, obviously. Not exactly a balanced power dynamic there. when you are hired they tell you exactly the basis on which you are hired, either to sit in an office/in front on slack at specific hours (FTE) or outcome-based (freelancing or FTE on flex terms). It's totally cool that we as professionals discuss our commitment and get a flexible working arrangement. It's not cool to say you will be available to respond to incidents and what not and then not do that. Most people do not need to be available to respond to incidents. Don't care. As long as I can do the job they pay me to do, that should be their only concern. great, then go on social media and bad mouth your employer and see if HR bats an eye, they should be only concerned about your output right. Yes, they should be. It is not their concern what I do on social media. It is unfortunate that there is so much power imbalance that most employees are afraid to criticize their employers in public. It is real Maybe in only some states? Why would it vary by state, if it isn't a legal requirement in any of them. It is purely on the employer's end, and I cannot find a legal restriction against it in any state. So it would only vary by employer. For SWE or other programming/code related positions I can see that making sense. You may only write 30 minutes of code in a day but the other 7.5 hours is spent either cogitating over the problem and creating the environment that allows you to solve the problem or participating in your team to make sure everyone is on the same page. You split that 8 hours between 2 companies and unless you are significantly under-employed at both jobs (2X in both locations or more) you're not going to be able to give your all. That's the problem, isn't it? You don't have to give it your all. You have to give it your enough. Or you spend 7.5 hours x2 on creating good environments that can be used in both companies and so each company gets 7.5 hours of free benefit > you're not going to be able to give your all. Why would you want to? You’re only working for money. There's a lot of crab mentality in tech. agreed Working a side job is typically not allowed for most full-time employees, at least not without permission. My current Fortune 500 tech company's contract explicitly said that if I moonlight, I cannot work for their competitors. And if I get a second job or contract work, I should discuss it with my manager or HR. It does't say anywhere that I cannot have second job at all. I know 2 SWE in the company who actually discussed this with their managers and got okay in writing for their consulting businesses. EDIT: Really curious if SWE actually read their contracts or they just assume that they are not allowed. I don't remember my contracts from earlier jobs. It would be interesting if we can have a site like levels.fyi for contracts. I moonlighted for a while, and I checked my primary job's employment agreement first. All it said is that I can't be simultaneously engaged by competitors. No requirement to inform my manager or the company. Lots of people in my company have side businesses (some rebuild and sell laboratory instrumentation, others contract, etc). I was surprised when I discovered the permissive nature of my company, but I've never seen it be a problem for anybody. There's probably something in the business rules about conflict of interest and how strictly that's defined/interpreted with respect to side gigs will probably depend on the employer. I doubt many explicitly say you can't have a second full-time job similar to what you do here because, well, that's obvious isn't it? At the same time, so long as you get your work done, most companies aren't going to object to your (mostly) nights and weekends hobby business or getting a degree (assuming you've worked out the details with your management). That's how mine is as well. Ditto - mines the same. Basically, no working for competitors. Does that stipulation that they write into the contract have teeth though? A lot of companies put a lot of stuff into contracts, it doesn't make it enforcable. The contract may not have teeth, the employer doesn’t own 24 hours of an employee’s time and has no legal basis to dictate what an employee does outside of the workplace. However, in the US “at-will” employment is the norm, which means either party can terminate the employment at any time for any reason, or no reason. If the employer finds out an employee is moonlighting or freelancing in their spare time they can simply fire the person, and cite violation of policy or give almost any reason that isn’t illegal. The contract would only matter if the case got into court, and that’s unlikely to happen since the employee has no right to a job in the first place. I have a friend who took two in office sysadmin jobs and automated them enough that he never had to come in and was able to basically do nothing except work on cars and play video games and hang out for like 5 years. I'm still proud of him to this day. IT department or just a one person sysadmin role. They were both online companies with fairly small teams. He was the sole IT administrator managing the networking on bare metal infra. He did a good job and would respond to emails, calls, or texts, but essentially when he was let go from both organizations (nearly at the same time) it was because they realized they had long ago outgrown the need for a classic sysadmin and mostly their services were starting to migrate to AWS as that was kind of the new thing happening. You don't see the problem in working 16+ hours a day considering the average person needs 8 hours of sleep and needs to ingest food? I don't believe there are many devs in the us working a full 8 hour day. I have children and they take up as much or more bandwidth than a second job would. I totally believe someone could work 2 dev jobs at once. You could. You just couldn't while having a healthy amount of sleep or a life beside work. And unless the person is on drugs, I just don't believe they are actually productive 16 hours a day. Most software engineers don’t work fully productive 8 hours a day. In my experience I’d say maybe 2-4 You don’t need to be productive for 8 hours a day in order to collect a paycheck. Often not for even a single hour. No problem IMHO if they are a consenting adult.
I wouldn't object any more than if someone wanted to run an ultramarathon or raise 5 kids. Not for me, but your desires may different I would not say that "we in tech make enough". with the crazy high cost of housing, health care, education, and more, it's no longer clear that people in tech make enough. people in the baby boomer generation could say that with much more confidence than our generation can. Imagine someone making over 200K complaining about CoL when the median income in the US is 36K... Astonishing lack of self awareness if you want to experience lack of self awareness, go talk to some lawyers charging $800/hr If the client is a Corporation that might be totally appropriate. If that lawyer then goes on to say how expensive his Latte has gotten then you might have an argument. do you think that lawyers make 200k per year? The vast majority make less than that. At large law firms 1st year law school grads routinely make that. A lawyer billing 800/hr might bill 2000 hours in a year for over 1M per year. Not sure you have a point? I'm interested in the answers here. I'm considering doing this given that my current role is pretty laid back. Not an answer to the question, but pertinent. I'm hiring and I recently extended an offer to someone and that person responded by saying it wasn't enough money. Our HR department and I went through all the different salary surveys and we determined our offer was fair. The person countered by saying That was the amount of money that they needed. I said okay please submit a consulting contract. They submitted a consulting contract with someone else's name on it. I called them and they said "oh yeah, you caught me, I was trying to bill two different companies for full time." Not hired. Seems like a recipe for burnout to me. But I burn myself out just doing one job anyway. Because for some reason if I’ve not out-delivered everyone else by an order of magnitude then I’m not satisfied No chance. I guess maybe contractors might get away with it in some circumstances but I don't see how it works in conventional FT agile teams with regular ceremonies, meetings, etc. Plus I value my free time, which I know is weird. If you're two-timing on clients / employers (that is, plainly working two FT jobs at once) -- you can't expect that to end well. If you're working > 50 hours a week (or whatever your personal limit is) for more than 1-2 months -- that won't end well for your health or business relationships, either. That's the score, basically. You're presenting opinions as if they are absolute facts above questioning. If you have a full-time job and you only need to do ~20 hours a week of work to complete all your deliverables, you could absolutely get another full-time job and have it go fine. No, it won't "go fine". You'll be lying to both of your employers. That's not "fine" and it can't possibly end well for anyone. How do you know anyone lied? If you have two fully remote jobs, and the workload for each one is ~20-25 hours a week, and the times don't overlap... I was trying to get you to actually provide reasoning, or evidence, or even "I acknowledge it's my opinion but I feel this way because __________" but here we are with more "I'm right, you're wrong, you're dumb if you disagree." Please try again because this is a point I'd love to actually discuss rather than just having you talk past me. Do either of your employers know that (1) you're working for another employer and (2) are actually working 20-25 hours a week when the terms of employment clearly state otherwise (as is almost universally the case with "full-time" employment in the U.S. and just about anywhere else)? Are you required to tell your employer if you're moonlighting or doing other paid work? I'm not. Does your employment contract (or the closest thing you have if you work in the US) specify 40 hours a week? Mine doesn't. It says I need to be available during "core hours" which amount to about 17.5 hours a week. It also takes about half a page to basically say "you have to get your assigned work done on time or you may face disciplinary action." If you're available during core hours only, and your stuff gets done, you've fulfilled your end of the bargain. I've worked placed where you have to have your ass in a seat 42.5 hours a week minus lunch. You can't work there and have another FT job, it's not tenable even for a week or two. But I know a lot of people who either have a FT job and a long-term/large contract position, or two FT W2 jobs simultaneously for months or longer. Your overly broad "[nearly] universal case" doesn't match the vast majority of the job descriptions I've seen when I was job searching earlier this year. Software development jobs are increasingly remote, and a small subset of those are increasingly asynchronous where they don't care where you are or when you work so long as you get your tasks completed. Are you required to tell your employer if you're moonlighting or doing other paid work? I'm not. Actually it's quite common for employment (and even consulting) agreements to have language specifying that you do exactly that -- "devote your full working hours and attention" to their duties for the Company. As well as clauses specifically prohibiting moonlighting (or at least requiring you to declare any such outside relations in writing), That is: to specifically prevent people from doing what you're doing. Then do they fire people who only have 1 job but are coasting? That's a different topic, of course. My F500 gig specifically allows outside work as long as its not for a competitor...Why would you assume everyone is lying? Wouldn't it make more sense that some of us just have different (full time) employment contracts ? If it's a "gig" based on deliverables (rather than hours) that's another matter, of course. But we were speaking of full-time employment in the usual sense. Including the usual sense of "full-time". sorry - I put this "have different (full time) employment contracts" in my comment to try and make that point clear.. Its full-time employment, salaried. Also, salaried generally means you get paid the same amount regardless of hours worked, which is another thing people seem to overlook. Anyway, as others have already commented better then I - many big/well known companies do not have issue with moonlighting. Also, salaried generally means you get paid the same amount regardless of hours worked, which is another thing people seem to overlook. Except the spirit of that agreement to not worry about the variance of working, say, 35 hours one week, 45 the next. They still quite definitely expect you to work an average of about 40 hours -- and usually provide language in the employment/consulting stating exactly that. In fact, if your agreement mentions the phrase "full-time" it is universally understood to mean exactly that. Many big/well known companies do not have issue with moonlighting. Even when outside employment/consulting is allowed (1) the vast majority expect you to inform them of such arrangements and (2) they do not expect you to shorten your commitments of time + focus to the role they are providing you a ... full-time salary and benefits for. yes - and you assume everyone is lying about it, instead of just telling their manager? and many do not shorten their time..and others work for companies that don't care as long as the work is done. I stand by my point - there's no reason to assume everyone is 'cheating'... That point is valid - obviously not everyone is lying. And if all of hour employers/clients are aware of what's going on, then obviously no harm is done. But people are probably lying (to at least one of their employers), and there seems to be a blasé attitude about it going around: "If I get my work (or a half-ass version of it) done in 20 hours and nobody seems to notice -- why not just try and get away with whatever I can get away with?" In so many words. As long as someone's getting their work done, nobody will notice. People have their own problems to worry about. In that respect, it is "fine." Everyone is getting what they paid for: results. Your score isn't my score. My F/T job at a FAANG adds up to about 10 hrs/week at most.. sometimes 15 hrs due to extra meetings. Could easily fit in another job, but would rather sit in the sun and read a book. It's not that you can't (logistically) fit another job in. Just that if you were to - it wouldn't end well. And would be like, you know, dishonest and unethical and all that stuff. Am with you on the reading a book in the sun part, though. It's good to have that data point as to what people really do with their time out in FAANG-land. How do you fit 40 hours of work into 10 hours? Do you have an email address or a contact method? lots of people work far more than 50 hrs/week on a regular basis, this is not a huge deal if that's your jam. If you're working multiple salaried positions, or double-billing your time, that's a different story. Of course a lot of people do -- but at a cost to productivity (per hour) and as said, their health and and relationships. There's lots and lots and lots of research about this, actually. Having a kid is a 2nd job. There is a cost to productivity per hour too and affects their health. Would you fire them? No. Because they're infinitely more important and valuable and interesting than any day job you can possibly think of. All of this industry's propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding. Even multiple salaried positions might be fine depending on the specifics of each one. Having a kid is a 2nd job than makes it > 50 hours. Would you fire them? a while ago i juggled 2 contracting gigs. they each paid X per hour which is a quarter to half of what you need as a full time self employed person in CA. employees in companies hiring contractors do not understand the math of self employment and thus expect unrealisticly low hourly rates. so we end up with this situation. i found that the max hourly rate for software development in general is about double of western europe. however, the cost of living there is a quarter of what it is in CA. TL;DR companies in CA in general are unaware of the enormous cost of living in CA partly driven by FAANGs. so anyone not working in FAANG ends up juggling multiple jobs. sort of like baristas but not yet as bad. I'm on both sides of this. I've started 2x companies at the same time (one where I work 9-6 and the other which I work around 6-12 and all weekend) so I'm literally working all the time. Initially it made me struggle in my 9-6 because typically when I don't understand something, I'd spend my outside hours reading into things or do some extra work to finish up... but now I appear as a standard developer instead of a 10x and it's frustrating as hell. The side project one has become vastly more successful and lucrative than my 9-6 and it's starting to creep into that time as well, with many employees asking me for information throughout the day and asking me to quickly help with things. I've told my 9-6 that I need to quit because it doesn't make sense but don't want to suddenly leave and harm the perspective value of the company. Both places know the other exists and I've really tried to keep them separate but it was easier when I was working in a vastly different timezone because I could juggle them both easier (get lots of valuable work done whilst nobody is online and feel like the day is already achieved). Now the other side of it which really pisses me off massively, is that for the side-job I've had to build a front/backend team to deliver things and it's fairly big now but it's 100% remote and we have no office (even before COVID). Some people that you hire are rockstars, others are just ok and then there's the guys who scheduling issues for meetings, suddenly become more active for a week when you notice they're not doing anything, push almost nothing. I wasn't aware of r/overemployed but it's been clear to me that this is a common scam for a long time. People start off great and then they suddenly stop delivering, which was making me start to really hate this remote stuff. We've applied a few things systematically to try and prevent the overemployed scam:
- Daily geekbot standup reports of what you did yesterday, today and what's blocking you - Detailed weekly geekbot standup reports of what you managed to achieve during the week and what you're still working on (the people who stand out are the ones who are continuously working on the same items each week. The "detailed" is the part that really shown us the cockroaches hiding in the woodwork) - Each release has commit log with the author next to each (it shows who is delivering) - Enforced daily pushes - even if you're not yet complete with your work, you should be committing every day, so if we need to investigate, we can see what you're actually doing on a daily basis. We had people who would only push chunks every couple of days or every week and it was hard work reading through it, to see if it looked meaty enough. - HR Slack channel with automated leave calendar notifications, so you can see who's booked off for the day, with requests being approved by HR (everyone knows who is around for the day) and also if you need to disappear for an hour or two, you can write it, so everything is more transparent and people can be honest about being AFK. We have a project manager, who we thought would keep tabs on the velocity of each developer and catch out who wasn't delivering much, but it really didn't help and it took management to notice something was wrong with various people. We've got stricter over time. At first we were getting abused due to lack of time and process and it was mega depressing having so many people and not seeing things progress with the product and feeling like you were being scammed but now due to the process it's not that bad IMO. I can't wait to quit my 9-6 so that I'm able to be more hands on with the other and not have to work around the clock. Most of my work in the side job is trying to improve processes, unblock people and code in things to reduce the reliance on me so things are smoother. > - Enforced daily pushes - even if you're not yet complete with your work, you should be committing every day, so if we need to investigate, we can see what you're actually doing on a daily basis. We had people who would only push chunks every couple of days or every week and it was hard work reading through it, to see if it looked meaty enough. I work one job and this scares me. An issue can take more than 3 hours, and I might spend parts of my day investigating, filing new issues that come up from the investigation, writing supporting documentation or cleaning up the backlog. I otherwise sympathize with your plight, but requiring daily commits seems like it would lead to a lot of half-baked commits and team members who are annoyed by having to push work they're not really finished with yet. Are you able to hire/retain employees with this? I have no desire to work multiple jobs and I’d still be out of there immediately. Ultimately software engineering is a seller’s market so I would tread carefully, if there are other places that either pay better or aren’t as restrictive there’s no reason why anyone should stick around. You are ok with people having 2 jobs right and meeting expectations for both jobs? You are just not ok with people disappearing and not working at all right? What was the failed method that the project manager used for velocity? How did the management do better at noticing than the project manager velocity? i'm working remotely from EU but company thinks i'm still in US I didn’t think this would be possible for a EU citizen(?) Are you originally a US citizen and you moved to the EU? Yeah it very much looks like it would only be possible with tax fraud being involved. How do you handle taxes? Do you have an email address or a contact method? It can be a new email address. Elon Musk, probably. Lol, too many at the same time. Staying sane must be difficult for him.
- 1.2m cash
- 300k RSUs (probably worthless or I leave before 4 year vesting cliff)
- 200k equity (only one job is at a publicly traded company)
- <150k cash bonus