Here’s a cheap and easier trick: find two easy remote jobs each paying $125k. There’s your $250k a year. You don’t need any particularly distinguished resume.
With the right job responsibilities, this is doable for a software engineer. If you can offset the two jobs a bit by time zone it’s even better.
But you better hurry, once people catch on that this is possible the supply of developers can quickly increase overnight, leading to a fall in salaries from oversupply.
I recently fired an engineer who was working 3 full time jobs all paying $130k+.
He ended up getting busted by all 3 companies at once, and all 3 fired him.
Hopefully he can find a new job that doesn’t check references. If you care about your reputation, or if you have the slightest moral compass, don’t do this.
Three jobs is definitely pushing past what's realistic. 120 of 168 available hours in a week, hah!
But, the sort of industry pearl-clutching about holding 2 jobs is interesting, when employers think nothing of making you work extra hours without comp, or be "on call" without comp, intellectual property clauses for stuff done on personal time, non-compete clauses, etc.
I 100% disagree. You are allowed to maintain multiple full-time jobs in the United States unless you have entered into a contract that says otherwise.
My father worked two full-time jobs to raise my siblings and his reputation and moral compass is just fine. Many middle class families do it for survival.
Did your father work both jobs at the same time? I m sure answer is No. GP is talking abput a remote dev who was fooling 3 companies. A full time job means you are available for that company at that time. Not concurrently.
Ok . When you get a full time tech/dev job next time, try asking the employer if you can work for another company concurrently. I am talking full time W2 jobs with benefits not contracting or freelancing.
The post I replied to projected that (for some reason) into being a bad idea because of some story deceptive, poor-performing, contracting violating, three concurrent jobs.
I stand by my statement. It is not wrong to work two jobs. That was the original claim despite what this other guy wanted to make it about.
I'm "this other guy" you reference above. For what it's worth, even if he were working only 2 jobs rather than 3, that would have still broken our ability to trust him with any meaningful work. From an HR perspective, if someone lies about having a 2nd job, what else are the capable of lying about?
> It is not wrong to work two jobs.
2 jobs vs. 3 jobs doesn't make much of a difference. It is wrong to work 2 jobs if you explicitly tell each company that you are their sole employer.
The thing I don't understand is if someone really wants to work 2 or 3 jobs... why not do it by looking for 1099 contract work rather than chasing W2 roles?
Yeah, I am not doubting you did the right job firing this guy. But you brought the wrong anecdote to this debate.
The original idea was about a 2nd job. Thats all. You are saying that shows bad reputation and moral compass and then trying to shoe horn in the idea that people with multiple jobs are liars and poor performers.
Have you ever had to work two jobs? As someone that did and whose parents also did, I dont equate it with the worst in people. You do. I think that says something about the classes we each grew up in.
Were you and your parents working 2 jobs on non-conflicting schedules?
I think is perfectly acceptable to work 6-2pm and 2pm-8pm for 2 employers.
But I don’t think it’s ethical to work 2 jobs where the hours are overlapping not on a staggered schedule.
> Have you ever had to work two jobs
Yes, when starting my startup. I woke up at 5am, worked until 9am on my startup, went to my day job and worked a full 8 hours, then came home and worked 6-10pm on the startup. After a couple weeks doing this, I let the CEO of my day job know, and requested they sign a contract saying anything I develop outside of regular business hours is owned by me and not my day job. They approved and signed the agreement. I left to build the startup full time 9 months later.
The key here is just being honest and transparent. You can work 2 jobs, that alone isn’t the problem, the problem is working 2 jobs and going to great lengths hiding it from your employers, calling out sick for fake doctor appointments, fabricating stories as to why you aren’t getting your work done, claiming you have fake medical conditions that prevent you from joining meetings.
The sad part is a few bad apples will ruin it for the rest of us. Remote is easy to abuse. The more it’s abused, the less likely companies are to continue embracing WFH post-COVID. The more it’s abused, the more companies will be compelled to do things like install remote monitoring software, etc.
> the classes we each grew up in
Not that it’s relevant, but I grew up with parents who wouldn’t even pay for a $25/mo gym membership, and told me to go find a job. Same with buying my first car as a teenager and paying gas/insurance. Thank god I dropped out of private college after 3 semesters, all of my loans were in my name, no help from the parents.
This is a great story. So when the original poster suggested working 2 jobs, you didn't tell the story about how you worked two jobs to build your own business and how it is a great idea that brought you success, you instead told the story about how you fired a guy that worked two+ jobs.
I guess that blows my mind, you have a great origin story. It seems we agree on more than I realize, we just assumed very different things.
Congrats on all the success you have had with starting your own business and the hard work it took to make it.
You've helped me to reflect on my own biases with your posts and replies.
> you worked two jobs to build your own business and how it is a great idea that brought you success, you instead told the story about how you fired a guy that worked two+ jobs
The take away that I’m trying to communicate (and clearly not doing a good job at) is pretty simple: have integrity, be honest, and act ethically.
Avoid exploiting, lying, and misleading.
If your employer is cool with you working multiple jobs and you’re honest about it with everyone involved, by all means, go for it!
Just my opinion. Pretty simple. I’m just advocating for people to act ethically.
I mean just read this blog post on Overemployed, having been on the other end of that as an employer, it’s infuriating seeing people jeopardizing their whole career and reputation for a few extra bucks: https://overemployed.com/overemployed-journal-week-2-elhapo8...
But you used your father as an example and my question is if your father worked for both at the same time. That matters a lot. Your comparison is not appropriate because there is a huge difference between working a job and then working another job at a totally shift/time than working 2 remote jobs concurrently where you are supposed to be available for both.
My comparison is comparable because all the original post said was to work 2 jobs. This other post comes in and tries to equate working two jobs with contract violation.
No - my dad worked one job during the day and the other at night. Why would you by default assume the worst in people? The original post was always about two jobs. Most people that work two jobs do so legally and ethically.
What on Earth are you all on about adding all these extra conditions to prove the original poster wrong. He never said - get two jobs, work them at the same, make sure this violates your contract, do a poor job, and lie about it.
You all trying to poison the water of this topic by equating it to something else entirely.
If I’m working multiple jobs yet still finishing my work and probably even doing better than some of the employees working for the company exclusively, I doubt you would be so quick to fire me.
It’s no ones fucking business how many jobs I work. Focus on results. This is the remote work equivalent of on-site managers who want to see asses in chairs.
I disagree with this wholeheartedly. If you are constantly doing the work of multiple devs, you get zero reward in this industry.
Instead, put that extra focus into side work and side projects. If you’re good enough you can even be honest with people. When taking on a contract you can say “I have another commitment and will be working between X and X on X days for you” as long as you get all the work done for your primary job it’s not immoral.
His output was horrendous. I would have fired him anyway based just on that, but discovering he had multiple jobs expedited the firing (and clearly explained why his output was so poor).
I’m curious how you found out he had multiple jobs? I agree 100% that someone should get fired if they aren’t doing the work. But it is typically illegal to fire someone just for moonlighting unless it is in their contract.
If I found out about it, yes, he'd be gone immediately even if he were our #1 engineer.
It's impossible to trust someone with AWS production keys and access to customer data when they lie to you about something as simple as who they work for. People secretly working multiple jobs are looking for an easy way to make a lot of money. If it's within their ability to secretly work 2 jobs, is it also in their ability to download proprietary company info and sell it to a competitor?
But there's no legal issue with working multiple jobs in the US.
Most employment agreements pay for 40 hours per week.
What employees do with the rest of their time is none of the employer's business.
They could be spending all that time driving an Uber, developing an open-source project, do contract/consultant work for a friend's startup, or just play video games.
As long as the work is getting done, the employer has no recourse unless it gets outright stipulated in the actual contract.
Your conflating of "working two software engineering jobs" and "stealing company data and selling it" doesn't make logical sense.
Working multiple jobs is not an easy way to make a lot of money. It takes time and effort.
Measuring employee productivity over "hours in chair" is the way to go.
It doesn’t matter what’s legal, it matters what the company you work for thinks. Anything else is over analyzing the situation.
The bottom line is working for two companies full time concurrently is abnormal and it’s not a stretch to imagine you’re not getting 100% of your employee while they juggle two jobs.
I’d also fire the report if I discovered them working two jobs.
Well as long as their other work is never directly competing with the company, and the employee is always getting their work done, I don't see an issue with employees doing side-hustles.
Whether that's developing open-source projects, running a YouTube channel or working 40 hours a week for another team.
If they are competing with the company or not getting a reasonable amount of work consistently done, then that would be an issue.
obviously they lied about their time commitment in working hours, and it's not about the number of hours, it's about honesty and their lack of commitment as promised.
This. I can't trust an engineer with our production AWS keys when they aren't honest about who they work for. (managing AWS infrastructure was part of his job description, and you need to be trustworthy to have AWS level access to customer data)
Usually in the fine print of signing on to become a full time employee, there are clauses to ensure you are not working for anyone else unless approved by company.
How did you find him out? Just curious since if someone was that determined they would probably go to extra lengths (i.e. different physical computers per job, etc) to conceal it.
1. He took his LinkedIn down after being hired. You can't have a LinkedIn when you have 3 jobs.
2. His output was horrible. He was an obviously a good senior level developer. But it would take him a week to do something a -junior- engineer couple do in 2 days.
3. Lots of strange and unexpected absences.
4. On a number of occasions I asked how he solved a problem at a prior company, and he spoke about the company in present tense rather than past tense. (A slip up on his part)
There were people a few other signs that were more subtle than the ones above... but ultimately I became suspicious about how such a good engineer's output was so bad, and had a theory he had multiple jobs. So I simply emailed his prior employer to make sure they were aware that he had resigned to work for our company. The CEO of his prior company (where he had been for 5+ years) was shocked to find out he worked for us.
The 3rd company he found through YC Work at a Startup, and through that uncovered he had been applying for a 3rd job and actually accepted an offer from one of them and had begun work.
There are whole blogs dedicated to how to pull this scam off (google it). But morals aside, I wouldn't recommend it simply because the stress of juggling remote meetings, standups, sprints between 3 companies is not easy.
And a reason why it's going to be hard to maintain that remote paradise developers are hoping.
Laws are generally not written for the average, decent person, but to stop the degenerates who would try to murder, destroy, etc, and wouldn't be punished otherwise.
People cheat on remote tests and interviews, for example.
The industry is full of engineers working 9-5 then going home and spending 4 hours on a side-hustle or open-source project (plus another 10 hours on Saturday/Sunday).
Those people can hold down two 40 hour a week software engineering positions. Timezone shifted, yes, but they can get their work done.
Note sure why this is getting down voted. Freelancers and contractors work multiple client jobs all the time. Low wage workers work multiple 'full time' jobs all the time. Are FT software engineers special?
FT in the software industry sets an expectation of full-time availability. Even if you have a light job that only takes a few hours a day, part of the reason we get away with that is knowing that if something blows up (Log4Shell being a perfect recent example), we are available to step up and spend the time needed to handle it. If you have 2 or 3 jobs, you do not have that availability.
This differs from low-wage jobs in other industries, where you are paid for your time on your shift, and then have zero expectations of your time outside of your assigned shifts.
Yes. If you want to work multiple jobs, that’s what contracting / consulting is for.
I don’t think you can compare engineers to a struggling single parent working 2 jobs at minimum wage. The former signs contracts saying they won’t work for other companies concurrently, the latter likely doesn’t.
If you want multiple jobs, simply work as a 1099 contractor. It’s that simple.
This strikes me as nonsense. There seems to be an uncritical acceptance of a definition of FT software engineering responsibilities here.
As an exempt, salaried employee you are being paid for work, not time. If you can manage to do the work for two employers then they have no cause to complain and you've earned your pay.
If you fail to do the assigned work or are unavailable for sync meetings (probably the hardest part of this arrangement) then they can fire you.
Any parent who is also a FT software engineer has two full time jobs, they just don't get paid for one of them. Cultural inertia around what you 'owe' your employer is not to the benefit of employees.
In this situation, where there are plenty of low level jobs that pay $125k that require 4 hours or less of actual coding time per day, working two of those jobs seems like a totally viable option. As others have pointed out you have to avoid employers that try to prevent you from working more than one job, but there are plenty of those (personal experience) so this, again, seems like a pretty good option.
Don't those workers working multiple 'full time' jobs usually have temp contracts paid by hour or service?
I haven't seen a full-time contract that would allow me to take other such commitments from other companies. Whereas when I was a freelancer I had to demonstrate that I have at least 3 roughly equal sized clients to be legally recognized as such.
Many (most?) work contracts mention that you can't just take another job without at least informing and asking permission from your current employer, who would most likely say no, especially if it's another software engineering job.
This is actually great advice, though Im very bad at shitty work, i need hyperfocus and challenging task to feel good about the job :(
But I wonder if there are companies who understand that 250k developer is not even close to 2 125k developers, but can be much much more valuable asset with proper management.
Everyone has their unique value to a company. That could range from large expertise with certain libraries/type of problems to deep knowledge of an industry or even your network (more applicable to sales/leadership). Not all developers do the same exact job and I think we can universally agree that some work performed is more valuable to a company than others.
100% agree. All I’m saying is that to get double the salary from someone not obligated to pay it would mean that you’d need to be able to convincingly answer that question first.
It’s going to be a massive elephant in the room before the topic of money is even raised.
With the right job responsibilities, this is doable for a software engineer. If you can offset the two jobs a bit by time zone it’s even better.
But you better hurry, once people catch on that this is possible the supply of developers can quickly increase overnight, leading to a fall in salaries from oversupply.