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 |
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 |
You can request your own data here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/
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...
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.
FWIW I'm not doing this, I'm just on the /r/overemployed subreddit.
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.
As a non-US person this is the most ridiculous reason to inherent anything.
Or he only lists the J2 from which he hasn't been fired.
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.
* 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.
- 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)?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
- 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[1] Not legal advice. It could maybe be fraud depending on the details?
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.
not juggling multiple "jobs" but still juggling a lot. i thought perhaps my memory was/is deteriorating... perhaps this is the reason!?
Is that entirely a bad thing, though, considering this industry? Discussion ongoing.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It can be a new email address.
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.
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.
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.
Not hired.
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
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.
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.
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.
Do you have an email address or a contact method?
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.
Do you have an email address or a contact method?
It can be a new email address.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
Not for me, but your desires may different
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.
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 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Why would you want to? You’re only working for money.
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.
Would you fire them?
All of this industry's propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
I was surprised when I discovered the permissive nature of my company, but I've never seen it be a problem for anybody.
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).
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'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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for coming forward.
How did you make it to senior staff without leetcode? How many years YOE to get there?
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.
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.
If the employee is meeting expectations or exceeding expectations then it is ok?
But not all things are equal. Some might be less than "one", and not require a full 8-hours.
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 :)
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?
Please try again because this is a point I'd love to actually discuss rather than just having you talk past me.
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.
But we were speaking of full-time employment in the usual sense. Including the usual sense of "full-time".
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.
If I'm ever in a position where I need more than 500k/yr, it will be my problem, not somebody elses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is good to have a circle of non-public capable people.
Will be good if you can be contacted.
Also doesn't the contract has something about the number of hours? It may not be enforceable, but it's on paper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I stand by my point - there's no reason to assume everyone is 'cheating'...
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.
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.