1. They tend to work double jobs at frankly lower tier companies with lower standards and significantly lower pay. Because the companies are lower tier, they stagnate in their career growth because the company is not teaching them good skills. And you cannot put both jobs in your resume, only one on top of that, and this will show up in future background checks.
2. Because of double working, they are pretty much guaranteed to not get promoted beyond the standard terminal level.
3. They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income.
4. You cannot work at proper startups and learn a ton, because the workload would be way too high for this strategy.
Real example: One person I know has 2 $150k jobs for a total of $300k. If they joined as a jr engineer at a FANGMULA or equivalent, they would be making $300k, not be fucking stressed about the duplicity that is working 2 jobs, learn more because it's a better company and get promoed to sr engineer within a year or two and make $400-500k instead. If they have ambition, they can cross the leadership rubicon (either through becoming a staff engineer or manager) and make even more, reaching up to $700k-$1M eventually.
Maybe if your having a hard time breaking into startups or FANGMULA and your just starting out, this might be an ok strategy, but beyond that, it's not a good idea.
Yep, can confirm. Worked a company where a remote employee got a new job but didn't bother quitting. He put in just enough work to pretend to be making progress and gave a lot of excuses about why his project was delayed.
Eventually someone figured it out. Management was furious. Remote work restrictions were tightened and everyone suddenly had far more check-ins to ensure we were actually working every day.
I heard they also contacted the person's new job and filled them in on the double-work situation. That person was universally hated and I don't know anyone at the company who would give them a positive reference.
This is ultimately what will drive stochastic based device monitoring. How long was your laptop open? Which apps were foreground with a moderate amount of activity?
Remote work won't be ruined by this. In fact, it's perfect.
The premise is that the average person puts in 10x the effort for a 1% return on investment. You are an employee, sure, but are "investing" the company in terms of life-hours you could spend elsewhere. Naturally, you want to therefore minimize work and maximize salary. The ultimate situation being getting regular raises by doing 20-50% less than is expected to you.
If employers don't want this the solution is simple. It's not finding these people and firing them. It's paying people commensurate to their effort like a real meritocracy would.
If someone can hold 2 jobs working at 50% brain capacity then they are obviously very talented and quite crafty. You pay this person enough, they will dedicate 100% of their brain to your project. The employer side of the equation is JUST as exploitative as the employee side. It's just far, far, far more common for the employee to be exploited. For example, via pagerduty, poor hiring practices leading to overwork, or overtasking.
This is wonderful. Anyone who is truly a libertarian should be encouraging this. It's the perfect free market solution to exploitative labor. You dont get paid past 40 hours for your salary. Why should you reduce YOUR OWN worth to make a company's bottom line bigger? Unless you hold ITM options in the company the answer is you don't and shouldn't. You should be exploiting them at every turn.
Not to mention that working two jobs poorly is a lot more work and a lot less money than boostrapping a decent SaaS
EDIT: Pretty rich that I'm getting downvoted so much, despite multiple examples of successful SaaS creators showing up in the comments, and this being a forum started by a VC partly to promote and encourage tech startups. If you think that starting a tech business is so impossibly difficult that you're personally offended at the idea of someone recommending you do it, I'd say you should just go back to Reddit or Twitter.
If you're bristling at me calling SaaS "easy", I just meant it's easier than running a multi-year scam and probably committing fraud, depending on the details of your employment contracts.
This feels so wrong. I always understood this to mean a really good developer taking on two easy jobs, perhaps a senior developer taking two junior-mid roles that paid similarly to the senior role, so they can meet the expectation of the employer while only needing to work 10 hours a week. I thought it was cheeky but fair. To actually try and cheat employers out of wages by taking jobs and knowingly doing the minimum required to hopefully not get fired pisses me off to be honest.
Over employed examples I want to hear about is from people getting jobs in admin roles and automating themselves, or senior developers taking manual testing roles and finishing their work in an hour a week.
Not that I endorse this, but this seems the wrong way to do this. Take one job and do well at it. Get a reputation that you don't need to be managed. Work hard. Identify a niche for work that needs to be done but is currently underserved. Take over some of that niche while telling everyone how hard it is. In reality the niche takes 20 or fewer hours a week.
Get the second job lined up. Take some vacation from the first and come out the gate hard at the second job. Attempt to more or less repeat what you did.
If you can get yourself setup on the right little niches you could probably keep three or four jobs going. If you are just kind of jelly fishing along though eventually people will notice how all the other juniors in the same surface area out perform you. You want to be the person who went off, slew some dragons in a specific area, and we need to keep this person around to ensure the dragons don't repopulate.
I basically get promoted doing that. Of course I'm using my spare hours to go help other people in the org, build relationships, get noticed, etc. All while having an easily defended core area to handle. Just do that but collect other jobs instead of promotions.
This is basically how I did it. Max for me was three jobs. I started pre pandemic. I was thoroughly burned out after five years. Took a break before getting back in. I could retire, but keep working for healthcare and the lulz. (One job)
There are a lot orgs out there where if you can spell java, your golden.
Not that I particularly endorse this practice, either, but your way wouldn't work. You're missing the part where the reward for hard work is more hard work. You definitely can get promoted this way, but, you can't really use it to maintain a whole other job, IMO.
Encouraging people to take two full-time jobs by lying and cheating their way around is such a terrible advice even if you only look at it purely based on self-interests with no moral considerations.
Negotiate well when starting a new job (If you haven't find a new job and negotiate well). Do great work. Use the extra time to invest on yourself: read, exercise, learn new skills, etc. You'll be happier and more successful in the long run.
Good advice even for one job--whether remote or in-person. Why put in 30% more effort, when you are not getting paid 30% more. That's why stick to the average pace of your team.
The classic advice is for career advancement. For promotions and raises and for internal political capital to promote the projects you want, or the implementation you think best. Sure, if you just want to a be a cog in the machine, without broader responsibility (and the historically much higher compensation for that) then don't do more than the is necessary to ensure you remain employed.
But it probably is more lucrative to achieve some success, and then leverage that to the next thing (which might need to be a different company).
May ai suggest a different spin? Try to put 30% more effort, but into learning stuff for your own sake. This will make you a better engineer. As a side effect you may be more worth to the company you work for and/of get a better job somewhere else later.
I think it depends.
My current job is relaxed over hours - I'll checks emails at home, wander in mid-morning and leave when my works is done. Might be 5 if I get it done or have plans, or might be into the evening (quite pleasant/productive to work uninterrupted in a empty room).
I've got other colleagues who'll be logged in at 08:30 (so I believe) and leave on the dot of 17:00.
I think both approaches work for different people and for the company a mix gives them more flexibility without having to create a formal plan.
I think what the article was bringing up was that if you set expectations and are seen to conform to them, everybody is happy (or doesn't think about it).
If you're the person who's always there as the office opens and sticks around late - you may be noticed and get a pat on the back, but it's never going to compensate for the additional hours you put in. This might be fine if you have one job and a career - but if you're trying to hold down 2 jobs, those extra couple of hours each day are 50% of the effort of holding down that 2nd job. They're worth 50% of a whole new salary.
German work culture outside of startups is a bit more like this, get in on time, work hard, don’t fuck around all day, punch out after 8 hours and don’t socialise with colleagues outside of work. Obviously I’m generalising a lot and exaggerating but it was something I observed.
Love being on an old fashioned “clock”. I log my time by the minute and if I work 41 hours one week I work 39 the next week. Worst case I aggregate maybe 20-30 hours over a few busy weeks and then I use it to take a day or two off.
My theory is that you have 2 sets of 4 hours per day.
If you work 8 hours for the same employer then that is kind of 1x results for you.
If you do 4 hours work and 4 hours "networking" then that often becomes 2x results - at that one company. This is considered good career moves. It's what all these 300K job discussions revolve around.
You could do 4 hours and 4 hours slacking off. That's usually 1X as well. sometimes more !
You could do 4 hours work and 4 hours writing blog posts. That sometimes is 2-3x or more. Not often.
Finally you could do 4 hours at each of two companies. This seems 2x as well.
> In the 30-60 day window, you should set goals with your boss if that’s not already done. Drag out the newbie card and claim slow ramp-up time. Identify what absolutely needs to be done, communicate that as your goal, and meet them.
In my experience, this will already make you more valuable than most employees working at big companies
Finally! Someone who actually gets it! Truth be told, you can substitute "realistic" or "sustainable" with "low" and have a good guide to performing well at one remote job here.
Word of caution: don't over develop this habit as it will stay with you for the rest of your life and in all areas of your life. You think you're being clever and getting away with 2x more money, but in the end you're hurting yourself the most. If you pretend you are working, if you're not moving as fast as you can, you won't be sharpening your skills. You're in fact most likely not only sharpening your skills, but making them more dull. It's when we challenge ourselves that we grow.
Americans are finally catching up to Third World standards. It's pretty common to work two jobs and juggle between them, it's just that you used to be able to have a decent life with one revenue stream. It seems that after covid this will no longer be the case. ;)
I know younger joking, sort of, but an averagely talented and experienced engineer can easily support a family with one income now. This article is really about how to do some game theory stuff to maximize income and be “financially free”. Something working two jobs in the third world will never provide.
I genuinely don't get the point of 2 remote jobs. The tech wage scaling is absolutely bonkers right now and the value proposition of this system is not clear to me.
Assuming you only work 20 of your 40 hrs/week in each job, you are still working a fulltime job with 2x your salary. If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
Now work a couple of years in this job, and soon you'll be able to complete its responsibilities in 20ish hrs/week. Every job gets easier overtime in that sense.
> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job
Haha, at what company? I've met few people who've been able to work at a company long enough (and for the company to be successful enough) to double their salary. Apparently, it's much faster to just get two lower paying, easy jobs.
I know for a fact that at Meta (Facebook), even if you literally are a genius and were promoted twice in 2 years you wouldn't be doubling your total comp.
"If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job."
Between the two extremes (mediocre and rockstar/10x), there are many 'competent' people who can't get promoted to their 2x salary jobs. And these people are competent in a particular niche, not like those who aced programming olympiads, compiler gurus, kernel hackers, etc.
> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
I don't know the numbers but in my limited experience, in western Europe, this is just not possible (or very very rare among C level people if any, not mere engineers). A good senior salary (gross) is like 80K Euro/year. As a senior engineer working in Europe, you cannot expect reach 100K Euro easily. Now, thinking that you can go from 80K to 160K just by being an engineer that is "competent enough" is just plain naive. Not even the CTOs are making that around here.
Where are these mythical promos with 2x salary? I have never met someone who got one. Heck, where are the companies that even keep up with market rate for devs? Every company has short tenures now.
> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
I've found the opposite is true. If you are extremely competent at your job your manager is motivated to keep you in place because that's what you're good at. It's easier to promote lower-accomplishing people-pleasers because it won't affect _their_ software throughput as much (higher level engineers write less code).
> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
One of the benefits of this is that you don't have to be competent enough to sustain two jobs. There are people who do this and just swap their jobs every year or less. Another side benefit of that is that people have lower expectations for the new hire, and if you're perpetually a new hire...
I love that we are collectively acknowledging that we're all lazy as hell. First that askHN about lying about working and now the HN hug of death for this article
I have a younger relative, making a very very comfortable living, who has taken on the developing the software for a number of small companies as a solo dev, each pay him for features and a pretty decent (non software decent) annual wage for ongoing maintenance. He makes no secret that he has multiple clients, there's no duplicity, and he gets to have a flexible life where he travels when he wants and exercises a couple of hours a day. Every client he's ever picked up has kept him on. He's got the full skill set to be able to be sales negotiator, designer, tester, dev. It may be that many of us don't and are more valuable, and will be paid more, in a team that blurs our deficiencies.
disagree with the overcommunication. overcommunication means your boss has too much sense of where you are or where you are claiming to be. and more work will be tossed over to you. always accept new work and just drop 50% of it without further reporting on it.
otherwise, yeah I always set low expectations. On day 1, I show up late to orientation. always. It's worked great for me over a long career. (single jobs, not dual, although in school I always maintained 3-4 concurrent part time gigs)
website worked for me but the menu part didn't load correctly. it looks quite poor. too bad it's not intentional.
there's only 1 time of year when you perform. the 2 months before perf eval.
This is a litmus test. If your mentality is that you are paid for your time, not for your value, then I guess you will always carry guilt about working multiple jobs.
If however you feel zero guilt, it is because you have internalized your true self worth. It shows you understand the value you bring to a company and the value of a company having a fully onboarded developer hot and ready to go whenever a crisis happens. You are not merely an ass sitting in a chair.
Once you learn that your value as a developer has no relation to time and space, you can truly ascend to the next level of social class.
The page is inaccessible now, resource limit reached.
for any given hi-tech job these days, the employee agreement always states this is your sole job per contract and all your inventions belong to your employer too(not just the 40 hours per week), especially for full-time w-2 jobs. How could you have two in parallel? are we violating the hiring contract here?
Assuming two jobs have no conflict of interests of course, otherwise it's illegal in most cases and nobody wants to do that(other than it's too unethical)
In California, yes, you can, provided the employers don't compete in the same areas of business. Your work on your off time is yours, provided it doesn't relate to your employer's businesses.
[+] [-] novok|4 years ago|reply
1. They tend to work double jobs at frankly lower tier companies with lower standards and significantly lower pay. Because the companies are lower tier, they stagnate in their career growth because the company is not teaching them good skills. And you cannot put both jobs in your resume, only one on top of that, and this will show up in future background checks.
2. Because of double working, they are pretty much guaranteed to not get promoted beyond the standard terminal level.
3. They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income.
4. You cannot work at proper startups and learn a ton, because the workload would be way too high for this strategy.
Real example: One person I know has 2 $150k jobs for a total of $300k. If they joined as a jr engineer at a FANGMULA or equivalent, they would be making $300k, not be fucking stressed about the duplicity that is working 2 jobs, learn more because it's a better company and get promoed to sr engineer within a year or two and make $400-500k instead. If they have ambition, they can cross the leadership rubicon (either through becoming a staff engineer or manager) and make even more, reaching up to $700k-$1M eventually.
Maybe if your having a hard time breaking into startups or FANGMULA and your just starting out, this might be an ok strategy, but beyond that, it's not a good idea.
[+] [-] brosky117|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnoitra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
Eventually someone figured it out. Management was furious. Remote work restrictions were tightened and everyone suddenly had far more check-ins to ensure we were actually working every day.
I heard they also contacted the person's new job and filled them in on the double-work situation. That person was universally hated and I don't know anyone at the company who would give them a positive reference.
[+] [-] sanjayio|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curious_cat_163|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twa999|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zer0354|4 years ago|reply
The premise is that the average person puts in 10x the effort for a 1% return on investment. You are an employee, sure, but are "investing" the company in terms of life-hours you could spend elsewhere. Naturally, you want to therefore minimize work and maximize salary. The ultimate situation being getting regular raises by doing 20-50% less than is expected to you.
If employers don't want this the solution is simple. It's not finding these people and firing them. It's paying people commensurate to their effort like a real meritocracy would.
If someone can hold 2 jobs working at 50% brain capacity then they are obviously very talented and quite crafty. You pay this person enough, they will dedicate 100% of their brain to your project. The employer side of the equation is JUST as exploitative as the employee side. It's just far, far, far more common for the employee to be exploited. For example, via pagerduty, poor hiring practices leading to overwork, or overtasking.
This is wonderful. Anyone who is truly a libertarian should be encouraging this. It's the perfect free market solution to exploitative labor. You dont get paid past 40 hours for your salary. Why should you reduce YOUR OWN worth to make a company's bottom line bigger? Unless you hold ITM options in the company the answer is you don't and shouldn't. You should be exploiting them at every turn.
[+] [-] VRay|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: Pretty rich that I'm getting downvoted so much, despite multiple examples of successful SaaS creators showing up in the comments, and this being a forum started by a VC partly to promote and encourage tech startups. If you think that starting a tech business is so impossibly difficult that you're personally offended at the idea of someone recommending you do it, I'd say you should just go back to Reddit or Twitter.
If you're bristling at me calling SaaS "easy", I just meant it's easier than running a multi-year scam and probably committing fraud, depending on the details of your employment contracts.
[+] [-] exdsq|4 years ago|reply
Over employed examples I want to hear about is from people getting jobs in admin roles and automating themselves, or senior developers taking manual testing roles and finishing their work in an hour a week.
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ucm_edge|4 years ago|reply
Get the second job lined up. Take some vacation from the first and come out the gate hard at the second job. Attempt to more or less repeat what you did.
If you can get yourself setup on the right little niches you could probably keep three or four jobs going. If you are just kind of jelly fishing along though eventually people will notice how all the other juniors in the same surface area out perform you. You want to be the person who went off, slew some dragons in a specific area, and we need to keep this person around to ensure the dragons don't repopulate.
I basically get promoted doing that. Of course I'm using my spare hours to go help other people in the org, build relationships, get noticed, etc. All while having an easily defended core area to handle. Just do that but collect other jobs instead of promotions.
[+] [-] throwaway1492|4 years ago|reply
There are a lot orgs out there where if you can spell java, your golden.
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xupybd|4 years ago|reply
I've burnt out before and lost motivation. It's horrible. I'd much rather buy into the company vision as much as possible.
I'd hate to have two jobs that are purely about time in equals money out.
I want one job where leadership inspires me to work hard and get more done than I would have without them.
[+] [-] codelord|4 years ago|reply
Negotiate well when starting a new job (If you haven't find a new job and negotiate well). Do great work. Use the extra time to invest on yourself: read, exercise, learn new skills, etc. You'll be happier and more successful in the long run.
[+] [-] raincom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobr1|4 years ago|reply
But it probably is more lucrative to achieve some success, and then leverage that to the next thing (which might need to be a different company).
[+] [-] ithkuil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bonestamp2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goldcd|4 years ago|reply
I've got other colleagues who'll be logged in at 08:30 (so I believe) and leave on the dot of 17:00.
I think both approaches work for different people and for the company a mix gives them more flexibility without having to create a formal plan.
I think what the article was bringing up was that if you set expectations and are seen to conform to them, everybody is happy (or doesn't think about it).
If you're the person who's always there as the office opens and sticks around late - you may be noticed and get a pat on the back, but it's never going to compensate for the additional hours you put in. This might be fine if you have one job and a career - but if you're trying to hold down 2 jobs, those extra couple of hours each day are 50% of the effort of holding down that 2nd job. They're worth 50% of a whole new salary.
[+] [-] jamil7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|4 years ago|reply
If you work 8 hours for the same employer then that is kind of 1x results for you.
If you do 4 hours work and 4 hours "networking" then that often becomes 2x results - at that one company. This is considered good career moves. It's what all these 300K job discussions revolve around.
You could do 4 hours and 4 hours slacking off. That's usually 1X as well. sometimes more !
You could do 4 hours work and 4 hours writing blog posts. That sometimes is 2-3x or more. Not often.
Finally you could do 4 hours at each of two companies. This seems 2x as well.
[+] [-] I-M-S|4 years ago|reply
In my experience, this will already make you more valuable than most employees working at big companies
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lanevorockz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatguy0900|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitexploder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] screye|4 years ago|reply
Assuming you only work 20 of your 40 hrs/week in each job, you are still working a fulltime job with 2x your salary. If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
Now work a couple of years in this job, and soon you'll be able to complete its responsibilities in 20ish hrs/week. Every job gets easier overtime in that sense.
[+] [-] nicolashahn|4 years ago|reply
Haha, at what company? I've met few people who've been able to work at a company long enough (and for the company to be successful enough) to double their salary. Apparently, it's much faster to just get two lower paying, easy jobs.
[+] [-] Roritharr|4 years ago|reply
Might be because I'm european, but the idea sounds crazy to me.
[+] [-] endisneigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raincom|4 years ago|reply
Between the two extremes (mediocre and rockstar/10x), there are many 'competent' people who can't get promoted to their 2x salary jobs. And these people are competent in a particular niche, not like those who aced programming olympiads, compiler gurus, kernel hackers, etc.
[+] [-] rokob|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmarcos|4 years ago|reply
I don't know the numbers but in my limited experience, in western Europe, this is just not possible (or very very rare among C level people if any, not mere engineers). A good senior salary (gross) is like 80K Euro/year. As a senior engineer working in Europe, you cannot expect reach 100K Euro easily. Now, thinking that you can go from 80K to 160K just by being an engineer that is "competent enough" is just plain naive. Not even the CTOs are making that around here.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxcole|4 years ago|reply
I've found the opposite is true. If you are extremely competent at your job your manager is motivated to keep you in place because that's what you're good at. It's easier to promote lower-accomplishing people-pleasers because it won't affect _their_ software throughput as much (higher level engineers write less code).
[+] [-] occamsrazorwit|4 years ago|reply
One of the benefits of this is that you don't have to be competent enough to sustain two jobs. There are people who do this and just swap their jobs every year or less. Another side benefit of that is that people have lower expectations for the new hire, and if you're perpetually a new hire...
[+] [-] omosubi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narag|4 years ago|reply
It was sad to see the epic 10x programmer die, now it's the time for the hillarious 0.1x pretender.
[+] [-] civilized|4 years ago|reply
Ironic, isn't it?
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkeycantype|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiveturkey|4 years ago|reply
otherwise, yeah I always set low expectations. On day 1, I show up late to orientation. always. It's worked great for me over a long career. (single jobs, not dual, although in school I always maintained 3-4 concurrent part time gigs)
website worked for me but the menu part didn't load correctly. it looks quite poor. too bad it's not intentional.
there's only 1 time of year when you perform. the 2 months before perf eval.
[+] [-] xwdv|4 years ago|reply
If however you feel zero guilt, it is because you have internalized your true self worth. It shows you understand the value you bring to a company and the value of a company having a fully onboarded developer hot and ready to go whenever a crisis happens. You are not merely an ass sitting in a chair.
Once you learn that your value as a developer has no relation to time and space, you can truly ascend to the next level of social class.
[+] [-] baobabKoodaa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] synergy20|4 years ago|reply
for any given hi-tech job these days, the employee agreement always states this is your sole job per contract and all your inventions belong to your employer too(not just the 40 hours per week), especially for full-time w-2 jobs. How could you have two in parallel? are we violating the hiring contract here?
Assuming two jobs have no conflict of interests of course, otherwise it's illegal in most cases and nobody wants to do that(other than it's too unethical)
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|4 years ago|reply