These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs (wsj.com) 168
When the pandemic freed employees from having to report to the office, some saw an opportunity to double their salary on the sly. From a report: They were bored. Or worried about layoffs. Or tired of working hard for a meager raise every year. They got another job offer. Now they have a secret. A small, dedicated group of white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, say they have found a way to double their pay: Work two full-time remote jobs, don't tell anyone and, for the most part, don't do too much work, either. Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play "Tetris" with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off -- in some cases, unlimited -- to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don't work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don't apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.
[...] Gig work and outsourcing have been on the rise for years. Inflation is now ticking up, chipping away at spending power. Some employees in white-collar fields wonder why they should bother spending time building a career. "The harder that you work, it seems like the less you get," one of the workers with two jobs says. "People depend on you more. My paycheck is the same." Overemployed says it has a solution. "There's no implied lifetime employment anymore, not even at IBM," writes one of the website's co-founders, a 38-year-old who works for two tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. The site serves up tips on setting low expectations with bosses, staying visible at meetings and keeping LinkedIn profiles free of red flags. (A "social-media cleanse" is a solid excuse for an outdated LinkedIn profile, it says.) In a chat on the messaging platform Discord, people from around the world swap advice about employment checks and downtime at various brand-name companies.
[...] Gig work and outsourcing have been on the rise for years. Inflation is now ticking up, chipping away at spending power. Some employees in white-collar fields wonder why they should bother spending time building a career. "The harder that you work, it seems like the less you get," one of the workers with two jobs says. "People depend on you more. My paycheck is the same." Overemployed says it has a solution. "There's no implied lifetime employment anymore, not even at IBM," writes one of the website's co-founders, a 38-year-old who works for two tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. The site serves up tips on setting low expectations with bosses, staying visible at meetings and keeping LinkedIn profiles free of red flags. (A "social-media cleanse" is a solid excuse for an outdated LinkedIn profile, it says.) In a chat on the messaging platform Discord, people from around the world swap advice about employment checks and downtime at various brand-name companies.
Meh. (Score:5, Funny)
I'll be impressed when they also have two spouses and two sets of kids.
That was easy before the pandemic (Score:3)
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Sub-letting a job, that is.
If it works for the CEO... (Score:2, Insightful)
CEO's quite often moonlight as paid board members at other corporations. If it's good enough for them, it should be good enough for grunts too, right?
Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yeah this is just more anti-telework propaganda. Get back in the office, peons. Your mid level manager is feeling self conscious and useless without you there to constantly micromanage. How will he be able to justify that fat raise and bonus this year if he can't point to all the serfs he has browbeaten into being productive?
Re:Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:4, Insightful)
Multi-national companies have been doing this for as long as we've had inter-continental airline travel.
Seriously, no excuses left.
Re:Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:5, Funny)
if a mid-level Manager can't manage a remote worker, the company should sack the manager!
That is a great idea. Then they can just hire a new manager from the vast queue of perfectly competent candidates waiting patiently by the front desk. Everyone knows that it is super easy to find excellent managers.
Re:Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:5, Interesting)
There are very few things that tell an employee or group of employees that they are considered fodder than hiring in an external manager.
Obviously ever case will be unique, but for any organization of decent size, the first thing that should happen is that the organization should start looking at their succession plans and their talent pipeline. And if they don’t have those in place, then they have more than one manager that needs to be shown the door.
It isn’t like this is requiring the company to invent business management practices from scratch.
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Or they could grow and develop their own people.
That would involve having people above the mid-level managers who know what they are doing.
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You are so correct.
I need to add "That would involve having people above the mid-level managers who care about the company."
The funniest thing is that in the MBA program(s) I am familiar with there are classes in 'ethics' that clearly are about removing any vestige of ethics.
Walk through the failures of every company you complain about or worse yet work for and try to find a mid-level manager and up that is actually doing anything other than padding their retirement.
Also in the 'worse yet' group is so many
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That would involve having people above the mid-level managers who know what they are doing.
Oh, they knew exactly what they are doing -- extract the most money from the company as fast as possible for the short years they are there.
Now, what they were hired to do, well, that's another story entirely.
Re:Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah this is just more anti-telework propaganda.
Is it? Or is it a desperate attempt to distract away from further evidence that wage stagnation is a huge problem.
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Why not both?
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I'll drink to that!
Re:Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's moonlighting. I think they're working normal hours except that now they work only half that amount of time for each company. Moonlighting means doing the normal amount of work and then going to a second job. As opposed to thinking that because no one can see me that I can get away with two simultaneous jobs as long as none of the meetings overlap, and as long as neither of them demand enough work out of me that I'd have to stop slacking.
Now I've been a manager, and I used to have some of the same stereotypes you do that all managers are evil people and if only workers were allowed to manage themselves that the world would be perfect. Turns out, it's not a good stereotype. It might be true here and there, but in general it doesn't hold.
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Airlines and ISPs do it all the time. If it's OK for them, it's OK for everyone else.
Re:Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that all managers are bad people, it's that bad people often end up as managers. Positions with high pay influence, and social status are frequently distributed not by merit, but by nepotism. This is much less true in businesses that are run well from the top down, but it's also a fact that psychopaths make up a disproportionate number of managers: https://fortune.com/2021/06/06... [fortune.com]
And yes, it may be true that some folks are working two jobs at the same time, but a.) they did that before telework, b.) a good manager will notice either way, and c.) it's a vanishingly small number of people who do this. I've seen too many similar opinion pieces recently regarding the evils of telework to think it merely coincidence. It seems like a coordinated propaganda campaign.
The owning class does not want the working class to have things easy, or to have more free time. Free time can be used to organize politically and achieve gains for the working class. They want us to have a two hour commute every day. They want us to be tired, burnt out, dispirited. It makes us easier to control, and control is what this is all about. In fact, money is just another means to the end of domination. The owning class would take a huge pay cut if it guaranteed they could keep the boot on our necks forever.
Re: Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:2)
Re: Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:2)
This is why people need to have an employment plan B at the ready and to brush up on their knowing when to tell somebody to go fuck themself skillz. No one is somebody else's happiness slave and no one should have to suffer and head to an early grave because of somebody else's mental problems.
Of course the real world is a Heisenburg world, so you can't always have a plan B, but you got to know where to draw the line and refuse to be bullied in this manner.
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As long as the work they were hired for is getting done who gives a rat's ass?
Yeah, the work they were hired for gets done... by somebody else.
Read the article. Their technique for working two jobs is "not getting things done". It is "setting low expectations with bosses", and staying visible at meetings.
In jobs I've been at, I have seen many people who have managed the technique of seeming to be hard at work, but in fact their "work" is done by getting their name associated with projects where somebody else does the work that they can take credit for. The Pareto Principle suggest
Re:Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:5, Insightful)
There are so many ways to look incredibly productive while not doing much. Not even the Wally way, but in a way that actually does a lot of stuff but none of it is that useful. For instance, stick some extra interface layers into your program framework - not because it needs it but because you can spend the next three months on that project with lots of code reviews, design reviews, code checkins, all the while looking like you are a hard working sonuvagun, and in the end the project is entirely unnecessary. Frameworks are great for this sort of stuff. Also writing libraries that no one asked for (I will replace our 7 existing logging libraries with just one new library!). I have seen programmers who lack a lot of good skills except for being able to write marginal code gravitate to these sorts of projects.
Of course, even good programmers fall into the trap where programming is easy but doing the rest of the job gets avoided. Such as not talking to customers, not writing the docs, not doing adequate unit tests, not verifying the test plans, not planning out the projects, etc. It's like they that that 100% of the job is just sitting there writing code, and sometimes someone has to step in and say "stop writing code, not one more line until your design is complete and you have gotten it approved by the product manager and product manager!"
Just last week I told a coworker that I really had a headache and decided to take it easy by deciphering a core dump. He said he knew exactly what I meant. The part of the job involving looking at memory dumps and assembly and making sense of it is a hell of a lot less work than the rest of the job that involves dealing with people, plans, documents, schedules, logistics, etc.
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Wow! You're company has a shit-load of incompetents in those positions.
With that as your description of *good* programmers, it's no wonder you evaluation team sucks.
Those should all be part of the initial and ongoing development. If they aren't, expand my previous observations to include your
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The group has evolved from a startup way back in 2000s, then eventually acquired by larger real company. For most of the time, quality has been lax. Technical debt that can never be fully recovered from. Ie, the typical startup style - get it done and shipped as fast as you can; hire early people because they're your friends and not because they're really good at the job; everyone has their own style; etc. Only with the larger company are we really starting to take a lot of these issues seriously. So righ
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There are so many ways to look incredibly productive while not doing much.
That's been my Main Operating Principle for the last 30 years. "The most pay for the least amount of work."
Oh, I'll do the work- I just won't break my legs running to my desk. I take lots of breaks and I work at a "dignified pace", which means whatever the fuck I want it to mean. There are two speeds: slow and slower.
Start early? No.
Stay late? No.
Kill myself working so my manager can brag about her metrics? No.
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If higher ups were in meetings and asked me about it I'd just say "John, isn't finished with the feed." or whatever.
If we all got canned, so be it. I'm heartless that way.
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Mostly it just proves that they're being paid for more hours than they actually work, or that in general they may be overpaid. If the general unspoken agreement is that you get a salary if you put in roughly a normal days' work, and you now have two employers with the same agreement, then clearly you are not putting in a normal days' work for one or both of them.
Now granted, this agreement often doesn't hold up. I know people who spent most of their day in the office watching youtube videos, despite multi
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Utter bullshit. This is only true for those who cannot differentiate *wants* from *needs*.
Your last sentence is kinda correct.
Re:Wow they discovered moonlighting (Score:4, Informative)
As long as the work they were hired for is getting done who gives a rat's ass?
Many people have jobs where output can't be easily quantified.
One programmer can be twice as productive as another. Or produce code with better quality.
If a programmer's Git check-ins decline is it because he is stuck on a difficult problem, working outside his area of expertise, dealing with some temporary family issues, or ... working a 2nd job. There is no way to know for sure. If you fire proactively at the first sign of a slowdown, you will have high attrition and lose expertise. If you wait six months or a year, you are losing productivity.
Why we can't have nice things (Score:5, Informative)
If you're presently working from home, and enjoying it, this is precisely the sort of article you do not want to see in print.
This will be fuel for the fire for those who want you back in cubicles.
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Exactly.
Also, what jobs do these people have? I'm WFH and busier now than I've ever been, mostly because I'm so much efficient I can increase the load.
Re:Why we can't have nice things (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm WFH and busier now than I've ever been, mostly because I'm so much efficient I can increase the load.
Yeah, don't do this. At least, not unless it comes with a corresponding increase in pay.
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WFH does come with a big pay rise though - no car running costs from daily commute. And N hours per week of time that's your free time again instead of wasted parked in traffic. It's not cash on your payslip, but it sure is valuable.
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And that's offset by the company's savings in not having to provide a workspace for you.
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Yes, how DO they manage it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, what jobs do these people have? I'm WFH and busier now than I've ever been, ...
Yes, how DO they manage it?
I'm between jobs right now (after WFH for over a year during COVID), taking only 3 credit hours of classes (via an accredited online school) and getting my silicon valley house ready to sell (while tending its veggie-and-fruit garden), and I'm so busy with NO job that progress is at a crawl.
(Or is maybe the issue that they DON'T? My wife tells of a former boss who got fired after it was discovered that he was out of the office at each of his two in-office "full time" jobs, working at the other during business hours threatening his reports with firing if they don't cover for him when higher-ups came looking for him.)
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Indeed. Blown out of proportion. For click-bait and sensationalism.
Nearly every tinker, tailor, coder, plumber, and electrician have done a side job to make a little extra money. There's often no malice or harm to the other party they work for.
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In fact, extremely blown out of proportion.
Working two jobs isn't unheard of, in fact, many people pre-pandemic had side gigs. Many employment contracts specifically allow them as well - though usually with restrictions like not offering a similar product to that of t
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Every ambitious (and, thus, exceptional} employee is looking for his side gig to turn into a self-fulfilling income generator. I was when I took the leap.
We've a half dozen or so former employees who run their own shop now... no hard feelings. That's what I did, and likely, what most of us did, when we went into business for ourselves. We learned the business from a previous employment experience.
Don't see anything wrong with it, normal (Score:4, Informative)
If you can get your work done, who cares if you have another job?
It's not like lots of tech workers have not had side websites or apps they make money from, for quite a long time.
Heck even people with physical jobs they have to appear in person for, sometimes have two jobs.
This doesn't seem strange or wrong at all, it's just efficient.
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I'm sure it depends on the state. But in California at least "no moonlighting" clauses are generally unenforceable; with working for a competitor being one of the few exceptions. But if you're not working for a competitor... maybe one job is FinTech and the other is for a game studio... and your job performance doesn't suffer; working two (or more) jobs is 100% kosher.
Re:Don't see anything wrong with it, normal (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure it depends on the state. But in California at least "no moonlighting" clauses are generally unenforceable;
This isn't about "moonlighting," which is having a side hustle on your non-work hours. This is about two jobs at the same time. Yes, that's illegal-- if you are being paid for working 9-5 for one company, and are in fact spending some of that time working for another company, that's fraud.
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It's only arguably illegal if you are, in fact, being paid to work specific hours. A lot of white collar work is salaried exempt, and mostly for those jobs it's illegal to track hours worked. If they get the job done, they get the job done, and a company that cares about hours worked needs to reassess how they measure performance.
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Again, I didn't say anything about achieving wealth wiithout working for it. I know I explicitly said *STOP* working.. you know.... *EVENTUALLY*, like when you are like 65 or so?
But because wages haven't actually increased with the cost of living, that's not happening to more and more.people, at least not those who conduct their affairs honestly.
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Or you could do what a lot of us do: skip buying the flashy bullshit and jetting to far flung destinations in your 20s, to instead work your ass off and save for retirement so you can do that shit in your 60s without having to worry about going back to work ever again.
I'm currently on track to optionally retire at 55 - 60, and accelerating into it. My wife has done the same. We're looking forward to 20+ years of doing whatever the fuck we want, whenever we want.
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It isn't that way for everyone though... even those who have been working hard the whole time.
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The other factor is lying to the boss. Back in the 90s I had a coworker fired on the spot because he was working a second job on the side building an electronic fish finder with his dad. The problem wasn't that he had a second job, but because the whole time he was taking extra "sick" days and giving other excuses for half days.
Re: Don't see anything wrong with it, normal (Score:2)
Must've been a hell of a fish finder. It would've been much cheaper and easier to just buy one from a sporting goods store.
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Umm... not normal at all, and plenty wrong with it. It's one thing to do a bit of "side work" while working for a primary employer full-time. Heck, I did that once with the company's owner well aware of my situation. (Owned my own consulting business and told him I might use my lunch breaks occasionally to run out to a client site nearby and fix their computer issues. If it took longer than expected, I promised I'd stay late to make it up. He was a bit cautious about allowing it but ultimately agreed. I t
Not if you are salaried (Score:2)
The problem here is, you're compensated to work full-time
Only if you are an hourly worker.
The people under discussion would seem to be working on salary - which means you are not in fact compensated for "full time", you are compensated for doing a job, however much (or little) time that takes.
If they were compensated "full-time" how come they don't get overtime pay?
Just as salaried workers do not generally get overtime, so too they cannot be docked for "undertime" work so long as they are being productive
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It's called "conflict of commitment", and is specifically called out in my own employment contract. It's not just a matter of whether you can juggle two jobs, but whether the requirements of those two jobs conflict with each other, particularly in the matter of trade secrets, patent disclosures, or competing products.
In my own case, I am allowed to consult to a limited degree outside of my job duties provided I disclose the type and scope of
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Oh, horseshit. You can quit or not accept the job to begin with. The rest of your post simply isn't true unless those companies fall under one umbrella.
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Usually because this means that the work is not really getting done - either the productivity has been going down, or the worker has been slacking a lot and has a lot of free time. We're not talking about people who work two normal jobs 8 hours for one then 8 hours for the other - we're talking about squeezing two half-assed jobs into one 8 hour day. That's the secret. Ie, you give a time estimate for your project that is twice what it really is because you know that you're only doing to work half the ti
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Describe one and how it's done, please.
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Sure. Someone works nights and weekends at a self-owned consulting business while also working 40 hours a week in a white-collar management position for a Fortune 500 which requires office attendance.
That wasn't hard.
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Which is what the article is about, rendering the rest of your post moot.
NOT FOR THE PEASANTS!!! (Score:2)
Only our capitalist neo-royalty such as Elon Musk and Carlos Ghosn are allowed to have multiple jobs if they can perform effectively at all of them!!!
Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you're competing against your employer or disclosing a company's private information, you are NOT contributing to the success of the organization, you are actively sabotaging it. .
Like a rightful law suit, bankruptcy and joining the fast food industry.
Can confirm it's a thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, because... (Score:2)
They don't apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.
Two wrongs make it right. That's how it goes -- right? /sarcasm
Many say they don't work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined.
On the other hand... If they can get their actual work done and management doesn't care, then it shouldn't be a problem. But then it doesn't need to be a secret either. But, I imagine they keep quite so they don't get assigned more work/responsibilities.
The last place I worked (a defense contractor) didn't have a problem with a second job as long as (a) they knew about it, (b) it didn't interfere or conflict with my job/work for them and (c
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Two wrongs make it right. That's how it goes -- right? /sarcasm
The programming language Karel taught me that three lefts make a right.
This is not new to the pandemic. (Score:3)
Well... the multiple jobs part might be new. But similar shenanigans have been going on for a long time already. The first one I heard of was a programmer who outsourced his job to a cut-rate consultant in China, sent over his credentials, and spent his days dorking around on YouTube and eBay:
https://www.bbc.com/news/techn... [bbc.com]
Hell... with that scam, there's no reason to stop at just two jobs.
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A straight shooter with upper management written all over him
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The reasons stories like that and the main story is we all dream of doing stuff like that even if we never would.
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Scam? All he did was to subcontract. Why is it legal when a corporation does it but not when their employer does it?
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Agreed. I don't enter that contract.
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Hehe (Score:2)
Get caught and get sued *twice* for breach of contract.
The smart money has never been to bet on twice the risk/twice the reward, it's always been on n times the risk, much more than n times the reward.
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Better question: What enforceable part of the contract was breached?
Most employment contracts I've seen include clauses that aren't enforceable. They're in the contract to use as a threat against an employee that doesn't know that it's unenforceable. (This is also why every one of those contracts has a severability clause).
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And then they wonder . . . (Score:3)
why companies are monitoring them [slashdot.org] to see what they're doing [slashdot.org].
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Try to pull that shit with me and the only thing you see is my backside on my way out.
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A lot of people say that... few actually walk when the shit his the fan though.
If a person is actually so unfulfilled at their job that they are unwilling to even suffer a regular commute to it, and they are as confident in their ability to get another job as the above attitude would suggest, then I would expect they would have left their job before covid.
Therefore, I am generally skeptical that a person who is saying this will actually follow through.
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I have a contract with my employer. Not a relationship. We have defined terms that we agreed on, if one of us wants to change those terms, we can ask the other side whether they agree, and if they don't, we terminate that contract.
Yes, it is that easy.
I tend to work on a base of "I treat you the way you treat me". If you treat me like a hire and fire means of production, don't expect me to consider you more than a business partner where I deliver workforce in exchange for money.
Not really working (Score:2)
"for most part, don't do too much work, either"
As much as people pound their fists on the table and scream how much more they get done working remotely, I call bs. That might be true for 10% of those working from home, not for the majority of people.
Answering help desk calls (and other piecemeal work) can be bench-marked (at the office or working from home). Most white collar jobs don't lend themselves to easy productivity bench-marking. It's easy to gain the system. Pro-tip: Get angry and combative if
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when I hear a fist pounding on the table, I am trained to yell back:
"there MUST be a better way!"
(go watch hettinger/python yt's)
shit'll change your life (if you like python).
They're doing it wrong (Score:2)
I have a secret for the middle managers (Score:2)
These are actually called 'contractors', and the industry has already been employing people like them for decades.
Now quit whinging and get your ass to the coffee shop to pick up our team order.
Good (Score:2)
The "calandar tetris" had me worried for a bit because I thought "Uh-oh burnout" but when I got to "Many say they don't work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don't apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them", I felt much better.
Civil servants have been doing it for 100 years (Score:3)
Some of them even invented a relativity theory on the job.
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free market! (Score:2)
if they manage to pull this off then their employers have to be satisfied with the service given, so no harm done and good for them. so free market isn't fun anymore if it favors clever workers? bummer. be smarter employers or cry us a river. just for entertainment!
so, to rephrase.. (Score:2)
"the people called employees, they go to the house?"
does that sum up the spiwit of the otticle?
Been done before (Score:2)
There was this guy who outsourced his own job to China.
https://www.bbc.com/news/techn... [bbc.com]
I did this, but with a twist (Score:2)
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So if my responsibilities are so great, I should be making more than a member of the BOD.
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Yeah, about that. Who do you think has more "responsibility", a board member who can literally make or break the company with a wrong decision or a pencil pusher who can at best screw up an order of more pencils?
And who do you think should, because of that, put more concentration on his job?