This happened to me, twice, and my company is < 20 people. Of those 20, 2 had multiple jobs. We hired a guy who found us on HN Who's Hiring who turned out to be working 3 (THREE!!) full time jobs, each paying $140k+.

He quit when I started putting deadlines on work when he started falling behind. I got suspicious, reached out to his prior company's CEO to ask if he was still employed, and turns out he was! Then came the discovery of the 3rd company...

For hiring managers out there: make sure candidates have a linkedin profile that lists your current company as their current place of employment (both employees with 2+ jobs had their LinkedIn hidden for obvious reasons), and always run background checks that include employment verification screens.

To play Devil's Advocate: IF the employee is meeting all work expectations, and IF he is not also working for a competitor, and IF he is keeping a good firewall between his work for each of these companies (using company-specific equipment for each job, never crossing the streams), then as a hiring manager, why is this a problem?

For low paid service workers, it's acceptable and sometimes expected to juggle multiple jobs. Why is it unacceptable for office workers?

Because in reality, we have to rely on engineers to be honest about their workload and estimates to determine realistic expectations.

The overemployed game is all about exaggerating how much you're working and how difficult your tasks are. Targets, deadlines, and work scoping aren't chosen in a vacuum. We rely on the team to give us feedback about what they can accomplish in the expected full-time work week.

This goes both ways. If I'm handing out 80 hours of work every week, I need my team to tell me it's too much and I'll scale it down. The problem with overemployed people is that they must lie about their workloads and estimates to avoid being assigned more work than they can handle.

We had an overemployed remote person once. Like the parent comment, we noticed when they weren't performing at the same level as their peers (or even a reasonable level of expectation). They were also frequently unavailable for discussions, half-involved in meetings, and generally unreliable.

> For low paid service workers, it's acceptable and sometimes expected to juggle multiple jobs. Why is it unacceptable for office workers?

Low paid workers with multiple jobs aren't doing them simultaneously, but someone with two remote tech jobs is almost certainly trying to do both at the same time. Honestly if someone had infinite energy and could dedicate 8 hours per day to my job and then another 8 hours per day to another job and not overlap the two or run out of steam, I wouldn't care at all. But in practice, it becomes a constant game of lies and sandbagging that is just incompatible with running a fair and balanced engineering team. (Hint: It's often the coworkers who catch on before the manager because they can see very clearly that their peer is sandbagging)

That’s why the better relationship for remote work is 1099 contract work. Bill by the hour and be upfront about your other gigs because it is to be expected.

I wish this were the norm

You hire a doctor for a few hours, plumbers/lawyers for hours or weeks depending on the task, everything goes fine

but somehow software engineers have to come on board, sit at a company desk, wear a company shirt drinking company coffee every day

It'd be great if coders were organized as individuals and small groups that just took on tasks for fixed bids, like the fantasy world from the book "Developer Hegemony."

I could really go for six months off right now, but I'd have to fight tooth and nail to get it from my job, and it would severely hinder my career. So instead I'm just stuck chugging along until I've got enough saved up to quit and start my own company (or take some time off, then jump through a bunch of hoops to take on another prolonged period of full time servitude)

(Bringing it back to the topic at hand: That doesn't make it morally right to lie to your employer(s) and do a half-assed job. The overemployed people on Reddit/TeamBlind sound like a bunch of lying dirtbags who just say everything is harder than it is to cover for themselves slacking off, and aim to just get fired after a couple of years.)

I think we agree. Sure, if he's sandbagging, distracted, and not meeting expectations, that's unacceptable. But the (maybe theoretical) superhuman who can successfully juggle multiple full-time jobs and perform as any other full time worker would be expected--I don't get why it's taboo. Maybe it's something magical in the "employee" word, since independent contractors can, and many times do, have multiple simultaneous clients, and it's not a problem.

You wouldn't work at Starbucks and Denny's on the same hours, would you? 40 hour per week contracts expect the same

There are 168 hours in a week. Even if they sleep/eat/shower for almost 1/3 the time, that's enough time to 3 40 hr/week jobs. Certainly enough for 2.

With the timezones 8 hours apart I suppose it's okay to work two remote jobs. The tech on the job will have to be vastly different however?

I think the constraining resource is emotional energy, not time. A lot of people are focusing on time but we all know only a tiny amount of our time is really spent working.

At least for me I don't even have enough emotional energy for my current job, I can't imagine doing more than one. The trouble is this is impossible to measure and certainly isn't formally part of employment.

On the surface, I agree. However, tech work usually involves intellectual property and sometimes non-disclosure agreements. Also, many employee contracts will explicitly prohibit other working arrangements (salaried or not). That said, I applaud anyone who can get away with it. The down side seems minimal.

There is little appetite for risk in staffing.

Maybe engineering staffing practices should be more reflective of the possibilities, but that’s best for a single Org to define for itself.

> He quit when I started putting deadlines on work when he started falling behind. I got suspicious, reached out to his prior company's CEO to ask if he was still employed,

Similar story here. Person was clearly falling behind and was unreliable. The "it shouldn't matter if they get their work done" narrative doesn't hold up in practice, at least not with any reasonably utilized engineering team.

Now when I hire remote, I get in contact with the person's former company to confirm their start and end dates match the resume.

I hope you don't call the person's former company before he signed the contract, you should not do that because he may not have resigned and told anyone about it, this could compromise him if he decides to pull out at the last minute. I would be really pissed if someone would do that to me and I would make sure tell everyone this sneaky behaviour on Glassdoor. Also I've resigned once but decided to take a month off in between so dates wouldn't match.

If you put an end date like the PP mentioned, then I think that's on you.

"<Start date> - current" prevents that problem nicely.

Have you considered your company pays so low as to force people to work multiple jobs? I think we both know that person could get much more than $140k elsewhere.

I have no strong opinion on the working multiple jobs thing, but a single person making $140k is not forced to do anything. That is not a low wage. Fucking hell.

Seriously, a single person making less than that can live comfortably nearly anywhere in the US if they keep expenses reasonable, especially if it's remote and they have no need for a car

yeah, just a quick reality check for the codezillas here: The median US household income for 2021 was $68,000

There are places outside the SF Bay Area

LinkedIn accounts are useless, except as a way of containing all the HR/Grind culture people.

The deepfakes and stolen PII discussed in the article are for identity theft: The candidate steals the identity of someone with an impressive LinkedIn background and then presumably hopes that the company takes their background at face value and doesn't ask too many hard questions in the interview. The company then completes reference and background checks on the victim. They might also use this identity theft to qualify for jobs that aren't available in their location due to contractual and/or legal restrictions.

The "overemployed" people generally aren't performing identity theft like this. Having multiple jobs ranges anywhere from legal to fraud depending on contracts they've signed or how they've misrepresented themselves (it's not uncommon to see suggestions to take multiple hourly jobs and then exaggerate the number of hours worked, for example). However, adding identity theft on top would elevate what they're doing to a major crime, which is not something that would help them.

It’s not legal for some people to hold multiple jobs because of visa restrictions. So that could be a motivation for the added risk.

"remote" doesn't have to mean "foreign". It just means your daily "physical office" isn't company premises.

I’m referring to people living in the USA on a visa who can only hold a single job at a time.

Yeah I got that. My point is there are plenty of people living in USA who are US citizens and who might also be tempted to pull this kind of scam (for want a better term).

that's too small a subset people - you should be looking at it from the angle of 'what are crimi at businesses doing at scale for profit"

Some jobs seem to only want you around for your experience/expertise, like baby-sitting and preventing fires. You could theoretically make everything so stable that when something fails a secondary system kicks in, and all you do is to debug when that happens and make it even more stable. Just make sure you have an excuse to not work on site or they will keep you busy with meetings, admin, and reports. But one day there will be the the perfect storm and all systems on your 15 different full time jobs will go down. You could always call in sick that day, but then they would hire more ppl like you.

I find it amazing how many people in this community don't realize that there is a fairly large number of low income people who work two full time jobs to survive.

Sure they're typically hourly not salaried but that doesn't seem to be too major of a difference.

I don't even see what the issue is at all. If a person can get both jobs done fine, then who cares?

This seems a little bit odd. Working exactly 40 hours a week is stressful enough - is it really worth it to double both your salary and your hours? I think I'd want at least 4x the salary in order to work 80-hour weeks - or is this practice mostly done by workaholics that enjoy long hours?

The people who do this aren't interested in putting in full workweeks and delivering good work.

Their goal is to find jobs and managers with low expectations, then sandbag as much as possible ("Gee, this task is harder than I thought. Going to take a couple weeks longer than we estimated!").

Had a team member try this and an old company. We caught on quickly when they couldn't keep up with their workload and were constantly unavailable during the day. Really sucked for the rest of the team who had to pick up the slack this person created by pretending to work full time.

I think this highlights one of the most important problems with people taking on multiple tech jobs: it’s the fellow employees that suffer the most. Some lost money is a drop in a bucket for most big companies, but other people just trying to do well at a single job really pay the price.

There are companies where the level of expertise is so low, you look like a genius beside them. I did this, I worked several jobs in parallel. The pay was... not really amazing, about 8k/mo when I had 3 projects at the same time. And in most of the cases I was a main player in some important parts of the system. I think _some_ people caught on. But I also think they didn't care that much because I solved their problems, unblocked their people and was always responsive, if push came to shove, I would put in the extra time to make the damn thing work and ship it.

Given your username, how did/do you manage to pass the interview for all those jobs? At least one of your interviewers would likely have asked if you've "finished" working with your "previous" employer or a question alluding to it. Either that or they would have done a background check via Experian or LexisNexis.

Who quits their job before finding another one?

It's not necessary for one to have already quit one's job. A question I've received is "What made you want to change jobs?" The question assumes that you are or will be removing yourself from a position at one's current/previous employer upon being accepted for the new job.

well if the work got done, and stuff shipped, then it does not look like anyone has the right to be angry.

i personally tried to do two jobs (with full agreement from both sides) splitting my week half half. It was a real struggle, but it is possible.

It’s actually really hard if you approach this from a well-meaning perspective, because typically you’d still be selecting the jobs based on your normal (when having a single job) criteria.

The key is to turn the thing upside down and seek out the jobs you’d normally reject - shifty companies with lower pay, bad tooling, tons of bureaucracy, etc - basically a place where no sane developer would willingly apply. Then, you’ll be the smartest person in the room without having to do anything special and the extra bureaucracy can be either automated away or come in handy as an excuse when you fall behind, while the lower pay isn’t really a problem if you have 4 of them running concurrently.

then beurocrats are a feature protecting you, not a bug

Stuff ships because people work hard to make that happen. If one member was dead weight, it’s not fair to simply point to a successful product - other people had to put in the work, probably extra work, to make that happen.

8k/mo total or per project?

Total. Rates were... not great. They sucked, honestly, at least compared to what I hear on here on HN. Slightly over 45 Eur/h all project rates summed. Somewhere in Eastern Europe. That's great for someone who grew up and went through college on about 150 USD/month, so of course I felt like a king.

Maybe don't have such low expectations that someone can moonlight your job for shits. Fire non performers fast.

Companies take forever to fire people.

Though I have worked for companies where “hire slow fire fast” was an actively spoken belief by senior leaders and executives.

They currently sit at a 2.8 on Glassdoor.

Think of that however you will.

If you're going to fire fast, what is the benefit of hiring slow?

The dopamine hit that comes from selection bias, probably.

Last I heard, the executive who manifested this mindset is gone, too.

Poetic.

If my snark wasn't clear, it's a mindset of hiring and personnel management that I think is lazy at best, total shit at worst.

In theory, hiring slow gets you better employees. Firing slow gets you better employees. So if you combine the two, you get the best employees.

Not what I believe, but that's the logic they were using

tsk! you're not supposed to ask that!

> Really sucked for the rest of the team who had to pick up the slack this person created by pretending to work full time.

The solution is to escalate the "sandbagger" problem to someone who can fire and replace them, not cover for them.

This is what consultancies do all the time.

The issue is mainly one of false advertising. Companies are looking for very different things in a consultant vs. a ft employee.

If you want to do this “scam” in an ethical way without the reputation risk, just be a consultant, work for multiple companies, and be honest about it.

You won’t get benefits and finding clients will probably be harder, but you can set your own schedule and charge a lot more for your time.

I'm not saying they are in the right, I'm just saying we accept consultancies adding hours for nothing as a default nowadays.

But yeah being a freelance would give you the freedom (at the cost of more time spent selling yourself).

Sorry, I meant the impersonal “you” (anyone reading the comment), not you specifically.

> This is what consultancies do all the time.

No, consultancies do not double-bill multiple clients for hours worked.

In fact, anyone billing a company in full for time that someone wasn't actually working on their project is committing fraud. Fraud that leaves a paper trail. This story would be brought to light very quickly by a disgruntled employee somewhere.

No, they bill senior hours for people with 3 years experience. Same thing.

If you work 3-4+ years in a big company, you would most likely had the social credibility and knowledge of the systems to get your work done in 15-20 hrs a week. So if you get a new job, maybe you work a solid 30 hrs for that company, 50 hrs a week is manageable.

Lots and lots of "average" jobs have FAR less than 40 hours of actual work, but are still 100% positions. This obviously also depends on the individual doing the work - some work very efficiently, while others can be very slow.

People then get the idea that they can juggle two jobs like that - but the trouble is usually not the work itself, but conflicting meetings and such.

I think the idea is you work two jobs that pay for 40 hours but only require 10-15 hours each, not to be noticeably worse than average.

Its probably done by people who snag lower effort remote jobs and do the minimum viable to be considered "good enough".

The trick is not working 40 hours :-)

I used to think this was possible but simply out of what I consider acceptable. Some time ago I worked for a week while interviewing for a company that required candidates to do paid work for them, and it was the most miserable week of my life. I wouldn't do this for an extended amount of time for any amount of money. It's not worth it.

If you want to buy a house in any major city in a G7 country, a single SWE salary isn't enough anymore.

I wonder if there are cases, where worker just outsource some of the work to a guy in a cheaper country.

I employed an Account Execs (sales people) last year who paid for virtual assistants (out of pocket) to do 50% of their daily work. I didn't find out about it until after we let him go due to performance issues. Apparently virtual assistants don't make great sales people.

I've also employed an engineer with multiple jobs (3 total). He's an active HN reader. I (sadly) wish they would have at least tried to outsource their work rather than not do the work at all and miss all their deadlines.

you mean like USA Federal work, outsourced via corporate consulting offices to the UK in turn outsourced to India ? because the insane requirements to sign a contract with the US Federal Agency eliminate almost anyone, even actual business people with staff who have the skills ? like that?

No, I mean "you work remote" as western guy (US, Europa) but you hire a guy in India or China by yourself. Instead you do your work, a guy with a lower salary does the job, you keep the difference and your company thinks you would do the work.

There have been documented cases of that happening. One story I read, the employee only got found out because there was unusual VPN activity. Such as valid logins from (possibly?) Chinese IPs.

The trick is to not double your hours. Idk if it works.

There is in fact a guy right here on HN claiming to have 10 jobs, bagging 1.5m a year.

"there is a growing movement of people who are doubling up on remote jobs"

Citation needed

r/overemployed

However I think a substantial number of posts are creative writing exercises

>However I think a substantial number of posts are creative writing exercises

A lot of division trolling going on there, trying to foment labor militancy. r/antiwork is the most visible facet of it, endlessly trying to encourage strikes, calling out, sandbagging, etc. This overemployed stuff (people blatantly bragging about how they're getting so much money for barely working and how you're stupid if you don't try and scam the system) is another facet of it.

It's the usual suspects exploiting and widening any and all divisions in society they can find.

Nah, it's more of an offshoot of r/cscq and Blind in the spirit of maximizing compensation above all else.

I can see this

Smart lad, keep it up.

It's WallStreetBets-esque. Not sure if it's reached the stage where most of the people on that subreddit are taking ironic advice unironically like we saw with WSB.

Nothing would surprise me in this age of post-irony. Fittingly, there is also apparently a grift component to it because the subreddit’s creator is hawking some service/product he’s selling.

The post-irony age has some amazingly brazen grifts. It's funny to watch from afar, but the last near-decade has shown how close to home these communities and grifts can eventually hit.

Actually, a citation is hardly needed here.

1. People want more money.

2. Remote jobs are becoming much more common as of late.

3. It is (much) easier to double up on remote jobs than non-remote jobs.

4. Doubling up on remote jobs results in more money.

5. Therefore, there is a growing movement of people who are doubling up on remote jobs. QED.

I mean, it's pretty unlikely that this argument doesn't hold. I feel like you'd need a citation to counter it.

>I feel like you'd need a citation to counter it.

You don't need a citation to counter a baseless assertion. My assertion is that most people who apply for remote jobs are fairly honest (by culture) white-collar types who wouldn't think to 'double up on remote jobs' for the same reason they wouldn't think go out at night stealing catalytic converters, which is that they possess a basic sense of right and wrong.

I mean, if you think that the average person is basically a scammer at heart, okay... Maybe you come from a low-trust culture, I don't know. I don't think most people who come from high-trust cultures would behave this way or think that behaving this way is okay.

No one is arguing that the average remote worker is doubling up on jobs.

But many more are now compared to recent history.

Stealing catalytic converters is directly harming another person and also punishable with prison time, it's hardly comparable to working two remote jobs. But sure, some (potentially large) proportion of white collar workers may not be willing to violate trust by working two jobs, but many would.

Beyond that, if you think that all knowledge workers are ethical people, I would remind you about all the horrible software that exists in the world for the sole purpose of scamming or harming people. There's a lot of it. And it's all unquestionably much less ethnical than working two normal white collar jobs.

Why go through all that hassle of faking another persons ID? Another resume etc

People outside the US/Canada who might not be otherwise eligible to be hired as a W2 or T4 equivalent employee.

If you have a US resident's stolen PII and can somehow set up a bank account to receive ACH direct deposits, and are a good enough social engineer, can possibly get hired under that name.

Equifax will narc on you. Bow down before your data broker overlords.

Hireright can also be nasty with the background checks, to the point of asking you to correct irrelevant minor typos (say, a space) in you credit file before validating your identity.

What industry? Over in infosec, they seem to just do courtesy interviews to suss out if I did some ecrime the feds are sniffing about, find out they were incorrect, then not even have the common courtesy to drop the act and offer to pay me as a consultant rather than treat job interviews as fishing expeditions.

I’m having a hard time parsing this comment, can you expand on who’s doing what?

Oh, I'd have someone connect me with say, an interview with the Software Engineering Institute or RAND. They'd have me speak to between six and twenty people about say, how I would work to secure CERT's vulerability stockpile.

Then they'd refuse to hire me, refuse to address the issues I discussed, and then sometimes one of the interviewers would pass that information to the Russians or Chinese leading to a massive break ala OPM or Solarwinds even after Senator Wyden sent Chris Soghoian or someone of similar skill adjacent to the Omnidynar group to go ask some hard questions.

In parallel, folks with non-US passports would obstruct any applications I made in private industry in favor of those with their same passport.

It was all super frustrating, since my CV had the appearance of someone with a deep commitment to nonprofit work, when it often more than I made decisions like "Being a PhD student pays slightly better than a Papa John's employee and I'll eventually find something more permanent doing the latter".

Lately, looking back, I wonder if I'd have been better off saving up then moving to Thailand like one of my old drinking buddies did. (I don't drink alcohol anymore, and I'm spending the afternoon reading HN as I work on some technical projects I'll probably never put online, since it seems no amount of code publication leads me to a fair interview -- all it does is give tools for others to use in their "work")

Happy to reply again if the above is unclear -- I made sure to not use a nym that doesn't include my legal name, for privacy -- I could have been much more detailed :-)

> Happy to reply again if the above is unclear

...

> Then they'd refuse to hire me, refuse to address the issues I discussed, and then sometimes one of the interviewers would pass that information to the Russians or Chinese leading to a massive break ala OPM or Solarwinds even after Senator Wyden sent Chris Soghoian or someone of similar skill adjacent to the Omnidynar group to go ask some hard questions.

This paragraph is exceedingly unclear and may hint at the reasons why you are struggling to get hired. This reads as some mix of narcissistic personality disorder / conspiratorial thinking. You write like a native (or near-native) English speaker, but your composition is all over the place.

I don't mean this unkindly, but have you ever spoken with a mental health professional? Many technical folks are neuroatypical and this can sometimes be a barrier to traditional stable employment.

I get the impression they are being deliberately obtuse, but that's not uncommon in this field (to be fair, so is schizophrenia/NPD).

This individual claims to be somehow involved in two high-profile national security incidents. It's not beyond plausibility that they are being exploited for information by companies who don't want to be seen associating with them. Snowden would receive the same treatment.

> This individual claims to be somehow involved in two high-profile national security incidents. It's not beyond plausibility...

Hacker news does attract some singular individuals from time to time, but I would suggest the more plausible scenario is that this person has untreated mental health issues.

Deliberately obtuse. Also schitzophrenia and NPD are... not remotely similar. You probably shouldn't risk a slander lawsuit if you're so uneducated on diagnoses, paired with never having met me.

Now, bristly replying aside: I also DO have anxiety, and wrote my comments earlier after too much caffeine.

>This individual claims to be somehow involved in two high-profile national security incidents. It's not beyond plausibility that they are being exploited for information by companies who don't want to be seen associating with them.

To give a real world example: one of the reasons I was pushed out of an NGO is I annoyed the lawyers pushing them to put MFA on their email accounts. Later we were one of the few not to be penetrated by the Russians... digitally... but when I watched that one Mr. Robot plotline where the one agent is increasingly unclear why her supervisor is not taking her concerns seriously, she finds out they are an agent of a foreign power.

Also I did a master's thesis on anonymity technology, so obligatory "it's not paranoia if they're actually out to get you".

>Snowden would receive the same treatment.

Snowden is stuck in Russia, a totalitarian hellhole. I live here, in the Paris of Appalachia, where I wander around sipping cortados and banging hipsters. We are not the same.

What often happens is I get a mix of people who respond in good faith (have no idea who the hell I am), paired with those who do, and say things in bad faith about my mental health.

(Reoccuring income would solve those issues overnight, email if you want a CV. I'm a decent pentester, can code in languages like Python and bash, and have an OSINT certification from Bellingcat.)

But often since my skills are more... qualitative (eg: I cannot write exploits well), people schedule an interview to treat it like a free consulting session (ask the one question an FBI agent would have if they could supoena me slipped in with the rest to clear me as a suspect in some bullshit), then don't actually hire me on... and the cycle repeats in 3-6 months.

Hence my supreme annoyance and occasional trolls.

Oh -- almost forgot -- in addition to the above, years ago, before I was doing brain experiments on undergrads alongside former Israeli snipers, I was in therapy. I found out at that therapist's funeral that he was a member of a motorcycle club. So sometimes... odd people boosted me through my career in civil society, and sometimes it feels like when I hit a wall, it's because someone in the past was supporting me for unsavory reasons, and doesn't have a good explanation for the sudden shift in allegiance.

I'm happy to explain further as needed, but all you really need to know is I ended up at a libertarian NGO despite being anything but, for reasons I don't fully understand, then got stranded in Appalachia by people who never want to admit they're wrong, even as I turn on the TV and see teachers who used to claim I was a menace to society running up on the capital.

TL;DR: I'm anxious because I'm a skinhead, in the antiracist sense, and a leftist, and the people who could assist me in my goal of being independent choose not to. I could join a firm like Mandiant or whatever tomorrow, be assigned some work, and be off HN and happy, but folks make the emotional decision to not allow me to do that, despite very clearly being qualified to, then question the mental health of a first generation PhD student with a dwindling bank account.

Any other questions?

:-)

> This paragraph is exceedingly unclear

That's putting it mildly.

Based on the writing, my best career advice to this person would be to take a community college English composition class and/or join the local Toastmasters.

Extra time spent working on communication skills almost always pays off more than extra time spent on technical skills.