Ugggh reading stuff like this is painful… this is the stuff that ruins remote work for everyone. I’d be more understanding if you spent your free time working on personal projects. It’s a different deal when you are misrepresenting yourself to multiple people and teams

This is amazing. Congrats and keep going. We need more of this spirit in the world. You saw a place of optimization and optimized it. Well done.

I think there's an interesting social conflict in these stories.

A state wants to maximize the output of its working population. More output, more taxes, more power. A company wants to capture all of the produced value of the employee's time and labor.

So, if an employee is underutilized, the state should want them to get another job and produce more, while the company would prefer they sit around and do nothing because they might get bored and produce something for the company's benefit.

Who will win?

This is either an elaborate troll or profound stupidity.

Any tips on finding marks for this scam?

Is “overemployment” a euphemism for fraud?

This can’t be real!!???!!

This regularly pops up in the Cleared world with people asking if it will interfere with a clearance.

I’ve had to advise multiple people it’s a very good way to be denied for a clearance.

There's an old saying: in you need something done fast, give it to the most busy person in the office. It sounds like bullshit but it works.

This kind of people needing to juggle two job are always "on", and probably have by necessity a much higher ability to prioritize correctly. I'm guessing here, but considering they managed not to get fired after 2 months, I think I'm guessing good.

So yeah, they won't be doing all the bells and whistles the middle manager wants from them. But if you manage to structure your company so the important stuff is the one that actually needs to gets done - they won't be a bad employee. Possible even above average.

Note here that the opposite of the overachiever with two jobs is the guy that pushes papers and stays on facebook. How much is he doing _valuable_ work in 8 hours? Yeah.

Sure, we'd all want perfectly adjusted people that work 8 hours like clockwork then go play gold. I personally don't know any.

I am completely sympathetic because of how expensive housing is.

Everyone here claiming it’s fraud: Why are you convinced that your employer and you have a congenial relationship?

All employment contracts are one sided. They have more power. They stick some unfair contract on you and underpay you.

Why did you get into the mindset that you getting paid enough to buy a house is now fraud?

Do you deserve to own a house? Because in most of the areas anywhere near me, it would take many years to afford one. If you have children, you also have to pay for college.

Unless you get lucky gambling or trading shitcoins: You will never survive on the salaries being offered for your labor.

And the terms are exploitative and one sided.

If you examine closely how most CEOs operate, and politicians, you find that they are exploiting every single loophole imaginable.

Take Elon Musk for example. He has 12 children and just nuked everyone at twitter probably over the age of 33. All laid off. And he cut holiday pay for contractors.

Do you think Elon musk gives a shit if you can afford a house and childcare as a tech worker? He does not.

I think the people in this thread gasping out of shock need to understand just how much you are being screwed right now by most employment arrangementst.

A couple decades ago maybe I could imagine it.

Now? Oh hell no. It’s totally unfair.

A work contract (or in some states even a work law) usually forbids working another full gig, so in virtually all cases those stories are severe work contract violations which get you immediately fired. Besides that, those stories are one of the reason why remote work gets more restricted. On a third point, i believe many of those people have mental health issues. It should be obvious that leading such a lifestyle isn’t compatible with a stable, truthful mental state. So i‘m not sure if there is a winner in this game.

Personally I would never land multiple jobs at the same time because I have strong ethics. My employee pays me for creating value, and that is a daily mantra you should repeat yourself everyday, especially if you’re remote. Overemployment would just lead to a mediocre work for every employee you have. I’ve been remote months before the pandemic and the most difficult thing is to keep focus, not the required focus on the assigned task, but on the big picture, on the direction and the main goals the company wants to accomplish, how you can help accomplish them and push more value than requested. That’s how you get paid well, how you build a long relationship made of trust, the kind of trust that raise your pay every year without asking. Let’s be honest overemployment is just another word for describing low effort programming, the production of yet another can of digital trash, and I just wish companies go back to the (un?)balanced ratio of remote/in person job like it was before the pandemic

> I’m happy with my decision to work multiple jobs at once, because not only do I feel like its given me more time with my family and friends

I wonder how this is the case - generally you would have less time doing this unless you are working the jobs concurrently, in which case, that is incredibly unethical and likely to get you fired from both companies if either found out

Looks like probably outright fraud. He posted a salary breakdown [1]

One fulltime W2 job and putting in timesheets for 40 hrs a week at each of two contract positions.

[1] https://overemployee.blog/how-much-do-i-make-as-an-overemplo...

I find it interesting that this blog is categorized as "Security Risk" by Cloudflare Radar, which my employer is using for web filtering.

Hopefully it's just a temporary glitch due to being an unknown/new domain.

I’m actually curious now if we look for these over employment seekers. Clearly they’re smart, and if we make an open contract, then both parties can extract maximal benefit from each other. Tech companies have a hard time ensuring engineers put their time, but with these folks perhaps they would be happy to time their work given the special situation they have.

A lot of outrage, discussion, mentions of "fraud." Another possible explanation, this is fiction, creative writing essentially.

How about working for your own side project? Is that also not cool?

The paternalistic employment system should go away.

Everybody should have their own company and all work relationships should be normal commercial contracts.

Why wouldn't you be able to have more than one client at the same time? Up to you how to manage it and what quantity and quality you deliver.

Let go of corpo daddy, state daddy, and sky daddy. Grow up.

To take the Machiavellian view, if you want to be nice, be nice to your wife and your kids. But not at work.

Companies always look out for themselves. I have sympathy here for the OE who is simply looking out for themselves.

IANAL - most definitely not - but it seems to me there is no crime here. Breach of contract, sure, absolutely - unarguable. Consequences - dismissal and no reference. But crime? Many employment contracts say 40 hours, any hours these days. Mine does. Show me a tech worker whose contract says they stop work at 5.30? That would preclude on-call, overtime, etc. So it's possibly a defence, should it be needed, that the OE is available for 40 hours a week, and not his fault that all 40 hours aren't needed, so he interleaves this with responsibilities for another employer. There are, after all, more than 40 hours in a week.

How can you do this as a regular employee? At least in my european country your employer has to pay social security insurance and that cant be paid twice. Therefore if you find 2 jobs you will sooner or later run into issues.

Also...Where are these companies where you dont have any overlapping meetings?

This is pretty much exactly how I would run anti remote work PR campaign.

Lets go through some basics. Click through articles on the blog. Is there a single one you couldn't write? No, really. This is the kind of stuff you give to/get from a copywriter. Everything is formulaic, you could write the same kind of posts about literally anything. It's a craft.

Now go through related social media. New accounts posting and moding. All relatively fresh.

Obviously, I have no proof. SM part is also how you would work if you wanted to remain anonymous, sure, but how do you explain this blog? Start of the whole thing being few months after CEOs started whining about how much superior in office experience is could have common causes. And obviously every story is possible - there probably are people doing it. Did they really start that recently?

Admittedly, asking for few dollars from people to get into better parts of discord while claiming to make 6 figures doesn't match exactly. There are reasons to do that (hiding lack of content), but that generally points to creative writing and general grift at least as much.

I guess what I'm saying is wait for major newspapers to pick it up and for people who want everyone in office to use all that as talking points.

When I fulltime consulted, I would often do something similar between clients. Never liked it as it remove time for education, reading, thinking, family / friends etc.

The breakdown is that he has one fulltime job of 140k + 80 hours a week capacity for 75 USD. If he saturates that, he is working 120 hours out of the 168 hours there is in a week, ie. under 7 hours of sleep while still working weekends and no time for other activities than work also excluding eating, toilet visits, etc.

Whether this is misrepresentation or legal, we would need to know the contracts of. But unless these are made by companies overly in favour of him, I doubt. Especially because he does not do anything specialised (75$/hour is in the low end of commodity software development).

Personally I would rather spend time specialising in a craft that pays better and work less and increase the potential hourly rate rather than the potential yearly income.

In my corner of the world this appears to be more common or just tolerated more since most of the IT workers are, for lack of a better word, pretend contractors(for tax reasons), so companies can't impose certain restrictions or else the tax authority will recognize this relationship as employment and demand taxes and social security payments retroactively.

Since late 2019 each contract of mine started including a clause stating that I should prioritize this particular client. That is the extent to which they went to date with restrictions.

I'm also required to notify them of any other client that I might have. Apparently they're keeping an eye on the overemployed.

In any case most people in my team had some kind of side gig, or had this project as the side gig and we decided to be open about it.

I know people who have been pulling 2-3 contracts for years now. That being said the most overemployed is already experiencing heart issues in his 30s, so he might have to back down soon.

I both have a small child and am too chicken to actually try it, but to be completely honest large organisations have such narrow roles and move at such a slow pace that it's not difficult to meet expectations while having two "full time"(heavy quotes here) contracts.

Personally I use this slack to spend more time with my family. My salary overtook my lifestyle expectations in 2019 so finances are not a problem.