1. Senior backend developer (~10 years of experience) trying to find a 100K Euro/year job in Western Europe: quite hard if all you want to be is a simple "individual contributor" (employee, not contractor) writing $PROGRAMMING_LANG code without having to deal with k8s, the cloud, mentoring, or on-call paging. Besides, I'm not specially bright, just average, so I cannot pass tricky tech interviews. I'm currently making 85K Euro/year (around 4600 Euro/month after taxes) which is nice, but I cannot deal with the stress my current role (tech lead?) implies: I'm supposed to be on-call, to mentor junior engineers, to "own" our products, to learn more about devops/infra topics, to bring and introduce new topics to my team, to be an example to engineers with less experience. All I want to do is to be part of a team pushing useful features for our customers: I don't want to be on-call; I like to teach and learn from others but I don't want to be a mentor; I want to write $PROGRAMMING_LANG code, I don't want to setup the infra of our services... I want the job I had in 2010! Now, that's for positions that pay ~85K euro/year. Imagine the stress for positions that pay 100K. I don't even think such positions (plain IC) exist in WE (excluding top companies ofc: I'm just the average Joe). It seems that this ~17% salary increase I'm looking for implies a 100% increase in stress. Nuts.
2. Getting a 50K euro/year job in Western Europe is easy for someone like me with ~10 years of experience. I can pass the interviews just fine (I guess I would just have to hide some previous experience of mine so that I look like a junior to the companies). 50K euro/year is around 3K/month after taxes. Not bad. Now, the stress of a 50K euro/year job is close to zero for someone with years of dev experience. Besides, you'll get ton of free time because you know exactly how to do "junior" tasks! No on-call, no mentoring, no cloud, no k8s... just coding like it's 2010!
Now, the big IF: what if I quit my current job and get 2x50K euro/year jobs? That would mean (oversimplifying taxes) around 6K euro/month after taxes (more than I would make earning 100K euro/year!). I think I could do it just fine (perhaps I would have trouble with meetings at the same time). Low stress (because I would be a senior doing junior tasks), more money. Bingo. From an ethical point of view: I would be a junior (earning junior money) producing senior-level coding. That's a big win for any company, no?
Now, coming back to reality: this is probably never going to happen.
Edit: I'm assuming 100% remote setup.
Edit 2: this all is just a mental exercise. I'm not planning to get 2x 50K jobs; the idea just came to my mind and all I wanted is to get your opinions about it. Merci!
- you're assuming that the schedules will magically align - they probably won't
- if either company thinks that you're working full time but you aren't, I wouldn't be comfortable with this from a purely ethical point of view
If you work $ELSEWHERE during the same hours, you're double-dipping, and you will be found out - either by replying to an email from the wrong address / with the wrong signature, being in a meeting for #COMPANY when you're supposed to be in a call with $ELSEWHERE
Now, if you can start one job early-ish (say at 0700-1500), and don't mind working the other one late-ish (say 1530-2330) - and they're not "competing" companies, go for it
You're not going to come out ahead on taxes in any country I'm aware of (regardless of what $COMPANY & $ELSEWHERE reports as your salary, the tax officials will be able to add them together at filing time) - $50k + $50k still plops you at $100k of pay (and, therefore, into whatever tax brackets that entails in your locale)
You may (or may not - you have to figure this out for yourself) be better off leaving Europe if jobs like the one you're looking for are too difficult to find
I'll suggest the same advice I gave him. Rather than working 2 full time jobs, have you considered consulting or freelancing? It's essentially what you're already talking about doing anyway. Now you're a consultant / freelancer. That pays pretty good. But it does run into limitations on your time.
Once the companies find out you can produce senior level output and junior level prices, they will take advantage of that situation quickly. So the stress would be quickly back with lower wages.
You should reconsider this. Everything you want - and more - can be had if you go contracting and stick with the same contract/company when it rolls over every 6 months (which they often do).
As a contractor, you're external to the company, so there's no mentoring of junior devs, no on-call, no researching new tech. You're brought in to write code, and that's it.
Interviews are short and easy, with no Leetcode or other tests, and the day rate for someone with 10 years experience will easily give you above €100k a year, allowing for 5 weeks holiday.
That's in Europe, where contracting via recruiting agencies is huge. In the US it's very different, and contractors have to find end clients themselves and manage those clients.
Another route that would involve less work but more responsibility is taking a leadership position at a small org. You're not obliged to work 40 hours a week but you are responsible for making sure things get done, which you can do from afar. If tech leaders can hold different leadership roles in several companies, you can do as well!
This is also a mental exercise, but something worth trying out.
Or is the assumption that since you are extremely efficient, you can squeeze in all the work demands of two fulltime positions into 40 hours per week?
Also you're implying that being a junior means half the work. Sometimes juniors just get menial tasks that take as long as a senior to do, but don't need the same level of skill.