HACKER Q&A
📣 toomanyrichies

Have you gotten a 2nd full-time remote job since the start of lockdown?


Over the course of the pandemic, I've seen multiple anecdotes here on HN of engineers (and others) taking on additional full-time remote jobs and working them in parallel. I'm wondering if there are folks here on HN who have made this work, either surreptitiously or with the consent of their current employer.

I'd like to hear about any and all gotchas you've encountered. The one I'm most interested in is the juggling of meetings. What if the current and new teams have overlapping stand-ups, for example? Or what if an impromptu meeting gets added to the person's calendar, creating a conflict with existing commitments?

I'm also looking for opinions on the morality of such an action. To me, it seems equivalent to that same dev getting a job as a shared ride driver or something, if (and this is a BIG if) the employee is able to continue delivering the same quality of work to both employers, the two companies operate in separate spaces, and there's no risk of improper IP transfer.

That said, I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong here. Hoping the HN hive mind will have insights that I haven't considered.

  👤 2xjob_throwaway Accepted Answer ✓
I have and it has been life changing. Here's the thing about a 2nd job. It isnt 2x better than a first job. Its about ~5x better by my calculation because it is 100% savings.

Heres the math.

I make 10k a month at job 1. After taxes 7k. I spend 2k on rent, 1k on food, 1k on insurance and other recurring and 1k on fun.

That means im saving 2k / month from job 1.

Now i get job 2. Im now making 20k / month, 14 k after taxes. But my expenses are still exactly the same. My savings have now gone from 2k / month to 9k / month.

So im really making almost 5 equivalent years of savings every year. At that rate, if you could keep it up for a decade, youd essentially account for a whole career.

👤 muzani
I switched jobs this year. The old job offered a very high part time salary because they just hit product market fit and my replacement wasn't able to keep up.

The coding would have been near effortless as there was already another guy there. The code was efficient - my main goal was that it would take less effort to write new code than it would to write user stories.

But there's a limit to how effective the work can be. Most of the remaining work was communication. A 15 min meeting disrupts work flow so much. How do you deal with two of them every day on vastly different contexts? What if they're on the same time?

Someone brought up that 2x the work meant 5x savings, but 2x mental workload actually feels 5x heavier too. If I did take a second job, it would be something physical like farming or cooking.

👤 codingdave
It all depends on what your agreement with either employer is. If you are contracted for 8 hours of butt-in-seat work, with zero on-call, and zero expectation of stepping up to handle urgent problems, there might be no ethical problems.

But I have never had a software job where that was the case.

👤 toomanyrichies
Resources I found while Googling around on this topic:

-OverEmployed.com- a community of people trying to work two remote jobs at once in order to gain financial freedom.

-A Buzzfeed profile on the founders of the above- https://www.buzzfeed.com/meganeliscomb/overemployed-working-...

-A NY Times piece which takes a strong anti-overemployment stance- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/magazine/overemployed-wor...

👤 whateveracct
The diminishing returns are too large to bother with a 2nd job. Then I might actually be busy with work 5 days a week!
👤 giantg2
Nope. Id love the extra money though. Apparently I'm too slow to do my regular one well enough (got a further development needed rating and a 5% pay cut).