You can request your own data here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/
For any manager paying attention, it wasn't difficult to spot. He would swing between being eager to please and virtually unreachable. We didn't have many meetings or phone calls, but he had more scheduling conflicts than anyone else. On the rare occasion that we had high urgency tasks, there was about a 50% chance that he would obviously be not working on it at all until the evening, despite being online all day.
Eventually we let him go for non-performance, which wasn't too hard to document. Now he has a problem where his resume start/end dates don't match what he's claiming on LinkedIn or (presumably) putting on his resume. He also burned the entire team (they figured it out) so he's not getting any positive references from anyway.
It may work if you can find two jobs with two incompetent managers who aren't paying attention, but I don't think it's as easy as people suggest for any reasonably well paying engineering job.
It's going fine; I measure that based on my performance reviews all being excellent, my clients all paying the bills on time, and all work is done in a timely fashion. I do individual contributor infrastructure engineering at the senior+ level.
Managing the calendar is the toughest part, making sure things don't overlap is difficult. My full time calendar is relatively light, the contracting gig on the other hand is starting to get on my nerves with the amount of meetings they're pushing me to attend.
I'm only doing it to pay for my house faster and when I finish with that by the end of the year I will quit, so far It had worked pretty well(minus some super long days).
Is that statistic actually for full-time workers doing overlapping time, and is there evidence? Or does it include all the people whose remote work is an hour here and there in random gig economy freelance tasks, where it's perfectly natural to have multiple commitments?
The main struggle is scheduling and making sure you can make all the meetings. It's also tough finding the right job which gives you autonomy to form your schedule.
The main perks are obviously money and not caring about getting laid off. In this market it's pretty hard to get laid off, we shall see how it plays out over the next few years.
Is that entirely a bad thing, though, considering this industry? Discussion ongoing.
In both cases I resigned the job out of boredom, but I could easily have kept them on and worked a full second job with no one noticing.
I'm doing it. I very recently took on a second full time job. I work as a Release Engineer for both. It hasn't been too bad so far. The biggest thing is managing your calendars to avoid conflicts.
Key observations to share are:
- the more different the jobs are, the more managable they are, as the complete context switch is as good as a break. It's not task context switching which is costly, it's role switching, which can be uplifting because there is a "you" in between the roles that is separate from each of them. Most highly successful people have intense hobbies for the same reason.
- Lying destroys your mental health. You don't need to lie if you set and relate with clear personal and professional boundaries. It's a kind of moral identity you have to set. Lying is weak, and indicates you've made some upstream errors that you just don't make when you are a pro. I asked a mentor for advice about something once and he said, "I don't get into the kinds of situations where this is even a question." If you are lying, for your own sake, stop.
- Stress really only comes from failing (nobody gets tired of winning, maybe just bored), so having another source of success improves your attitude and that pays off on both gigs massively. Success gives you a refreshing vibe to be around, and most jobs don't provide enough of it, so bringing exogenous success to relationships and work is huge.
- Working as a consultant in large institutions, there are employees and managers who make sabotaging and undermining consultants a kind of sport, so you need the durable skills for handling those people, as if you are doing multiple jobs, your biggest risk comes from people who won't respect your boundaries. That's a general life lesson as well.
- Realistically, nobody questions anything if you are succeeding, so if someone gets "suspicious," it's really that you aren't delivering value for them and it's time to improve or move on anyway.
- Have a plan to invest the increased revenue and don't spend it. You are giving up so much of your life to do the extra work, blowing it on representative and symbolic pleasures is just remedial, and becoming enslaved to the hedonic treadmill is a recipe for burnout. There is no there there. Luxury mainly makes up for impostor syndrome and blowing money satisfies a self destructive urge. If you wouldn't buy it if nobody else could see it, don't buy it.
- Have a plan to outsource or compensate for all the personal balls you are going to drop like new relationships, home and vehicle maintenance, accounting, gym time (get a home gym), nutrition, pet care. If you can do a master's degree while working, you can do a second job, and people with families manage, but if you don't have commitment and buy in from your partner, consider that the additional revenue is just going to become a bigger support obligation when you destroy your marriage making it, so take care.
For me, working two jobs adds a level of secrecy that’d be difficult for me to maintain long term. Also could be hard to do simple things like take PTO.
Many, sadly, low income families have to work two or more jobs. We in tech make enough but what if you are bored and need more challenges.
My current second job is family but I know multiple single engineers (or in one case, with grown up kids) with 2 jobs. They work 16+ hours each day but with pandemic there was nothing else to do, so might as well do more work. At least, one guy is pretty open about it with both of his employers. Others hide it but they get the work done.
Also you can list 2 jobs on your resume. When I started my career, I didn't had very high paying tech job, I did freelance work on the side and listed on my resume. Never been problem.
Your company doesn't own you.
Not hired.
But I burn myself out just doing one job anyway. Because for some reason if I’ve not out-delivered everyone else by an order of magnitude then I’m not satisfied
If you're working > 50 hours a week (or whatever your personal limit is) for more than 1-2 months -- that won't end well for your health or business relationships, either.
That's the score, basically.
The side project one has become vastly more successful and lucrative than my 9-6 and it's starting to creep into that time as well, with many employees asking me for information throughout the day and asking me to quickly help with things. I've told my 9-6 that I need to quit because it doesn't make sense but don't want to suddenly leave and harm the perspective value of the company. Both places know the other exists and I've really tried to keep them separate but it was easier when I was working in a vastly different timezone because I could juggle them both easier (get lots of valuable work done whilst nobody is online and feel like the day is already achieved).
Now the other side of it which really pisses me off massively, is that for the side-job I've had to build a front/backend team to deliver things and it's fairly big now but it's 100% remote and we have no office (even before COVID). Some people that you hire are rockstars, others are just ok and then there's the guys who scheduling issues for meetings, suddenly become more active for a week when you notice they're not doing anything, push almost nothing.
I wasn't aware of r/overemployed but it's been clear to me that this is a common scam for a long time. People start off great and then they suddenly stop delivering, which was making me start to really hate this remote stuff.
We've applied a few things systematically to try and prevent the overemployed scam: - Daily geekbot standup reports of what you did yesterday, today and what's blocking you
- Detailed weekly geekbot standup reports of what you managed to achieve during the week and what you're still working on (the people who stand out are the ones who are continuously working on the same items each week. The "detailed" is the part that really shown us the cockroaches hiding in the woodwork)
- Each release has commit log with the author next to each (it shows who is delivering)
- Enforced daily pushes - even if you're not yet complete with your work, you should be committing every day, so if we need to investigate, we can see what you're actually doing on a daily basis. We had people who would only push chunks every couple of days or every week and it was hard work reading through it, to see if it looked meaty enough.
- HR Slack channel with automated leave calendar notifications, so you can see who's booked off for the day, with requests being approved by HR (everyone knows who is around for the day) and also if you need to disappear for an hour or two, you can write it, so everything is more transparent and people can be honest about being AFK.
We have a project manager, who we thought would keep tabs on the velocity of each developer and catch out who wasn't delivering much, but it really didn't help and it took management to notice something was wrong with various people.
We've got stricter over time. At first we were getting abused due to lack of time and process and it was mega depressing having so many people and not seeing things progress with the product and feeling like you were being scammed but now due to the process it's not that bad IMO.
I can't wait to quit my 9-6 so that I'm able to be more hands on with the other and not have to work around the clock. Most of my work in the side job is trying to improve processes, unblock people and code in things to reduce the reliance on me so things are smoother.