I currently have 10 fully remote engineering jobs. The bar is so low, oversight is non-existent, and everyone is so forgiving for under performance I can coast about 4-8 weeks before a given job fires me. Currently on a $1.5M run-rate for comp
this year. And the interviewing process is so much faster today, companies are desperate, it takes me 2-3hrs of total effort to land a new job with thousands to chose from.
I'm assuming this is facetious, but... high performers are potentially big winners in a remote world.
Let's say someone gets 5x the person next to them done. Very few companies will pay them 5x. Maybe double...
But if they can manage their time well enough to get X done in some fraction of the time, they could realistically do two or three full time jobs worth of "normal" work, and increase their pay - and income security - over having just one job. This doesn't work when you have to be in person all day, but remote?
A high performer that can produce 5x on a consistent basis in one job will only be able to produce maybe 2.5x on multiple jobs with significantly more convoluted career progression and schedules. Context switching and context setting are both quite difficult.
But a 5xer will quickly promoted to principal level (L6) within a decade of entering their industry if they hop around a couple of times.
L6s usually make 2.5x of what their peers make. So the conventional process really isn't that bad.
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Honestly, if you can consistently produce 5x and provide good estimates, then you should be consultant / contract hire for mid-tier companies. You will make a lot more money and have a lot more agency over your own life.
Finding clients is a hustle, but so is holding 3 jobs at the same time. So, pick your poison.
It's not my experience that high performers get paid more than peers, people who switch employers and negotiate better pay are the ones that are paid more. Staying at one company and working on career progression is a slow grind to good pay.
The way I see it is that I can come in to a fresh role on that 2.5x peer rate by performing a solid interview at architect/principal level. I then do this for multiple roles concurrently then I'm on 7.5x my peers. Which is actually a pretty good estimate to what I know I'm making in relation to others. I also find the principal/architect roles are sometimes less hands on and you're being paid for knowledge and advice, so it actually makes it less of a burden to product high output.
I feel like this is the post-covid take on the classic SO thread: "I automated my job, do I have to tell my boss" [1]
It really depends if you view employment as "they are paying you for 40 hours per week" or "they are paying you for a specified output, good for you if you can get it done faster!"
It's an interesting point but I think that we're honestly vastly overestimating how highly performing high performers can be - 5x is a pretty reasonable number to me for an extreme skill gap including an experience gap but ruling out the most junior folks.
We've already got a wage spread that more than covers 5x with most folks fresh out of college looking at 50k/annual if they're outside of SV and some devs within SV making 500k or more.
A 10x can't be a 1x in 10 places. Maintaining 10x the average productivity requires being in harmony with the work environment, the environment makes the 10x engineer as much as he makes himself, you can't do that while working 10 jobs.
This is all good if you’re just given sprint tasks and expected to crank out code for them without much supervision. What happens when any 2 of the 5 jobs decide to schedule a recurring meeting at the same time?
I currently run 3 full time contracts concurrently, and yes meetings clash, but it's easy to get meetings rescheduled if you just ask. Sometimes I have two calls on at the same time if I know its a call where I'm mainly going to be listening. Can always claim "bad internet" and drop out of one to answer question in another.
Approach management and discuss a comp increase? Tell them you constantly have tech recruiters hitting you up with far loftier packages but you love the current firm and just want to have a more equitable compensation package.
If not, start looking. There are thousands of good-paying jobs out there. We're in a significant labor shortage for engineers and many companies are upping the stakes through stronger compensation and fully-remote-forever work environments. Take advantage of the situation.
Why should they? Unless it's some kind of contract I don't think you can be sued for not doing your job - you can be fired (and likely would be), but incompetence doesn't generally lead to legal problems.
Many employment contracts expressly forbid you from accepting other employment without prior authorization from the company. If his employment contracts contain that provision, then he would definitely be in breach. But... damages would probably be limited to just the salary that the company paid.
Definitely true for most high-paying companies (meaning experienced enough to not have employment contract full of beginner's holes like this).
Explicitly forbidding another full time employment, full rights on all intellectual property, non-competing agreements etc. Also explicitly expecting to work ie 40 hours.
I would take this with grain of salt the size of Jupiter, since such behavior would quickly show on any employment feedback source that any proper company hiring should check beforehand. Being blacklisted forever for well-paying companies will bite back very quickly too.
In most of the Europe, I believe this would be illegal simply due to amount of work expected - there are hard limits on that.
If true regardless, it might not be the smartest idea to brag online about committing multiple frauds, which casts another doubt about the whole story.
Depends on the kind of contract involved. A full-time employment contract (what is often called "permanent" in the west) is one thing, a B2B arrangement is another.
Personally, I haven't had an employment contract for over 6 years now, and in fact to stay in the clear one should ensure they have at least two simultaneous clients - though most ignore that, at least in Poland.
Could be seen borderline fraudulent since no employer signing this kind of contract would reasonably expect this behavior. So that could add a criminal element in addition to the civil damages.
Conflict of interest - say you're working for two companies that are in vaguely similar spaces (e.g. Google and Apple). Seems like grounds for a lawsuit.
Dude, you're my hero, I'm currently at 3 jobs at once (used to be 4 but the contract ended) and this is 100% true, I like some jobs more than others and it really boosts up income and learning, can you share more secrets? It's been a hell of a ride for me
It's not very satisfying so definitely not retire early. However, it's a good way to raise the equivalent of a seed round without having to give up any equity and simultaneously execute on practical customer discovery regarding the needs of modern engineering teams in a remote-only world.
There were a lot of big words there but am I right at reading your statement as - "I'm exploiting employers so that I can found a start up that is able to monitor truant employees?"
The most unbelievable part of this is that you have 10 "mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering" that only pay $150k each on average. I do not believe you.
I 100% believe them. I'm doing something similar but with 3x concurrent roles and am considering adding a few more. You'll be surprised how bad you have to be to get fired. I can go days doing nothing, then crank at a few hours work for one pull request on a Friday and people are happy.
You should really consider working for several of the large bay area legacy companies like HP, Veritas, Symantec, NetApp, etc. The "work life balance" at these places is quite good in the sense that most engineers aren't working much.
I think you could easily do two or three jobs at once and accumulate overlapping stock grants quite easily. That overlap eventually gets your yearly to a serious amount.
That's hilarious and it sounds like a great anecdote for parties!
I'm in the opposite situation, I quit my only job because I couldn't stand wasting my time and I'll just keep on running my business (less money but freedom and time to make more and grow).
Out of curiosity and if you're happy to share, are you still running your own company while "working" these jobs?
No, I sold my company in 2019 and exited last summer. It took up far too much time to pull off anything like this. The new venture is purely in fundraising and research mode until I stop this little experiment.
Wow you really do sound serious. I have done ghost development for 2 jobs before, as in I took the job and had juniors help me out although I was doing majority of the work. Never thought of 10 jobs.
This seems way better for me to set my own funds straight than chasing investors for my product ideas. I do not think I can pull off the work needed though...
Thank you for your service as being a literal leech on the economy. There will always be people who try and exploit the system - trying to guard absolutely against them is a futile effort, but I hope the number of folks following in your footsteps is quite few.
And hey! Maybe one of your coworkers will see this post!
I'm a tech culture reporter at Protocol and I'd love to talk to you about this, if you're down! I'm at akramer@protocol.com or @anna_c_kramer on Twitter, and happy to provide my Signal over email if that's preferred. Let me know if you'd be interested in chatting.
Yes writing code, I provide enough actual progress that people must assume I'm either extremely methodical or woefully incompetent. I put in about an hour per job per day. I'm logged-in on slack/teams/etc and disable idle indicators. I use a virtual KVM to switch between laptops as needed. The biggest problem I run into is video meetings occurring at the same time, those I usually just disable video and blame it on internet problems.
Many of these positions are mid-to-senior level in "must have" positions like Data Science or Data Engineering where measuring progress can be difficult for even full-time contributors. I target overly funded growth-mode companies where they're focused on adding unnecessary headcount to work on poorly defined projects.
While it is not explicitly illegal, you are most definitely violating your employment agreement so your employer will fire you if they find out and might sue you as well.
The problem is really that multiple parties may be able to claim the rights to all of your output while you were on their payroll, which is obviously messy from a legal standpoint.
There aren't any laws about how many jobs you can have. Your employer is free to fire you if they find out though. Usually you have agreed not to have multiple jobs when joining, especially so at places like Facebook.
A typical silicone valley company's contract usually have some clause saying that all your creative work while contracted with the company, even on off hours, belongs to the company. So signing two such contracts with two different companies usually means they both own the code you wrote for both companies, or maybe even trickier legal implications.
Of course you can try to get that clause removed during contract negotiation, but I doubt many people would be successful on that negotiation (you might have better luck to exclude some of your open source contributions).
Every SV company I've ever worked for has explicitly disclaimed rights to my work done off hours with my own equipment... as they are required to do under CA law.
I'm not sure how you can claim all work was done during off hours with ten full-time jobs. If OP got caught he could have some very expensive legal problems.
"A typical silicone valley company's contract usually have some clause saying that all your creative work while contracted with the company, even on off hours, belongs to the company."
My experience, working for a number of silicon valley companies, has been the exact opposite. There is a clause that says (in legalese) "we don't own stuff you do on your own time with your own equipment if it isn't related to what you do at work"
It is my understanding that California public policy actually requires companies to put this disclaimer in work contracts.
They would have to last 1 year to get the full TC which isn't the point. They do the minimal amount of work to collect a $150k salary and then get fired in 4 months and move on.
This is the US, anyone can sue anyone for anything. That said, California has very favorable employee-protection laws around non-compete, non-solicit, notice periods, at-will employment status, and ownership of work. It's very unlikely an employer will sue over $10-20k. So far, they all just fire me and move on.
