Working Multiple Jobs
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To me this is advocating the equivalent of polygamy - where you have two full-time families living in two separate homes and you are going to somehow bifurcate your entire life for the two of them. How do you tetris your life schedule? The baseline cognitive load required for that cannot be ignored.
Anyway - one man's trash is another man's treasure. For this person, it works. Suggesting this is the new norm and here to stay? Not so sure. Generally speaking I don't think this is healthy or even moral/ethical when you consider these companies are ultimately expecting meaningful work out of you.
I don’t know what else to say. AMA?
Sometimes fantasies happen in real life. It’s rare, yes, but it’s not unheard of. In fact, I’ll be jumping on a call in 10min after having been off a call for 20min at separate companies.
The answer to your critique is "market rate."
Off topic story: In the early days of the internet I had a friend named Sal, who didn't understand what asl meant. He was very confused how people in chat rooms knew his name as soon as he got there, but weren't spelling it correctly.
After probing in a diplomatic way, it turned out that they interpreted "Howdy" as "How are you doing today?" which was fascinating to me, because it makes perfect sense. I never would've made the connection.
Edit: Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howdy
My heart happens to be in ML. So when an ML opportunity came along, I went for it. Things worked out. They offered a full time salary position for equivalent to what I was already making. I told them "I understand that you're not able to afford market rate for ML engineers -- let me know if that changes! In the meantime, why not do a contract for that rate and see how it goes?"
They protested in the usual way, but the problem was, they needed me. Both companies need me, and I'm effective at both.
I make roughly three times the average SV startup salary. I don't get sick days, which is the only part that sucks. But -- regret? You overestimate how much work this actually is.
The best part is the work itself. I get to design some cool-ass banking infrastructure while also doing some cool-ass ML work. And the whole reason I'm doing all of this is so that my wife and I can have a baby, because IVF in America is $40k.
(I realized one day that if I worked as hard as I could -- or in my case, "at all" -- it wouldn't take that long to save up $40k.)
I would say it's a worse deal to gamble your life on startup equity in exchange for below market rate. The fact is, if you're someone who can get a job at FAANG in terms of skill level, you're underpaid at a startup, in exchange for the small chance of getting rich later on. I'd rather "sell my equity now" and take full market rate, as it were. But I don't want to work at FAANG, because FAANG comes with a lot of baggage that doesn't exist at startups -- which is the whole reason people take startup jobs.
It’s good to burn the candle at both ends and the middle once or twice, both to prove you can, and to determine why you shouldn’t longterm.
The money was good, I out earned my coworkers in Bonus compendation, but the color had literally drained out of my life. I had no hobbies, no plans, I just went to work, came home, and once or twice a month, lost a weekend to the latest DDOS.
ETA: DO NOT LOSE YOUR CHILDREN’S YOUTH to work. Just don’t.
100%.
They are young for such a short period of time. (Feels long some days, but it's short.)
I prefer to work a 9-5 for a single company/product than shuffle between 10 different projects. It's fun for a short period of time, but eventually it tires me out. People are different, of course.
I think it would be quite interesting to circle back with you in a few years about this. You might be right. Want to put some contact info in your public HN profile so that I can reach out? Otherwise, feel free to DM me on twitter :)
Wait to see the cost of a college education...;(
Edit: (Maybe this would be hard to replicate in the corporate sector because thinking about it more, being a faculty member is closer to being a contractor than an employee in some ways important to making this arrangement work. Faculty aren't really managed like an employee at a software company; their time is their own except for their course schedules that are assigned. But otherwise they are much more free to arrange their schedules)
Aren't there IP, trade secret, and more generally, conflict of interest concerns with an employee working for multiple companies?
(5 years old but a lot still applies)
It was a firm that did financial transactions, so not only did those keys give access to the money itself, they also allowed one to approve normally refused transactions or vice versa (e.g. make a transaction with a wrong pin entered go through anyway).
Obviously we were watched, but still.
Whereas the employees were part of the company and had a different set of expectations.
If this wasn't the case, please share the company name so I can move all my money far far away from them :).
> I am not talking about freelancing, consulting, and the other forms of working for many clients. I am talking about holding down multiple full-time jobs at the same time.
Meanwhile, I completely reject the notion that working two jobs should affect the compensation for them. If someone is working 80-100hrs/week for double pay, why would we expect them to get paid less?
There isn’t 40 hours of work.
- Am I paid for my tangible work output, or for availability? What about intangibles? How do you measure it anyway?
- It there, or is there not, an expectation that I devote my "best hours" of the day to the job?
It's really better just not account for things in such detail. Like, I'm willing to ignore a co-worker doing two jobs at the same time, because I'd like to avoid getting my salary cut because as a night owl, my "best hours" are really outside of 9-5.
And, to answer one specific question: Why would you owe your "best hours" to the job? They contract for specific hours.
Fred's an accomplished VC. Just having his name associated with your company (even if he didn't bring other value) is valuable in itself.
If you're an employee with millions stashed somewhere (so that you don't mind taking a paycut) and just the idea of your leadership being involved brings value to the company, then you too can work multiple jobs. Otherwise, this probably won't be so simple.
So it makes it pretty enticing to get a second full time job, learn how to do it well, automate some of it and then only work about 20 hours a week. As long as you’re meeting the deliverables for both organizations, on time and in full, what’s the problem?
If I was an employer and an employee said "I can meet all the deliverables in 20 hours a week", I'd say either:
* great, let's get you working on more deliverables, or
* great, let's give you 50% of your pay
It is perfectly okay to split your time between two employers (I've done it myself as a freelancer).
What isn't okay (at least to me) is to say to employer 1: "okay, I'll give you my full time energy, give me work to do", then figure things out so you don't have to give your full time energy (automation, realizing that meetings take too much time, whatever). Then, with that extra time, instead of asking for more work (as you said you would), finding another job.
I wonder how folks would feel if the situation were reversed. Say you hired an assistant to help you for 10 hours a week and they were meeting all their goals. Yay! Then, after a few months you find out they were charging you for 10 hours but only working 5. I don't know about you, but I'd feel pretty bummed.
Some might say "well, just set the goals and the payment and let the assistant decide how much to work". That's called contracting, not employment. Goals change and it is hard to nail them down in a contract (it requires effort from both parties and is inflexible if things change).
Employment occurs when:
* the employer wants your time and commitment, with goals to change as needed.
* the employee doesn't want the risk of setting a fixed price for their goals.
If they want to give you more work to do without paying you more, then they're falling into the trap of seeing you as an underutilized machine that could be producing more widgets. Based on your definition of employment, I think you believe that model applies to software development. I think that attitude fundamentally misunderstands that the work we do is not primarily measured in quantifiable output but in qualitative results. Sometimes work takes longer than expected, sometimes work takes less time than expected. What matters is that progress is being made and project deadlines are carefully chosen given available resources and the risk profile of the project.
Would you give your assistant a raise in the case I outlined?
The creatives I have working for me on a side project bill hourly, but I'm never checking or adding up whether they actually work those hours. I can see tangible work being done to an excellent standard. That's all that matters.
Paying for time is disrespectful. I'm paying for results. This matches other trades within the community. I'm not paying a baker for 10 minutes of his time, I'm paying him 5 bucks for a loaf of bread (the result of his labor).
If I could pay programmers per loaf of bread produced, I would. But there is no "loaf of bread" metric available. All programming productivity metrics are flawed.
I wish I could upvote this 10 times.
Unfortunately this is also true:
> All programming productivity metrics are flawed.
so folks have to arrive at something.
You've arrived at:
> tangible work being done to an excellent standard
Which is a great place, and one where most folks who do 'side projects' or contracting land. (Side note: one of the things I loved about contracting is the matter of fact way most fellow contractors talked about rates and money, with none of the taboo there often is with full time employment.)
Employees with full time employment, I submit, have different norms of measuring success. Hours worked often, deliverables sometimes.
Halving the comp because an employee is twice as productive as you expected is certainly an option
That is of course problematic. My comment assumed a relatively healthy workplace where help is offered as well as more work.
> If I’m receiving high marks and positive feedback across the board, what are you trying to fix?
And only working 20 hours a week? Again, you need to do what works for you, but my understanding of the contract with an employer is that if someone is purposely doing less work than they've committed to, that's not good.
Flip it around a different way. If you signed up to do ~40 hours of work, but the employer structured things such that you regularly needed to work 60 hours a week, would you be okay with that as long as they gave you your salary? Or would you feel cheated?
I would feel cheated, myself.
This absolutely happens. Maybe not to the extreme of +/- 20 hours, but it certainly happens. Maybe I’m not good at handling burnout, or maybe I’m just sick of having to deal with it. But I’ve found a pace of work that allows me to both meet objectives and keep my sanity. If an employer is unwilling to work with me on those grounds, I’m going to favor my sanity.
As you should!
Perhaps my original comment was a bit flip and didn't properly outline the nuance.
The major points:
* there's a norm around hours for a full time job
* if employers and employees communicate openly about expectations (hours, output, whatever), it's all good
* if one side or the other violates the norms, adjustments should be madeWhile full-time work is 40 hours of work per week by convention, as a salaried employee, I'm not really paid by the hour, right? I'm paid to get what I'm supposed to do done correctly and on time. There may be some weeks I do have more than 40 hours of work to do, but there may be others when I have less. I don't get paid more in the exceptionally busy weeks, but I don't get paid less in the relatively light weeks, either.
So, when you write,
> my understanding of the contract with an employer is that if someone is purposely doing less work than they've committed to, that's not good.
My take is that we're not talking about that -- we're talking about people doing all the work they have committed to in less time than expected. I am being paid to write and maintain documentation for a software product; my success at that task is not directly measured by the hours that I put in.
Now, if you're being paid for a full-time job and you're consistently able to do all your work in 20 hours a week or less, this is probably a warning sign -- either you're not communicating to your employer that they're not giving you enough work, or the employer simply doesn't have enough work for you. In the former case, you may eventually be seen as not pulling your weight even if you're technically doing everything you're asked to do, and in the latter, your company may decide that they just don't have enough work to keep paying you -- or the company may be in trouble. I have experienced all of those things at various points (including being let go after a short time because I "wasn't proactive" in trying to get people to give me work, which was not entirely true from my perspective, although in retrospect I was a lousy fit for that job).
But, I've also been positions where work was effectively cyclical. There were periods where I was working a lot and periods where there just wasn't much stuff in the pipeline yet. While the answer to your last hypothetical is "yes, I'd feel cheated," I'd also feel cheated if the employer adjusted my salary down during weeks they only had 20 hours of work a week for me to do.
To bring this around to the original thread, I think the problem with "two full-time remote jobs I'm at concurrently" is that even if you're being paid for the tasks rather than the hours, there is a commitment of availability. Even as a technical writer, I need to be available to answer questions and work on unexpected high-priority tasks, even hot fixes -- that's part of what I'm on salary for.
I don't know of many people who give employers their full time energy. They'll give them X hours/day of their time Y days/week to work in some agreed upon venue in line with how other employees work.
The idea that someone who does well in an agreed upon role and doesn't need to spend X hours/day of their time Y days/week to perform in line with others should take on more work for the same pay is very managerial.
Along the same lines, if I hired an assistant to do something that took me 10 hours/week, and they did it in 5, I would view that positively.
On one hand, if I overestimated how much it takes for someone else to do that work, there's a good chance I can find someone else who will do that same amount of work for half the cost.
On the other hand, if I can't find someone else to do the work for half the cost, that implies the person I hired is very talented, and I would rather have someone talented/skilled as an assistant than someone who isn't as talented/skilled. Yes, I'm paying the talented/skilled person more per hour, but I'm ultimately paying someone to do something specific. I'm not trying to optimize how much work I extract from them for a given amount of money.
> * great, let's get you working on more deliverables, or
> * great, let's give you 50% of your pay
I would urge against this.
As a manager, what you have to deliver, is output, not work. Your team generates work, and your job is to find the right mix of team that meets that output given the other requirements (which are usually cost, time, or some mix of the two), and remove any blockers your team has towards providing you that output (not the work!) you need to deliver.
> I wonder how folks would feel if the situation were reversed. Say you hired an assistant to help you for 10 hours a week and they were meeting all their goals. Yay! Then, after a few months you find out they were charging you for 10 hours but only working 5. I don't know about you, but I'd feel pretty bummed.
You feel bummed because you overbid. If you're happy with the output and not the price and can do better, go ahead and shop around, but it's not your employees fault you don't know how much that help is worth.
> Some might say "well, just set the goals and the payment and let the assistant decide how much to work". That's called contracting, not employment. Goals change and it is hard to nail them down in a contract (it requires effort from both parties and is inflexible if things change).
That's called managing.
A pimp that is collecting a stable that they can pimp out to whatever goals they have (or their customers' have), must continuously work very hard to prove to their "employee" that they're actually helping them make more money (even including the vig!). How they "manage" that stable varies wildly, but only the output matters: If you don't bring them anything, they will walk. People who don't know what they're worth often have to work in this kind of environment, but communication speed is increasing, and the successful manager will not be able to rely on the ignorance of their team forever. At some point, the "manager" will have to start thinking about their goals, and decoding them into roles and responsibilities, instead of merely redistributing the goals like chum.
It makes a lot of sense to me that there's a big responsibility on the manager to build a team and to help them succeed. That's what I tried to do when I managed.
I still maintain that working at 50% effort (which time is a proxy for; whether that is a good idea is a different argument, but that's where we're at for most software jobs) for a sustained period of time as an employee is just as bad as an employer expecting you to work 50% more than you signed up for for a sustained period of time.
I found it to be quite a good example to communicate the point
Contractual problems, context-switching problems, conflict of interest problems, and from experience consulting, time problems since your two companies are very likely to want to have meetings at the same time. If you're an independent contributor at both companies and expectations are low you might be able to pull it off, but if you're a manager forget about it.
You still need a lot of conditions if you're not going to be getting into a lot of elaborate subterfuge and ridiculous amounts of work. A few off the top of my head.
If you're a full-time employee, it's a lot more imaginable if you have a contract gig somewhere else rather than a full-time job which almost no employer is going to be OK with.
You need a relatively light workload in that first job as an individual contributor. You can't have a lot of meetings, travel, and a fair bit of flexibility generally. You can't really be known in the industry at large.
If you can land a contractor job that takes you another 20 hours or so with someone non-competitive which also is largely independent work? And you keep that job pretty quiet.
Maybe. But that's imposing a lot of conditions and probably isn't really sustainable for any length of time. It's somewhat interesting as a thought exercise but seems pretty impractical outside of some narrow cases. And maybe that person is just better off consulting which puts everything above-board.
(Read "you" as "one", I guess)
For example: If you run social media accounts for ten companies with a similar market, you can gain leverage by cooperating with yourself and cross promoting between non competing accounts.
Meanwhile, high value employees becoming more expensive than ever. Fractional approach is amazing for startups who get it. Still: A lot of CEOs still stuck in previous ways of thinking or have genuine concerns about legal liabilities. Hiring someone fractionally has a big problem depending on what agreements that person is expected to sign. To make it work legally would need multiple companies to agree to same terms (unlikely).
It is a weird phenomenon and a lot of it is kind of soft under the table with a wink.
I think people wanting to do this via DAO or other might be served by coming up with some common legal framework that they require employers to sign onto.
That, in turn, might require DAOs to have sufficient market negotiation power (you can’t hire programmer XXX unless you agree to our DAO terms YYY). Starts to resemble a Union.
I once stayed very close to the Clinton Hill, Brooklyn location they mention, and may be in the market for an apartment/home soon.
Do you or your father have any pointers for evaluating a building like that? Or any ways to keep up to date on such developments?
I'm sorta surprised it's in NYC because my understanding is that city living is already efficient compared to single family home living? i.e. in terms of the energy cost per person.
Also I imagine older buildings are not great in terms of efficiency compared to new construction. One thing I noticed in NYC is that even relatively expensive (e.g. pre-war) buildings have in-window A/C units.
It's not for everyone, certainly, but it's a dream for me.