SRE has 5 full-time jobs and makes $1.2M a year | Hacker News Reader

SRE has 5 full-time jobs and makes $1.2M a year

old.reddit.com

23 pointsbiohax20157 comments

IANAL, but this sounds illegal or at least an immoral thing to do. It's one thing to not be given work or to be given a small amount of work that can be done very quickly, and to use the rest of the downtime to do work for someone else, but it's quite another to lie to your employers about what you're doing. OP talks about how when people ask him what he's working on, he'll lie and say "oh, I'm blocked by X". That just feels wrong to me.

If I had a job that realistically only gave me 10 hours of work per week, I wouldn't mind picking up a second job to fill in the rest of the time. But if my job is giving me 40 hours of work per week, and I'm lying about the progress of it so I can maintain 2+ jobs, that feels like fraud in some capacity. Maybe not in a legal sense, but in a professional sense, perhaps.

Any other insights here?

Where do they say that they lie about progress? They literally use the free time within a role to find another role.

They could get fired, but immoral? Come on. You don't own your employees. Employees aren't resources, they are people.

Pay your engineer 1M and they won't find another job. Probably they'll start reading War and Peace, or contribute to Linux Kernel, or something.

He says it in some of the comments further down:

https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...

> There's a lot of sighing, a lot of "ahh this roadblock", a lot of "I ran out of time this week". There's been a ton of times that even I have been like "There is no way they actually take this excuse" and they always do.

He's basically saying "oops, I ran into a roadblock" or "I ran out of time" but he's not actually doing the work, so he's effectively lying to his bosses. This is not "free time".

https://old.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/s12c8l/i_star...

> I hang out at my desk from 8-5. Either working or playing games, or redditing, or whatever. I'm on call for 4 of the jobs, but they don't even know what that is supposed to mean so *I either ignore the pages* or never get called. I don't have any kids, so I don't know how big of a wrench that might throw in to things.

Here he's literally saying he knowingly ignores his job duties.

I cannot imagine any job that has this little work and pays this much. I find it highly unlikely this person netted 5 of them back-to-back.

The only situations that I have heard of where this exists is when departments merge and some people are let go and then someone whose boss was let go remains employed because everyone knows they keep X running and that that is important, but no one knows how or what is involved and doesn’t really care as long as it is working.

Everything you read on the internet is true.

- Mark Twain

but I think this is totally doable considering current situation

5 full-time jobs at 40+ weekly hours each would be 200 hours worked per week, which this person clearly does not put in.

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