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Comment by serp002 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure fraud is the right word, but the companies are expecting him to be working 40hrs a week and I'm guessing he is not doing that, which is at the very least dishonest. Perhaps he is actually working 80hrs a week in which case this is not fraud for sure.

But he mentions someone had 7 jobs and was working 20(??) hours a week which means he's basically scamming all those companies.

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In my experience of highly paid tech jobs you're generally on salary and your work is managed by some clueless project manager with some notion of how many points you can accomplish in a week. If you find yourself in that situation, and you can do "40hrs" of work in 10 hours, getting a second or even third job of that nature seems like the quickest way to increase your earnings.

You will not convince me you can complete "40hrs" of work in "10 hours," doofus.

That's just 10 hours of more effective work. The other 30 hours you're lying to me and cheating me out of what I'm paying you.

Of course, you can get away with it, because you're clever, there's way too much money in tech jobs sometimes, and people are trusting - and you deliver! Even if the work product is only meh; it's better than what those other chumps were doing, right?!

Until you get caught; until someone in the recruiting community in your field/stack/industry catches wind of this post or that post; or you slip up and double book stakeholder meetings; or your background check shows multiple employers; or ....

Hiring is guessing.

I disagree that an employer is paying for 40 hours of my time: They're paying for output and results. I think rational employer would concede the same.

> Until you get caught

It's not as true today, but across 2020/2021 that couldn't possibly matter less. If this person was caught, then what? They fire them and give them 4-12 weeks severance? A year ago a good dev could have another job lined up before sundown.

That depends on what your contract says, I definitely get paid for x hours of work.

Regardless of whether the managers are clueless or not, software companies operate on trust that the engineers' estimates of how long work will take, is based on the difficulty of the work with the natural assumption that you are devoting all your working hours to that work, and that there's not some hidden multiplier in your work estimates because you're splitting time with other jobs.

Unless you tell your team and your manager "I only work 1/x of my time at this job", it is deceit.

CEOs can be CEO's of multiple companies, why cant employees be employees of multiple companies if they are doing the job.

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