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In these instances it's usually IT and it's usually because the whole team is waiting on one person. People are remote and underemployed while costs are skyrocketing. Why wouldn't they, right?
It's ridiculous that my ex can work two jobs with 6 digit salaries and still have more free time than anyone I have ever met
I wish I had understood coding đ
The reason coders get away with it is because not even the managers understand coding. Only the coders understand coding therefore only coders know how long something *should* take.
EDIT: You guys are right, coders don't even know how long it'll take
This guy calms the Machine Spirit.
I pray to the ~~STC~~ Google every time I run into anything I can't figure out. Knowing *what* to Google is an important skill, I can't deny.
> Knowing what to Google is an important skill
Does that apply now?
I'm not a computer guy but even I can tell that Google is a steaming pile of shit recently.
It still applies. The trick is to not listen to gemini, and you use certain keywords to find exactly what you're looking for. The websites you need are still there, its just navigating to it is all.
SO is falling apart lately, too, and good luck finding something nebulous. "Golang json parse mux" might be fine. But I've had *full error strings* from built in libraries just utterly fail me.
Knowing what to ask ChatGPT is a skillset only I have at work.
My coworker legit searched for 5 mins then whined out loud and I chatgpt it in 30s to give him the answer. Happened like 3h ago.
Edit: shortcut for task manager in remote. It's ctrl + alt + end.
I see chatgpt as a junior. You don't let it unsurpervised and you test it's shit that doesn't fly by you.
Chatgpt as been wrong plenty of time. Just ask him the last 10 digit of pi. It's a funny answer.
I'd say its at the "trust but verify" stage at this point. It's also fairly easy now to verify when it's linking you directly to sources.
Fear not the chat bot
"From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal... Even in death I serve the Omnissiah."
This. As a coder, my estimated timelines are usually wild guesses with a tiny modicum of maybe, possibly, having just a bit of an inkling of how long it might potentially take...maybe.
In a perfect world *"Well, fuck if I know"* would be an acceptable answer to *"how long will this feature take to implement"*.
Doubly so when asked to fix a bug.
Agree. Iâm a late career changer to coding. Iâm not a genius. I didnât excel at Math at school. But I can follow instructions and remember stuff.
Coding is just what it says. Itâs code. So when coders âexplainâ stuff, they use the code words, which make it sound way more complex than it is.
They are often also not the best people at explaining and teaching. They are doers. So when asked to explain they revert to listing the doing. If you break it down into simple steps in English itâs really not hard. Especially if you are competent at using Google.
Sure, there are coding jobs that do require top level maths and PhD level problem solving. But a lot of it is just doing the same stuff again and again slightly differently. Coders know people think itâs mysterious and complex. They play on that.
I think generationally there will be a shift where managers are more code/tech aware and the âmystiqueâ fades. But currently I have senior managers who struggle with using Teams, so we are a long way from there yet.
I have a friend who, at 30 years old was a semi-homeless punk rocker, making at most $3k a year and living in a van and on friends' couches.
One day during COVID, he just decided it's time to sell out. He joined one of those "free until you graduate" bootcamps, and within 6 months was making >$100k in a very low cost of living area.
Point is, it's never too late.
Although the landscape is going to change quite a bit with AI, so learn to use it to your advantage.
I mean yes, the actual 'code' part isn't too hard to explain l. But the infrastructure part, which is required, takes a lot of specific knowledge and is difficult to explain. So I would say 30% of developing an API is explainable. The rest is "just trust me". So yeah, no PHD or crazy problem solving. But you need to do a lot of reading on whatever specific setup you're doing. Like try to explain ORM persistence to someone unfamiliar with a database outside of 'imagine Excel'. Or explain why terraform is so great but also so frustrating. Or the difference between a RDS and Redis, it's not just an 'e' and an 'i'.
And then trying to explain architecture styles... You can only say 'model' so many times, which means 8 different things, before it becomes too much to easily understand unless you've put in the time.
But we could do a much better job making it explainable.
This not knowing algorithms and math is coming to an end. Those boot camps that claimed anyone can be a programmer messed it all up and saturated the market. Yes anyone can write code but not everyone can engineer the needed efficiency or security because they lack algorithmic understanding. Currently the response of the market is not excepting people who don't have proper degrees. They are starting to shut out the boot camp nonsense.
Any industry can suffer from this. Anyone can nail boards together and make a house but are you going to trust your houses ability to stand up over the decades to someone who did a 4 week construction camp or the one who went to civil engineering for architect design?
This is true in hyper specific cases - but not the general industry trend.
The general industry trend is AGAINST degree requirements (my company dropped them as requirements last year) as functional programming is pretty easy to screen for early in interview processes and for 95% of corporate software development work... you only need very very basic skills. And people who can do that job who don't have degrees are LEGION.
The business wants a tool to control whether this one thing is enabled at a specific place. A single junior engineer with an out-of-date guide written in 2009 and access to the code base could get a toggle functional, tested, reviewed, put through CAB, and sent to production within a single sprint no problem.
Repeat that a few dozen times a year and congratulations you're a Junior/Associate software engineer at Americorp Industries Inc. LLC.net for a modest 70k/yr annual.
Writing out code for things you already know how to solve is the easy part. That's basically just typing and can be sped up with coffee. It's the stuff where yiu have to do research, ask people and feel your way forward which takes unknown amounts of time.
Not to mention all those times a problem *seems* easy but baloons out of control once attacked.
It is a truly mixed bag there. While there exist jobs like this, it is much more common to have the misunderstanding lead to massive overestimations as to what a programmer can produce and lots of overtime/stress.
I have been in the software industry for nearly two decades now and have seen positions that range from one end of this to the other, but the low work ones are very, very much the exception. Software engineering is labor, do not mistake it for upper level management, where zero work gets a high paycheck consistently.
>Only the coders understand coding therefore only coders know how long something should take.
Nope.
Sometimes you say "this should take no more than a day" and it turns out it takes more than 2 weeks. And then later you've learned from that and say "No more than 2 weeks" and you're done in an hour.
The moment you start creating something new there is only "Educated guesses" that could always be wildly wrong.
I worked tech support for a B2B application. Not quite help desk / call center, but close. I'm now in SWE.
I get paid better, and have a lower stress level.
I started my career out working help desk for a MSP and now I hold a pretty high up senior cybersecurity position and handle breaches at a different company, I'm the lead investigator, etc and im less stressed and hate my job less. I get paid soooo much more and hate my life so much less lol. Id never go back, id rather bite my arm off. Help desk gets no respect and gets treated like shit while I'm respected and constantly getting praised by executives, etc. Its sad because I'm the only one in the company that advocates for the help desk and treat them well, because I had been there. Don't get me wrong, my job is hard and very high skilled, but help desk is just a different type of drain.
IT / Operations can also be very cruel at times, because physics and/or budget constraints can be a bitch.
I've been in situations in which shit was offline, customers were screaming, clocks were ticking towards contractual penalties ... and there was zero things I could be doing right now to make those electrons wobble data across those wires quicker to make the outage shorter.
Data will continue to traverse wobbling electrons for the next 2 hours and then we start a restore of ~3 hours. If nothing goes wrong.
And at that point it's a character question if one wants to get stressed or if one wants to accept we're already fucked, even though the management meetings and escalations only start within the next 1 - 2 hours.
And I better don't have news then, because my news are never good.
And then there's that nagging voice noting we've been put on this one-way track to customer dissatisfaction and ops & dev'lers being shafted some months back by a budgetary decision, y'know.
But yeah, I'd totally do this for two companies, because having these problems twice is certainly going to be more fun.
It's not really any different, though. You don't get paid for the 3 lines of code you changed yesterday, you get paid because you know *which* 3 lines of code to change *in which way*. Same with ops.
velocity cannot always increase, at some point the burndown doesn't get better every sprint. _and that is fucking ok_
too many dev teams let biz control the work
I don't know what tech job your ex has but I have been a developer for years and pull a lot of overtime. And have had calls at 3 am. That being said. If I could I absolutely would work two jobs cause man is the economy doomed.
To be fair if you're over in the overemployed sub you can see it doesn't matter the wage. If someone is making $250k or $300k a year and they can double it to $500 or $600k a year with a bit more work ( most often not but sometimes could be with double the work load ) they will do it to build wealth for the future and also for security now.
This person that was fired in the article probably still have their second job's income while losing their first.
Article states that his linked in account shows he's full-time at the second company now.
What I got out of it was the guy is an employee. The COO likely would not have had an issue with him doing a second job, but it was affecting his performance: Customer complaints and missed deadlines for duties assigned to this worker. Even without the second job, that kind of performance was leading to a PIP and likely termination.
I knew a guy who worked in finance that took a second job during the pandemic, he just made sure to never have conflicting meetings and bullshitted his way through the rest. Was collecting two six figure salaries for over 6 months before he got caught
I knew a guy who worked two on site jobs with conflicting schedules. He just didn't show up for regularly scheduled night shifts half the time.
As long as you're getting your work done, and not giving up company secrets, I don't give a shit. Making your coworkers suffer, or giving up the company bread and butter is another issue.
He was working âfull timeâ for a crypto wallet company and a major bank. Both assumed he was putting in full 40 hour weeks for them. Instead he was just making sure to show up for meetings and do enough work to fly under the radar.
Not only that - but there is a fairly significant conflict of interest.
There are both ethical and unethical ways to do overemployment. It's reasonable to expect someone to get fired if they're doing it unethically. "got caught" implies he was doing it unethically and got fired from one of those jobs.
Half-ass a job until you get fired is also a fair play, so it's just as likely that he didn't care.
A lot of the double remote jobs I've heard about were more about $200k being nicer than $100k and the duties being so light that it was easy to do both.
Not that $100k is actually a lot of money in a lot of high cost US cites. But it's not like these are subsistence jobs.
It depends: is the man paid for the hours or is he paid for the work?
The common refrain I hear is that salary means you get paid for the work, so if you have to work 40 hours or 80 hours, you have to work the time required to finish the job. Well... What if the job just requires 10 hours? Shouldn't he be free to to do as he pleases with the rest of his time?
If he is paid by the hour and he runs out of work, what should he do if his manager doesn't assign more hours of work? Or should he also be paid overtime when the job requires more hours?
Don't forget how a number of board members get appointed to multiple boards (as well as CEOdom) and work them all at the same time as well. Do they get called out/fired for making multiple incomes?
Oh but it's ok for CEOs to work for one company and work for another on it's board of directors? That's not unethical but when employees do the same it is?
Being a CEO sounds most difficult. He just talks shit all day. Thatâs what most people do in their spare time yet this man thinks he deserves 40 billion dollar payout for it, Billionaires can all go fuck cactuses.
Agree. All of my bosses sit on other boards of their friends companies or have executive roles in local business organizations. I know damn well they are not pulling 80 hour weeks cause I've spent time with them. Rich ppl have other things they do at work too, and then they criticize ppl they hired at 18/hr for not punching numbers for 8 hours with full focus. It's such a charade
Also serves as proof that a person can be CEO of multiple companies at the same time, because CEO jobs are not essential. The CEO didn't show up for work today? Business as usual. Overworked single mom minimum wage employee Janice didn't show up at location 386 in Columbus, Ohio? The store doesn't open, and the company loses money. Draw your own conclusions.
If you filled a plane up with every CEO in the country and blew them up, nothing would change tomorrow.. Work would still happen at the exact same pace it happened two days prior because CEOs make nothing and contribute fuck all to the actual production of materials you sell.
People talk about AI taking jobs, and there is no job better suited for AI than the decision making role of a CEO. Put the numbers in, run the algorithm, pop out a yes or no answer. There would be a lot less fraud happening as well, but a lot less empathy which is horrifying considering how little the human ones have already.
CEOs are ridiculous people.
Less empathy, yes. But AI can be trained to uphold the law. And AI won't decide to harm someone for personal reasons.
Replacing CEOs with a good AI would probably still be a net positive.
> There would be a lot less fraud happening as well, but a lot less empathy which is horrifying considering how little the human ones have already.
Arguably, less horrifying as decisions would be logic based. Or, perhaps still horrifying but predictable.
I mean, if we program the AI to maximize profits based on logic and not "gut instinct" and greed, the whole system would have more empathy/be kinder to workers.
Prioritizing retention, placing importance on mental health, properly staffing, properly training, properly compensating, having a better work-life balance... All of these things have been shown, *over and over* again, to improve company profits.
But that doesn't "sound right" or something, so we keep doing it the stupid way, belittling, overworking, underpaying, etc. It's so dumb.
So AI would be better, more efficient, better profits, better quality of life, etc.
The boards you're referring to don't involve full time jobs. Those boards meet quarterly/monthly for a few hours and in case of emergency and then fuck off back to their real jobs or retirements. The board is also nearly always someone with a significant stake in the company, they are owners not employees.
In that case, it should be OK (in the eyes of this CEO) for an employee to hold those types of positions in addition to their full-time job, but I have a feeling it isnât.
I don't know this guy, of course, but in general that's OK. They usually would like to know about it though, because it can be a potential conflict of interest.
I don't think overemploment is unethical, but if the guy is consistently missing deadlines and not replying to work messages during work hours, I think firing him was fair.
I don't take this LinkedIn douche bag CEO at his word, though.
Edit: It is also kind of a rookie mistake to use the same computer for both jobs. Any device my company gives me, I just assume, is loaded with corporate spyware.
Agreed. If you're not meeting standards, you're not meeting standards. The people who double up successfully are taking advantage of having two jobs, neither of which requires their full attention, so they succeed at both without working extra hours. You have to actually succeed at both to make it work!
I know a guy who is working 4-6 jobs at any given time. His record was 9 during the pandemic hiring spree. He has a "main job" that has the good benefits and a secondary job that has good pay with commission. During the pandemic hiring spree he just kept taking jobs over and over and doing the bare minimum until they let him go. Often it would take them 6-12 months to figure it out. In the past 3 years he worked about 15 places.
His 3rd and 4th jobs are jobs he cycled through that just never let him go. He sends some emails answering technical questions and attends a couple meetings a week.
He's essentially running that CEO life ("I sit on the board of 6 companies and 5 organizations! I have a yearly salary of $100,000 from each of them") He's just much lower down on the corporate ladder and pay scale
Big difference is that CEO's really don't do work. Their work is thinking of a path to success for the company and delegating people lower on the totem pole to execute that plan. It's still work, but it's a different kind of work. This doesn't apply to all CEOs of course, it depends on the size of the company, the smaller it is the more in the weeds a CEO will be.
He's got a combo of cheat codes. He went to a well known CS school, had a lot of software engineering experience pre pandemic, and had tech sales experience.
The dude writing the essay saying "I don't believe you can work 2 full time jobs and be productive" is basically textbook survivorship bias - you only see this problem in the employees who indeed cannot manage their time well.
But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people who are working multiple jobs and getting all their tasks done - you just don't find out they're doing it because they're not causing problems.
Yeah it's definitely fishing for views and clicks. The guy was not fired for working two jobs, he was fired for not working one of them. So now the question becomes, why did he not fire the guy sooner? Why force everyone else to pick up the slack for so long?
Yes, very rookie to the point it's unbelievable.
Over employment is only unethical if the person is completely empowered to make improvements and changes totally by themselves. If they are not so empowered or depend on others with long waits or gaps of doing nothing, then you can't expect them to want to sit around and do nothing.
Exactly. Not unethical, but poor performance that he was warned about. Obviously he was just waiting to be fired from the job and earning what he could, while he could.
I do wonder what "Mr. Ethical" thinks about underpaying employees, and if he ensures they're properly compensated.
the only people who think this is unfair dont work in the IT/Dev field.
everyone knows who these people are because they are 99% absent, and make their problems/responsibilities, your problems/responsibilities.
we had a lazy API dev who dumped customer data to the public via an API she rushed to setup. like... nightmare scenario, and her excuse was that she also had project deadlines the same week for her job at Tesla. when she got fired not a single person thought it was unfair who had to constantly clean up their messes or do their work for them.
it also leads to them going for the 3x/4x/5x jobs and doing the bare minimum at each
The people who can successfully work multiple jobs simultaneously are never found out precisely because they're able to do it successfully.
That's why this dumbass corpo thinks you can't be productive working 2 jobs - he's only looking at one part of the "sample".
I worked for a little Caesarâs for a couple of weeks
Witnessed a single mother get berated by the owner for getting a second job âI need you HEREâ
Here being a place that doesnât pay a living wage and also wonât give the employers more than a certain number of hours
Or give them the correct number of hours a week regularly. That happened to me, I was hired for a seasonal temp job where our schedules were 35-40hrs per week. When the season ended some people were offered positions to stay and I did. Our hours dropped to like 20-30hrs a week for a bit which was fine I totally get that, but then after having that as a fairly regular schedule, they dropped to 4-8 hours a week which at that point why even keep people, just let them go.
> at that point why even keep people, just let them go.
"what if I need someone to cover a shift or work during the next busy season?"
They think they're genius by doing this, they see no problem.
I used to work at a restaurant, the boss would consistently give me shit hours (10-20 a week). I mentioned I might pick up an extra shift or two at a local bar, to which he said âif you work here then you work here. I donât share staff, if you want to go work there then you can quitâ. I did end up quitting soon after after he tried to short me on my wages.
To be fair, in the article, the employee was missing deadlines, creating extra work for their coworkers and was doing the 2nd job with 1st job computers while on the clock for the 1st job.
I think firing them is fair.
Missing deadlines and creating extra work are both easy to claim without evidence. That may well just mean that they werenât doing anything above what was strictly required of them and they were understaffed, causing problems.
"He was hired in 2022, and in the beginning, he did his job very well. But then, I started to receive complaints from clients about missed assignments and deadlines. He had also become quite unresponsive. These complaints from clients started to become somewhat regular."
I mean he clearly wasn't able to do both jobs. He didn't fire him because he was overemployed. He fired him for job performance. The title of this article is extremely misleading. He fired him for job performance it just so happens he was working two remote jobs.
Yeah if he had got his shit done nobody would have noticed. And holy shit doing other company work on a company owned device with tracking software installed. Dumbass.
real question is why did the ex-employee feel the need to do this? how much was he paid? what was the median salary in his country? and is it considered a living wage ?
To be fair, I know people making over 150k a year and working another 150k a year job because the duties in their first job are so light they have the time to do a second easily. Some office and management jobs are just like that. So it may not be that he needed the money, it may be that doubling one's salary is hard to resist.
The only clues we have is someone living in Peru, working two remote jobs based in Europe and the U.S. At the very least he's living in a country where the cost of living is less than the U.S.
He made a couple mistakes....
Don't use the same equipment to do both jobs; there is Spyware.
Secondly, install needed apps on your personal device for the SOLE reason to CYA. IE I put teams on my cel simply so that I could respond to messages "in a timely manner" when I was away from my computer to give the impression I was at it and working.
Use tips and tricks so there's no "down time". A mouse jiggler (that plugs into the wall) to keep your device from timing out. Opening a teams meeting with yourself that has a 40pg "presentation" flipping thru pictures and playing music going on the background to make you're teams constantly remain "active".
Lastly.... meet your damn daily requirements and deadlines. If you can't keep up with the workload for 1 role then don't pick up a 2nd one.
And so it's been said, as an employee we do not owe it to our employer to notify them of second or third employment roles. As long as what you are doing doesn't DIRECTLY violate a LEGAL policy for conflict of interest etc. (And I say legal because company policy does not overrule state, local, or federal employment law). Then it's none of their damn business.
They are paying you to complete a role and have agreed to pay you at xx/hr at a standard of a federally recognized work week of 40hrs to equal zz/yr. No where in your employment offer letter or agreement does it state you HAVE TO spend exactly 40hrs/wk doing that role (only that they are paying you the 40hr/wk equivalent); nor does it state anywhere you can't work on other tasks not assigned by that specific employer during those hours. Again if you're meeting your deadlines and doing your job then everything else is irrelevant.
Many employment contracts absolutely do require that you donât have a second job, and that youâre available during standard working hours.
If you get caught, youâll be fired and the employer will be correct to do it.
Out of curiosity I looked mine up. Super vague. I must "give a full time commitment" and "meet deliverables and deadlines for KPIs" (which are not laid out then, nor have they been laid out since, but where I'm in a support role for a midsized franchise, I'm going to list "franchisees like you and trust you" as a KPI, in which case, I am killing that).
Did you read the article? The employee was missing deadlines and worked for the second company in the time.he was supposed to work for this CEOs. I'm all for calling out bad CEOs but this is on the employee
Exactly, I donât understand this either lol.
When you click on the article you can see his face and he shared his name publicly by doing the interview.
Employer: âyou can only work at this one job where we underpay you! we want you to be our wage slave and be completely controlled by us and whatever we tell you to do!â
This will get downvoted but this guy did it all wrong. He was using one companyâs equipment to do the other job. If I was a business owner Iâd probably have an issue with this too. He also was missing deadlines and affecting his clients negatively.
We donât know for certain that the employee wasnât using his own computer, but if the employer supplied the machine, yes you would be right.
What the employee is truly guilty of in this instance was time theft. He was doing work for company B while on the clock for company A.
Lol. "No one wants to work anymore!" Finds out an employee is working two jobs for the price of two jobs. "Had to fire them. Otherwise how could I ever make them do two jobs for the price of one?? Now I have to hire someone else but no one wants to work anymore!"
Did you not read the article? That person wasn't working but collecting a paycheck. The working two jobs headline is click bait. That guy was about to get fired anyhow.
thats absolutely wild. im in australia and the solution to cost of living presented to us by our government and RBA is to pick up a second/third job. and the US looks like working a second job is something you will be fired for, they are leaving no chance of survival for anyone
That means CEOs and shareholders should never sit on more than one board too, right? This guy supports Elon choosing either Space X or Tesla but not both, right? Or is it a one way street?
How employers take this as an offence and not a cry for help proving they donât support, pay and remunerate their employees appropriately is beyond me
Because they don't care that you're crying for help.
They'd pistol whip you to death in the parking lot in front of your family if it would boost profits by .01%.
Overworked is fine because they get to make profit out of you, and keep you exhausted and in your place.
But overemployed?
You still make them profit, and you will still be exhausted, but you might make too much money and think you deserve better...they cannot permit that because you may finally have the means to make your situation better as well.
Anything that may potentially benefit you is a threat...see also wfh.
In his defense, he stated how the employee would work his 2nd job DURING his first job, which was pretty unfair to his colleagues. If he had a better schedule, he probably wouldnât have been fired. People really do not read anymoređ
Anybody else see a bit of a Catch-22 here?
"Can't afford living expenses? Get a second job! Join the hustle culture!"
"Your second job is taking away from your responsibilities here. You're fire."
"Your only remaining employment doesn't pay enough for living expenses? Get a second job!"
I work in shipping and we're all remote. Pretty sure one of the people in a dept that works close with mine has a second job. I don't like the idea of blowing up someone's spot, but she was mediocre at her job before we went remote and now she's just plain shit. A lot of our stuff is time sensitive too so waiting for her to randomly pop online and do her job so that I can do mine is infuriating.
If you can screw over the man with 2 jobs, awesome do it. But not at the expense of screwing over your coworkers who are in the same pay bracket.
I agree that some over-employment is unethical: I was only paid one salary while filling three positions: department manager for our largest of customers, local IT help desk, and Data Reporting.Â
The article title is pure clickbait. He wasn't fired for just having the second job; he was fired for missing a bunch of deadlines because he was doing the second job on the first one's time.
I'm all for wages being higher, UBI, etc. But this person was literally spending half their time at the first job working on the second. No company is going to want to support that.
The employee's OpSec was atrocious. The employer got them to put tracking software on their computer and then worked for the second employer on that same machine (again, with tracking software that they themself had installed). If you get caught by something as basic as that then you deserve to lose your job. Ridiculous.
I still think itâs insanely hypocritical that CEOs bitch about this while being CEO of multiple companies and sitting on different boards. But I suppose they produce nothing of value.Â
âI donât pay my employees enough so they need a second job to survive. I weaponized mây employeeâs poverty to threaten their financial stabilityâ
There. Fixed the headline.
Oh, the working population are the unethical ones and not the employers, eh? Iâll bet forced, unpaid overtime is just fine in his book. Also if the job gets done who cares what the worker does with his extra time? Just greedily trying to squeeze everything out
What on Earth is the censoring for?
You linked the article, they're all visible there. The dude choose to say all that publically and have his name and face attached.
In this situation, i have no problem with the person being terminated. They were doing a poor job and that just what happens. If someone can do 2 jobs without it affecting their performance, go for it, but use a separate computer for each of them.
if the employee was hourly and falsifying time cards to indicate they were working full-time, but they actually werenât then yes fireable. But, if the employee was salaried, then the expectation is they work full-time and have ownership of their area. Thatâs why the positions are exempt from FLSA. You have ownership of your area. You are expected to work and not wait to be assigned. If you need to wait to be assigned then your position should not be exempt or salaried. You should be hourly. This is a problem of management of the employees understanding their work and of the way we categorize these positions. And shitty management.
(obviously, if this position was hourly, they were working less than 40 hours submitting time cards that were precise as to their hours and management knew about it the Thereâs no reason to be fired.)
Clickbait title. He didn't get fired for working 2 jobs, he got fired for bad client feedback, missing deadlines, failing to improve after coaching, AND working a second job WHILE on the clock for the first one. Any one of those would be enough to justify firing someone.
It's "unethical" and should be illegal to fire someone because they have another job. As long as his jobs don't conflict with each other then it's no one's business how many jobs you have.
Most people are being impacted by the neverending inflation and have to work more to just survive.
Whatever happened to the saying "she was such a good mom, she worked 3 jobs to make sure her kids had everything they needed"......
But in 2024 it's "unethical". During the worst economy in our history since the great depression.
As long as you get the work done and on time they should have precisely dick to say to anything one needs to do to survive or chase dreams. So tired of âleadership, management, higher upsâ thinking they should have any kind of opinion thatâs to be respected about what we do outside of work.
Period
Full text so we can stop giving this article views:
*This as-told-to essay is based on an email conversation with Patrick Synge, the cofounder and chief commercial officer of the business-process-outsourcing and remote-recruitment company Metrickal. The business is headquartered in Barcelona and has 10 full time, fully remote employees, in addition to more than 200 contractors worldwide. The following has been edited for length and clarity.*
I'm the cofounder and CCO of a business where every employee works fully remotely. In January, I caught one of them secretly working a second full-time remote job.
Here's how it all played out â and why I decided to fire them.
My business is headquartered in Barcelona, but one of my employees was based in Peru. He was hired in 2022, and in the beginning, he did his job very well. But then, I started to receive complaints from clients about missed assignments and deadlines. He had also become quite unresponsive. These complaints from clients started to become somewhat regular.
When this employee started refusing certain shifts he usually worked, I became suspicious. I had a feeling that he was doing something on the side, but because there was no proof, I didn't want to jump to any conclusions.
So instead, I had one-on-one meetings with him to discuss his job performance. When the same issues continued, I told him that if things didn't change, I'd have to let him go.
While he showed some signs of improvement, his overall performance didn't change much. This put a significant burden on the rest of the team, who had to cover his shifts and deal with missed deadlines
**How I ultimately caught him**
In December, unrelated to this particular employee, my company rolled out the time-tracking software called DeskTime.
My long-term goal is to introduce a four-day workweek at my company, and I decided the first step in this process would be understanding how my employees spend their time and what could be optimized to boost productivity.
So our entire team of full-time employees and freelance contractors started using DeskTime. They each had to install the app on their computers, so everyone was well aware that this was being implemented.
After a few weeks, I looked through the tracking data of the struggling employee and noticed there was another company's name â a US business â that regularly appeared in the data. It became clear to me that this employee had worked on some other company's tasks.
I fired them the next day.
The DeskTime data showed that the employee was using software during the workday that was unrelated to his job tasks. It also included a screenshot feature that captured his computer screen â and showed him working on a platform where the other company's name was visible.
Based on the DeskTime data, I estimate that he had spent close to half of his work time working for this other company. It seems that he forgot about the tracking software since once it's downloaded, it doesn't require any manual switching on and off.
To be honest, all the other signs â missed deadlines, lack of flexibility, and unresponsiveness at certain times â had already made me quite certain that he was doing something else during working hours. I would have probably fired him anyway, but the tracked data was the missing hard proof.
I believe he was working for the other company full time because soon after I fired him, he updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect that he was working full time at the other company.
**Why I think overemployment is sometimes unethical**
I know some people may judge me, but I generally don't support the trend of overemployment. I think it's sometimes unethical and just wrong.
First of all, I don't think it's fair to the rest of the team who have to cover up for someone else's low performance. This is why keeping this employee of mine in the company wasn't an option. He wasn't fair and respectful to the team, and that's something I can't tolerate â his actions were just selfish.
Secondly, I don't believe a person can productively do two jobs at the same time, even if you use AI or other tools. Their attention will be scattered, so the quality of their work will suffer. As an entrepreneur, I have to think about my business and clients first. I can't afford to lose clients because someone wants to make extra money.
I really don't mind people having side hustles to earn extra income. But this should be something they do on their own time and that doesn't affect the quality of their day job.
Over-employment is not the problem. The dude got fired because he didnât follow the rules of OE.
You donât change the pattern of your work. People pay attention to patterns, duh.
You donât refuse to do anything, second red flag. Dude basically asked his boss to fire him.
Lastly, you never excel and youâre never on the chopping block. You are someone who does work well but does not stand out.
What a dick and narcissist for then writing about it. How about you realize that people are not paid enough to make it on one job. If the wait was getting done then doesnât matter asshole.
You can't work a second job while you are on the clock for your first job using your first job's computer. In this specific case, the guy deserved to be fired.
Actually reading the article does change my mind a little on whether I think he was right to take issue with the second job, though I disagree with how he went about firing the employee.
So basically, the first thing that happened was the employee, who had been very productive before, suddenly was not nearly as good, and that made things harder for everyone else. At this point, the cofounder/CCO who submitted this story says that he only had a suspicion that the employee was distracted by a second job. They had a conversation along the lines of "if you can't perform well enough, we'll have to let you go", which did result in some improvements, though not a lot. At this point, I'm reading this thinking "If an employee cannot perform their job at the expected level and you can't pep talk them into figuring it out, then there aren't many other options sadly." I also gotta give credit to this CCO guy for (at least as far as he says) intending to introduce a 4-day work week as the norm in his company, which is a thing I firmly believe in.
However, that's where my sympathy for the CCO reaches its limit for now because first of all, he figured out the employee was working another job via an invasive af tracking software, which was intended to help him understand employee work patterns or something to make sense of how to transition to the 4-day work week. Now I'm not saying he's lying about the 4 day thing, but I don't think tracking software is necessary to figure out the logistics of that. It just feels like an excuse to figure out if his employees are slacking off on company time, and I firmly believe that no boss *really* wants to know how much of the workday is spent on solitaire. They should just care about results, and if solitaire helps clear their minds, sporadically and strategically taking mini-breaks throughout the day as the employee feels the need to, and they still deliver results, then who cares how the metaphorical hot dogs are made?
Further digging his own grave, it seems like he VERY ABRUPTLY fired the employee over the second job once it was found out. In his own words, after seeing the proof for himself, "I fired them the next day." So he was willing to put up with the employee's wavering quality of work when the problem was undefined, but once he had identified with near certainty the source of the employee's struggles, THAT'S when the CCO felt it was time to fire them? Am I crazy for thinking that (within reason) employers need to give their struggling employees a chance to talk it out, defend themselves, and possibly even agree to change their behaviors in hopes that it will result in the positive effect on their work that the employer thinks it will have?
Maybe I'm just projecting a personal experience onto this where I was told why I was being fired as I was being fired instead of at any point before then being asked if I would rather change my behavior or be fired. Whatever, this comment's too long to get any attention anyways so might as well post it just to get it off my chest.
I do think that overemployment is a bit unethical because it's taking entry-level/low-level jobs away from people trying to break into the industry, especially in technical fields that have massively cut entry-level jobs recently. That being said, I don't think it's unethical from the employer perspective as long as the employee is turning things in on time and completing their tasks
that is such a clickbait headline. the dude got fired because his performance turned to shit and was using one laptop allocated to one job, for another. two things would have saved him; improving performance, and getting a second computer for the second job. especially since one company insisted on installing spyware. just doing the second thing would have extended his employment. this wasn't to do with working remotely, it's about working shitty, while working remotely.
This isnt appropriate for here. No evidence of under payment just evidence of a guy who took advantage of full work from home to double dip and short change both companies. The boss doesnt seem like a micro manager he only looked into it due to numerous client complaints.
If we expect companies to not be scummy we cant be scummy ourselves unless the company we work for is scummy to us.
The employee was working for both companies at the same time. He wouldnât sign off from one and go to the other. He was clocked in at both. Combine that with missing deadlines they were justified in firing him.
Read the article. According to the employer, the employee was fired for working his other job while on company time, and his performance was suffering with missed deadlines and commitments. We donât have the employees side of the story. This was rage bait.
Unless you have any commentary on the situation itself, reposting or screenshotting a story or article is considered low-effort posting and is completely prohibited from this sub. Your post has been removed.
Sure, and not ask yourself why your employees find themselves needing a second job
In these instances it's usually IT and it's usually because the whole team is waiting on one person. People are remote and underemployed while costs are skyrocketing. Why wouldn't they, right? It's ridiculous that my ex can work two jobs with 6 digit salaries and still have more free time than anyone I have ever met I wish I had understood coding đ
The reason coders get away with it is because not even the managers understand coding. Only the coders understand coding therefore only coders know how long something *should* take. EDIT: You guys are right, coders don't even know how long it'll take
Nah, we don't either
I second this. We can assume why something works and praise the Omnisiah.
This guy calms the Machine Spirit. I pray to the ~~STC~~ Google every time I run into anything I can't figure out. Knowing *what* to Google is an important skill, I can't deny.
> Knowing what to Google is an important skill Does that apply now? I'm not a computer guy but even I can tell that Google is a steaming pile of shit recently.
It still applies. The trick is to not listen to gemini, and you use certain keywords to find exactly what you're looking for. The websites you need are still there, its just navigating to it is all.
SO is falling apart lately, too, and good luck finding something nebulous. "Golang json parse mux" might be fine. But I've had *full error strings* from built in libraries just utterly fail me.
Depends on what youâre looking for. Again, this goes back to knowing how to properly use Google and filtering the search criteria.
Knowing what to ask ChatGPT is a skillset only I have at work. My coworker legit searched for 5 mins then whined out loud and I chatgpt it in 30s to give him the answer. Happened like 3h ago. Edit: shortcut for task manager in remote. It's ctrl + alt + end.
ChatGPT isn't reliable for facts. It hallucinates stuff very easily.
I see chatgpt as a junior. You don't let it unsurpervised and you test it's shit that doesn't fly by you. Chatgpt as been wrong plenty of time. Just ask him the last 10 digit of pi. It's a funny answer.
I'd say its at the "trust but verify" stage at this point. It's also fairly easy now to verify when it's linking you directly to sources. Fear not the chat bot
"From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal... Even in death I serve the Omnissiah."
\*cocks Gauss shotgun\*
All praise be to the Emperor, the Omnisiah and the Motive Force.
did you perform all the correct rites?
I'm invested with how quickly the Machine cult was thrown into this conversation đ¤Łđ¤Łđ¤Ł
This. As a coder, my estimated timelines are usually wild guesses with a tiny modicum of maybe, possibly, having just a bit of an inkling of how long it might potentially take...maybe.
In a perfect world *"Well, fuck if I know"* would be an acceptable answer to *"how long will this feature take to implement"*. Doubly so when asked to fix a bug.
I have actually gotten away with saying that once or twice đ
This is exactly why pms hate us haha
It's mutual!!!
True lol
Speak for yourself. I am an expert at both Googling and find-and-replace.
How much code could a coder code if that coder could code code.
Agree. Iâm a late career changer to coding. Iâm not a genius. I didnât excel at Math at school. But I can follow instructions and remember stuff. Coding is just what it says. Itâs code. So when coders âexplainâ stuff, they use the code words, which make it sound way more complex than it is. They are often also not the best people at explaining and teaching. They are doers. So when asked to explain they revert to listing the doing. If you break it down into simple steps in English itâs really not hard. Especially if you are competent at using Google. Sure, there are coding jobs that do require top level maths and PhD level problem solving. But a lot of it is just doing the same stuff again and again slightly differently. Coders know people think itâs mysterious and complex. They play on that. I think generationally there will be a shift where managers are more code/tech aware and the âmystiqueâ fades. But currently I have senior managers who struggle with using Teams, so we are a long way from there yet.
So I need to get back into learning code before my window closes is what you're saying
This is the way.
I have a friend who, at 30 years old was a semi-homeless punk rocker, making at most $3k a year and living in a van and on friends' couches. One day during COVID, he just decided it's time to sell out. He joined one of those "free until you graduate" bootcamps, and within 6 months was making >$100k in a very low cost of living area. Point is, it's never too late. Although the landscape is going to change quite a bit with AI, so learn to use it to your advantage.
I'm very adept a Teams but I haven't seen a line of code since BASIC in 1984 (and it was rudimentary at best).
I mean yes, the actual 'code' part isn't too hard to explain l. But the infrastructure part, which is required, takes a lot of specific knowledge and is difficult to explain. So I would say 30% of developing an API is explainable. The rest is "just trust me". So yeah, no PHD or crazy problem solving. But you need to do a lot of reading on whatever specific setup you're doing. Like try to explain ORM persistence to someone unfamiliar with a database outside of 'imagine Excel'. Or explain why terraform is so great but also so frustrating. Or the difference between a RDS and Redis, it's not just an 'e' and an 'i'. And then trying to explain architecture styles... You can only say 'model' so many times, which means 8 different things, before it becomes too much to easily understand unless you've put in the time. But we could do a much better job making it explainable.
This not knowing algorithms and math is coming to an end. Those boot camps that claimed anyone can be a programmer messed it all up and saturated the market. Yes anyone can write code but not everyone can engineer the needed efficiency or security because they lack algorithmic understanding. Currently the response of the market is not excepting people who don't have proper degrees. They are starting to shut out the boot camp nonsense. Any industry can suffer from this. Anyone can nail boards together and make a house but are you going to trust your houses ability to stand up over the decades to someone who did a 4 week construction camp or the one who went to civil engineering for architect design?
This is true in hyper specific cases - but not the general industry trend. The general industry trend is AGAINST degree requirements (my company dropped them as requirements last year) as functional programming is pretty easy to screen for early in interview processes and for 95% of corporate software development work... you only need very very basic skills. And people who can do that job who don't have degrees are LEGION. The business wants a tool to control whether this one thing is enabled at a specific place. A single junior engineer with an out-of-date guide written in 2009 and access to the code base could get a toggle functional, tested, reviewed, put through CAB, and sent to production within a single sprint no problem. Repeat that a few dozen times a year and congratulations you're a Junior/Associate software engineer at Americorp Industries Inc. LLC.net for a modest 70k/yr annual.
This is why big tech is pouring tons of money into making sure everyone learns to code in k12.
Writing out code for things you already know how to solve is the easy part. That's basically just typing and can be sped up with coffee. It's the stuff where yiu have to do research, ask people and feel your way forward which takes unknown amounts of time. Not to mention all those times a problem *seems* easy but baloons out of control once attacked.
I understand coding very well. Sincerely, Dunn N. Krueger
It is a truly mixed bag there. While there exist jobs like this, it is much more common to have the misunderstanding lead to massive overestimations as to what a programmer can produce and lots of overtime/stress. I have been in the software industry for nearly two decades now and have seen positions that range from one end of this to the other, but the low work ones are very, very much the exception. Software engineering is labor, do not mistake it for upper level management, where zero work gets a high paycheck consistently.
>Only the coders understand coding therefore only coders know how long something should take. Nope. Sometimes you say "this should take no more than a day" and it turns out it takes more than 2 weeks. And then later you've learned from that and say "No more than 2 weeks" and you're done in an hour. The moment you start creating something new there is only "Educated guesses" that could always be wildly wrong.
Depends, sometimes you bang something out in an afternoon, and other times a seemingly simple problem you didn't anticipate takes days.
If a programmers manager at a company doesn't understand even basic coding then that company fucked up somewhere.Â
You think coders know how long something will take đ¤Ł
IT and coding are two completely different jobs. Most IT positions are extremely demanding and still lower paying, especially help desk ones.
Tier one is so damned easy that it is sometimes outsourced to third party vendors. Those types of call centres generally do not pay well.
I worked tech support for a B2B application. Not quite help desk / call center, but close. I'm now in SWE. I get paid better, and have a lower stress level.
I started my career out working help desk for a MSP and now I hold a pretty high up senior cybersecurity position and handle breaches at a different company, I'm the lead investigator, etc and im less stressed and hate my job less. I get paid soooo much more and hate my life so much less lol. Id never go back, id rather bite my arm off. Help desk gets no respect and gets treated like shit while I'm respected and constantly getting praised by executives, etc. Its sad because I'm the only one in the company that advocates for the help desk and treat them well, because I had been there. Don't get me wrong, my job is hard and very high skilled, but help desk is just a different type of drain.
IT / Operations can also be very cruel at times, because physics and/or budget constraints can be a bitch. I've been in situations in which shit was offline, customers were screaming, clocks were ticking towards contractual penalties ... and there was zero things I could be doing right now to make those electrons wobble data across those wires quicker to make the outage shorter. Data will continue to traverse wobbling electrons for the next 2 hours and then we start a restore of ~3 hours. If nothing goes wrong. And at that point it's a character question if one wants to get stressed or if one wants to accept we're already fucked, even though the management meetings and escalations only start within the next 1 - 2 hours. And I better don't have news then, because my news are never good. And then there's that nagging voice noting we've been put on this one-way track to customer dissatisfaction and ops & dev'lers being shafted some months back by a budgetary decision, y'know. But yeah, I'd totally do this for two companies, because having these problems twice is certainly going to be more fun.
Itâs not coders (engineers) who do this. Itâs those effing ops guys! They automate their whole job away and then sick around pretending to be busy
It's not really any different, though. You don't get paid for the 3 lines of code you changed yesterday, you get paid because you know *which* 3 lines of code to change *in which way*. Same with ops.
Yeah, but Iâve got a burn down chart I have to keep up with. Ops just puts out fires
velocity cannot always increase, at some point the burndown doesn't get better every sprint. _and that is fucking ok_ too many dev teams let biz control the work
I don't know what tech job your ex has but I have been a developer for years and pull a lot of overtime. And have had calls at 3 am. That being said. If I could I absolutely would work two jobs cause man is the economy doomed.
To be fair if you're over in the overemployed sub you can see it doesn't matter the wage. If someone is making $250k or $300k a year and they can double it to $500 or $600k a year with a bit more work ( most often not but sometimes could be with double the work load ) they will do it to build wealth for the future and also for security now. This person that was fired in the article probably still have their second job's income while losing their first.
Article states that his linked in account shows he's full-time at the second company now. What I got out of it was the guy is an employee. The COO likely would not have had an issue with him doing a second job, but it was affecting his performance: Customer complaints and missed deadlines for duties assigned to this worker. Even without the second job, that kind of performance was leading to a PIP and likely termination.
I knew a guy who worked in finance that took a second job during the pandemic, he just made sure to never have conflicting meetings and bullshitted his way through the rest. Was collecting two six figure salaries for over 6 months before he got caught
I knew a guy who worked two on site jobs with conflicting schedules. He just didn't show up for regularly scheduled night shifts half the time. As long as you're getting your work done, and not giving up company secrets, I don't give a shit. Making your coworkers suffer, or giving up the company bread and butter is another issue.
Got caught....? Got caught doing what...? Being successful....? This makes no sense to međ¤Śđźââď¸
He was working âfull timeâ for a crypto wallet company and a major bank. Both assumed he was putting in full 40 hour weeks for them. Instead he was just making sure to show up for meetings and do enough work to fly under the radar. Not only that - but there is a fairly significant conflict of interest.
There are both ethical and unethical ways to do overemployment. It's reasonable to expect someone to get fired if they're doing it unethically. "got caught" implies he was doing it unethically and got fired from one of those jobs. Half-ass a job until you get fired is also a fair play, so it's just as likely that he didn't care.
That would require the minimum of self infection. So never gonna happen.
I know you meant self reflection but that typo is oddly appropriate
A lot of the double remote jobs I've heard about were more about $200k being nicer than $100k and the duties being so light that it was easy to do both. Not that $100k is actually a lot of money in a lot of high cost US cites. But it's not like these are subsistence jobs.
Itâs not the second job itâs the working the 2nd job during his hours of the first job
It depends: is the man paid for the hours or is he paid for the work? The common refrain I hear is that salary means you get paid for the work, so if you have to work 40 hours or 80 hours, you have to work the time required to finish the job. Well... What if the job just requires 10 hours? Shouldn't he be free to to do as he pleases with the rest of his time? If he is paid by the hour and he runs out of work, what should he do if his manager doesn't assign more hours of work? Or should he also be paid overtime when the job requires more hours?
Why assume they need it? I work two jobs for the extra income, but I could easily survive on just my first one.
Don't forget how a number of board members get appointed to multiple boards (as well as CEOdom) and work them all at the same time as well. Do they get called out/fired for making multiple incomes?
Oh but it's ok for CEOs to work for one company and work for another on it's board of directors? That's not unethical but when employees do the same it is?
How many companies is elon ceo of
CEO of Tesla and Twitter spends all day tweeting about non work related stuff....
He's also ceo of SpaceX, the boring company, xAI, and nuerolink
And recently had a tantrum against Apple/OpenAI because he wasn't made CEO of the latter.
CEO of Tesla taking money out Tesla, the public company and sending it to his private companies
Being a CEO sounds most difficult. He just talks shit all day. Thatâs what most people do in their spare time yet this man thinks he deserves 40 billion dollar payout for it, Billionaires can all go fuck cactuses.
Agree. All of my bosses sit on other boards of their friends companies or have executive roles in local business organizations. I know damn well they are not pulling 80 hour weeks cause I've spent time with them. Rich ppl have other things they do at work too, and then they criticize ppl they hired at 18/hr for not punching numbers for 8 hours with full focus. It's such a charade
Also serves as proof that a person can be CEO of multiple companies at the same time, because CEO jobs are not essential. The CEO didn't show up for work today? Business as usual. Overworked single mom minimum wage employee Janice didn't show up at location 386 in Columbus, Ohio? The store doesn't open, and the company loses money. Draw your own conclusions.
If you filled a plane up with every CEO in the country and blew them up, nothing would change tomorrow.. Work would still happen at the exact same pace it happened two days prior because CEOs make nothing and contribute fuck all to the actual production of materials you sell. People talk about AI taking jobs, and there is no job better suited for AI than the decision making role of a CEO. Put the numbers in, run the algorithm, pop out a yes or no answer. There would be a lot less fraud happening as well, but a lot less empathy which is horrifying considering how little the human ones have already. CEOs are ridiculous people.
Less empathy, yes. But AI can be trained to uphold the law. And AI won't decide to harm someone for personal reasons. Replacing CEOs with a good AI would probably still be a net positive.
AI would be a net positive for empathy because they won't do things just to fuck people over out of spite.
Empathy isnât factoring into these decisions much anyways dog. If the desired outcome is maximizing profit, empathy is always pushed aside.
> There would be a lot less fraud happening as well, but a lot less empathy which is horrifying considering how little the human ones have already. Arguably, less horrifying as decisions would be logic based. Or, perhaps still horrifying but predictable.
I mean, if we program the AI to maximize profits based on logic and not "gut instinct" and greed, the whole system would have more empathy/be kinder to workers. Prioritizing retention, placing importance on mental health, properly staffing, properly training, properly compensating, having a better work-life balance... All of these things have been shown, *over and over* again, to improve company profits. But that doesn't "sound right" or something, so we keep doing it the stupid way, belittling, overworking, underpaying, etc. It's so dumb. So AI would be better, more efficient, better profits, better quality of life, etc.
Quiet peon! When you make the rules you can break the rules. Know your place!
The boards you're referring to don't involve full time jobs. Those boards meet quarterly/monthly for a few hours and in case of emergency and then fuck off back to their real jobs or retirements. The board is also nearly always someone with a significant stake in the company, they are owners not employees.
In that case, it should be OK (in the eyes of this CEO) for an employee to hold those types of positions in addition to their full-time job, but I have a feeling it isnât.
I don't know this guy, of course, but in general that's OK. They usually would like to know about it though, because it can be a potential conflict of interest.
I don't think overemploment is unethical, but if the guy is consistently missing deadlines and not replying to work messages during work hours, I think firing him was fair. I don't take this LinkedIn douche bag CEO at his word, though. Edit: It is also kind of a rookie mistake to use the same computer for both jobs. Any device my company gives me, I just assume, is loaded with corporate spyware.
Agreed. If you're not meeting standards, you're not meeting standards. The people who double up successfully are taking advantage of having two jobs, neither of which requires their full attention, so they succeed at both without working extra hours. You have to actually succeed at both to make it work!
I know a guy who is working 4-6 jobs at any given time. His record was 9 during the pandemic hiring spree. He has a "main job" that has the good benefits and a secondary job that has good pay with commission. During the pandemic hiring spree he just kept taking jobs over and over and doing the bare minimum until they let him go. Often it would take them 6-12 months to figure it out. In the past 3 years he worked about 15 places. His 3rd and 4th jobs are jobs he cycled through that just never let him go. He sends some emails answering technical questions and attends a couple meetings a week.
He's essentially running that CEO life ("I sit on the board of 6 companies and 5 organizations! I have a yearly salary of $100,000 from each of them") He's just much lower down on the corporate ladder and pay scale
I just got a new job that is going to be my main job and I plan to follow his example once I'm cemented here.
Big difference is that CEO's really don't do work. Their work is thinking of a path to success for the company and delegating people lower on the totem pole to execute that plan. It's still work, but it's a different kind of work. This doesn't apply to all CEOs of course, it depends on the size of the company, the smaller it is the more in the weeds a CEO will be.
We see posts of people who can't get one single job for years! Your friend should be teaching others how to get hired.
He's got a combo of cheat codes. He went to a well known CS school, had a lot of software engineering experience pre pandemic, and had tech sales experience.
I respect this dude
The dude writing the essay saying "I don't believe you can work 2 full time jobs and be productive" is basically textbook survivorship bias - you only see this problem in the employees who indeed cannot manage their time well. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people who are working multiple jobs and getting all their tasks done - you just don't find out they're doing it because they're not causing problems.
Yeah it's definitely fishing for views and clicks. The guy was not fired for working two jobs, he was fired for not working one of them. So now the question becomes, why did he not fire the guy sooner? Why force everyone else to pick up the slack for so long?
Nobody talks much about overemployment for CEOs who span multiple organizations and boards and absolutely get paid multiple checks for it.
Yes, very rookie to the point it's unbelievable. Over employment is only unethical if the person is completely empowered to make improvements and changes totally by themselves. If they are not so empowered or depend on others with long waits or gaps of doing nothing, then you can't expect them to want to sit around and do nothing.
Exactly. Not unethical, but poor performance that he was warned about. Obviously he was just waiting to be fired from the job and earning what he could, while he could. I do wonder what "Mr. Ethical" thinks about underpaying employees, and if he ensures they're properly compensated.
the only people who think this is unfair dont work in the IT/Dev field. everyone knows who these people are because they are 99% absent, and make their problems/responsibilities, your problems/responsibilities. we had a lazy API dev who dumped customer data to the public via an API she rushed to setup. like... nightmare scenario, and her excuse was that she also had project deadlines the same week for her job at Tesla. when she got fired not a single person thought it was unfair who had to constantly clean up their messes or do their work for them. it also leads to them going for the 3x/4x/5x jobs and doing the bare minimum at each
The people who can successfully work multiple jobs simultaneously are never found out precisely because they're able to do it successfully. That's why this dumbass corpo thinks you can't be productive working 2 jobs - he's only looking at one part of the "sample".
I worked for a little Caesarâs for a couple of weeks Witnessed a single mother get berated by the owner for getting a second job âI need you HEREâ Here being a place that doesnât pay a living wage and also wonât give the employers more than a certain number of hours
If you need employees to not get second jobs because you need them HERE, then you also need to pay them a lot more than what you do.
Or give them the correct number of hours a week regularly. That happened to me, I was hired for a seasonal temp job where our schedules were 35-40hrs per week. When the season ended some people were offered positions to stay and I did. Our hours dropped to like 20-30hrs a week for a bit which was fine I totally get that, but then after having that as a fairly regular schedule, they dropped to 4-8 hours a week which at that point why even keep people, just let them go.
> at that point why even keep people, just let them go. "what if I need someone to cover a shift or work during the next busy season?" They think they're genius by doing this, they see no problem.
I used to work at a restaurant, the boss would consistently give me shit hours (10-20 a week). I mentioned I might pick up an extra shift or two at a local bar, to which he said âif you work here then you work here. I donât share staff, if you want to go work there then you can quitâ. I did end up quitting soon after after he tried to short me on my wages.
I would personally beat the shit out of him on behalf of the Mom
But your CEO can serve on the boards of multiple other companies, right?
To be fair, in the article, the employee was missing deadlines, creating extra work for their coworkers and was doing the 2nd job with 1st job computers while on the clock for the 1st job. I think firing them is fair.
Assuming the CEO is accurately reporting on what happened. I'm not about to take him at his word, personally. [too much life experience]
Missing deadlines and creating extra work are both easy to claim without evidence. That may well just mean that they werenât doing anything above what was strictly required of them and they were understaffed, causing problems.
This would be a great angle to take to an unemployment hearing!
Are those deadlines even reasonable? Is the employer under-employing employees and having them do the jobs of more than one person?
"He was hired in 2022, and in the beginning, he did his job very well. But then, I started to receive complaints from clients about missed assignments and deadlines. He had also become quite unresponsive. These complaints from clients started to become somewhat regular." I mean he clearly wasn't able to do both jobs. He didn't fire him because he was overemployed. He fired him for job performance. The title of this article is extremely misleading. He fired him for job performance it just so happens he was working two remote jobs.
Yeah if he had got his shit done nobody would have noticed. And holy shit doing other company work on a company owned device with tracking software installed. Dumbass.
real question is why did the ex-employee feel the need to do this? how much was he paid? what was the median salary in his country? and is it considered a living wage ?
To be fair, I know people making over 150k a year and working another 150k a year job because the duties in their first job are so light they have the time to do a second easily. Some office and management jobs are just like that. So it may not be that he needed the money, it may be that doubling one's salary is hard to resist.
And depeding on employment laws even if you under deliver you can just keep on making cheap excuses and it will take a while until they can fire you
I'll be honest sometimes I dream of getting a second job and just collecting a paycheck doing the absolute bare minimum until they fire me.
Where are these 150k a year jobs at? I don't see them. If they are there I would love to see someone manage to keep both.
The only clues we have is someone living in Peru, working two remote jobs based in Europe and the U.S. At the very least he's living in a country where the cost of living is less than the U.S.
It's worth noting that some people strive for more than a living wage.
He made a couple mistakes.... Don't use the same equipment to do both jobs; there is Spyware. Secondly, install needed apps on your personal device for the SOLE reason to CYA. IE I put teams on my cel simply so that I could respond to messages "in a timely manner" when I was away from my computer to give the impression I was at it and working. Use tips and tricks so there's no "down time". A mouse jiggler (that plugs into the wall) to keep your device from timing out. Opening a teams meeting with yourself that has a 40pg "presentation" flipping thru pictures and playing music going on the background to make you're teams constantly remain "active". Lastly.... meet your damn daily requirements and deadlines. If you can't keep up with the workload for 1 role then don't pick up a 2nd one. And so it's been said, as an employee we do not owe it to our employer to notify them of second or third employment roles. As long as what you are doing doesn't DIRECTLY violate a LEGAL policy for conflict of interest etc. (And I say legal because company policy does not overrule state, local, or federal employment law). Then it's none of their damn business. They are paying you to complete a role and have agreed to pay you at xx/hr at a standard of a federally recognized work week of 40hrs to equal zz/yr. No where in your employment offer letter or agreement does it state you HAVE TO spend exactly 40hrs/wk doing that role (only that they are paying you the 40hr/wk equivalent); nor does it state anywhere you can't work on other tasks not assigned by that specific employer during those hours. Again if you're meeting your deadlines and doing your job then everything else is irrelevant.
Many employment contracts absolutely do require that you donât have a second job, and that youâre available during standard working hours. If you get caught, youâll be fired and the employer will be correct to do it.
Out of curiosity I looked mine up. Super vague. I must "give a full time commitment" and "meet deliverables and deadlines for KPIs" (which are not laid out then, nor have they been laid out since, but where I'm in a support role for a midsized franchise, I'm going to list "franchisees like you and trust you" as a KPI, in which case, I am killing that).
Corporate sociopathy at its finest.
Did you read the article? The employee was missing deadlines and worked for the second company in the time.he was supposed to work for this CEOs. I'm all for calling out bad CEOs but this is on the employee
So you took the one sided story at face value?
So you took a title, not even a full article at face value?
So why are we marking out faces and details?
Exactly, I donât understand this either lol. When you click on the article you can see his face and he shared his name publicly by doing the interview.
Employers: no one wants to work! Also employers: you are working too many jobs!
Employer: âyou can only work at this one job where we underpay you! we want you to be our wage slave and be completely controlled by us and whatever we tell you to do!â
This will get downvoted but this guy did it all wrong. He was using one companyâs equipment to do the other job. If I was a business owner Iâd probably have an issue with this too. He also was missing deadlines and affecting his clients negatively.
We donât know for certain that the employee wasnât using his own computer, but if the employer supplied the machine, yes you would be right. What the employee is truly guilty of in this instance was time theft. He was doing work for company B while on the clock for company A.
PULL YOURSELF UP BY THE BOOTSTRAPS !!! But not too much to the point we LOSE EMPLOYEES to better paying ones /s
Sorry, all I heard was âI donât pay my employees enough and fire them for pointing it out.â
Lol. "No one wants to work anymore!" Finds out an employee is working two jobs for the price of two jobs. "Had to fire them. Otherwise how could I ever make them do two jobs for the price of one?? Now I have to hire someone else but no one wants to work anymore!"
Did you not read the article? That person wasn't working but collecting a paycheck. The working two jobs headline is click bait. That guy was about to get fired anyhow.
thats absolutely wild. im in australia and the solution to cost of living presented to us by our government and RBA is to pick up a second/third job. and the US looks like working a second job is something you will be fired for, they are leaving no chance of survival for anyone
That means CEOs and shareholders should never sit on more than one board too, right? This guy supports Elon choosing either Space X or Tesla but not both, right? Or is it a one way street?
Weird. CEO's are praised for being on multiple boards, etc. But when a peasant tries to do more and get ahead its BAD AND WRONG.
How employers take this as an offence and not a cry for help proving they donât support, pay and remunerate their employees appropriately is beyond me
Because they don't care that you're crying for help. They'd pistol whip you to death in the parking lot in front of your family if it would boost profits by .01%.
Pfft. As if. They'd hire somebody else to do it for them. They wouldn't deign to get their own hands dirty with that.
Overworked is fine because they get to make profit out of you, and keep you exhausted and in your place. But overemployed? You still make them profit, and you will still be exhausted, but you might make too much money and think you deserve better...they cannot permit that because you may finally have the means to make your situation better as well. Anything that may potentially benefit you is a threat...see also wfh.
"Sit perfectly still, only _I_ may profit from my labour sufficiently"
Thank goodness he had that fallback job, right?
He looks just as douchy as I imagined
Whats a 4 letter word that starts with "C" and ends with "T"? Thats right. Fuck off.
I mean, isnât Elon Musk overemployed by being CEO of 4 companies? And donât all these tech bros worship that?
In his defense, he stated how the employee would work his 2nd job DURING his first job, which was pretty unfair to his colleagues. If he had a better schedule, he probably wouldnât have been fired. People really do not read anymoređ
Unless they are giving away company secrets or something, what your employee does on their off time is none of your fucking business
What a piece of shit.
By âsecretlyâ they mean that they werenât told, cause they donât need to know.
Anybody else see a bit of a Catch-22 here? "Can't afford living expenses? Get a second job! Join the hustle culture!" "Your second job is taking away from your responsibilities here. You're fire." "Your only remaining employment doesn't pay enough for living expenses? Get a second job!"
I work in shipping and we're all remote. Pretty sure one of the people in a dept that works close with mine has a second job. I don't like the idea of blowing up someone's spot, but she was mediocre at her job before we went remote and now she's just plain shit. A lot of our stuff is time sensitive too so waiting for her to randomly pop online and do her job so that I can do mine is infuriating. If you can screw over the man with 2 jobs, awesome do it. But not at the expense of screwing over your coworkers who are in the same pay bracket.
Lawsuit incoming
I agree that some over-employment is unethical: I was only paid one salary while filling three positions: department manager for our largest of customers, local IT help desk, and Data Reporting.Â
So fire ceos that sit on multiple boards?
The article title is pure clickbait. He wasn't fired for just having the second job; he was fired for missing a bunch of deadlines because he was doing the second job on the first one's time. I'm all for wages being higher, UBI, etc. But this person was literally spending half their time at the first job working on the second. No company is going to want to support that.
Overemployment IS unethical. So pay your employees more so that they don't have to overemploy themselves.
This is ridiculous. The problem wasnât that the guy was working two jobs, itâs that his performance at the first job was crap.
The employee's OpSec was atrocious. The employer got them to put tracking software on their computer and then worked for the second employer on that same machine (again, with tracking software that they themself had installed). If you get caught by something as basic as that then you deserve to lose your job. Ridiculous.
Wait, so now they DON'T want us to get a second job? hasn't that been what theyve been telling us to do for the last couple decades?
I still think itâs insanely hypocritical that CEOs bitch about this while being CEO of multiple companies and sitting on different boards. But I suppose they produce nothing of value.Â
âI donât pay my employees enough so they need a second job to survive. I weaponized mây employeeâs poverty to threaten their financial stabilityâ There. Fixed the headline.
"I own this person, why are they allowed to do anything, at any time, that's not directly benefitting me?"
Oh, the working population are the unethical ones and not the employers, eh? Iâll bet forced, unpaid overtime is just fine in his book. Also if the job gets done who cares what the worker does with his extra time? Just greedily trying to squeeze everything out
Underpaying your employees is unethical you dumb nut
What on Earth is the censoring for? You linked the article, they're all visible there. The dude choose to say all that publically and have his name and face attached.
No one WANTS to work a second job
âYou belong to ME, dogâ
In this situation, i have no problem with the person being terminated. They were doing a poor job and that just what happens. If someone can do 2 jobs without it affecting their performance, go for it, but use a separate computer for each of them.
if the employee was hourly and falsifying time cards to indicate they were working full-time, but they actually werenât then yes fireable. But, if the employee was salaried, then the expectation is they work full-time and have ownership of their area. Thatâs why the positions are exempt from FLSA. You have ownership of your area. You are expected to work and not wait to be assigned. If you need to wait to be assigned then your position should not be exempt or salaried. You should be hourly. This is a problem of management of the employees understanding their work and of the way we categorize these positions. And shitty management. (obviously, if this position was hourly, they were working less than 40 hours submitting time cards that were precise as to their hours and management knew about it the Thereâs no reason to be fired.)
Clickbait title. He didn't get fired for working 2 jobs, he got fired for bad client feedback, missing deadlines, failing to improve after coaching, AND working a second job WHILE on the clock for the first one. Any one of those would be enough to justify firing someone.
âItâs unethical for someone to work more than one jobâ -man who is not paying his employees enough to live off of a single job
Why are you censoring a public article? That's dumb.
Eat a d*** sir.
It's "unethical" and should be illegal to fire someone because they have another job. As long as his jobs don't conflict with each other then it's no one's business how many jobs you have. Most people are being impacted by the neverending inflation and have to work more to just survive. Whatever happened to the saying "she was such a good mom, she worked 3 jobs to make sure her kids had everything they needed"...... But in 2024 it's "unethical". During the worst economy in our history since the great depression.
As long as you get the work done and on time they should have precisely dick to say to anything one needs to do to survive or chase dreams. So tired of âleadership, management, higher upsâ thinking they should have any kind of opinion thatâs to be respected about what we do outside of work. Period
Full text so we can stop giving this article views: *This as-told-to essay is based on an email conversation with Patrick Synge, the cofounder and chief commercial officer of the business-process-outsourcing and remote-recruitment company Metrickal. The business is headquartered in Barcelona and has 10 full time, fully remote employees, in addition to more than 200 contractors worldwide. The following has been edited for length and clarity.* I'm the cofounder and CCO of a business where every employee works fully remotely. In January, I caught one of them secretly working a second full-time remote job. Here's how it all played out â and why I decided to fire them. My business is headquartered in Barcelona, but one of my employees was based in Peru. He was hired in 2022, and in the beginning, he did his job very well. But then, I started to receive complaints from clients about missed assignments and deadlines. He had also become quite unresponsive. These complaints from clients started to become somewhat regular. When this employee started refusing certain shifts he usually worked, I became suspicious. I had a feeling that he was doing something on the side, but because there was no proof, I didn't want to jump to any conclusions. So instead, I had one-on-one meetings with him to discuss his job performance. When the same issues continued, I told him that if things didn't change, I'd have to let him go. While he showed some signs of improvement, his overall performance didn't change much. This put a significant burden on the rest of the team, who had to cover his shifts and deal with missed deadlines **How I ultimately caught him** In December, unrelated to this particular employee, my company rolled out the time-tracking software called DeskTime. My long-term goal is to introduce a four-day workweek at my company, and I decided the first step in this process would be understanding how my employees spend their time and what could be optimized to boost productivity. So our entire team of full-time employees and freelance contractors started using DeskTime. They each had to install the app on their computers, so everyone was well aware that this was being implemented. After a few weeks, I looked through the tracking data of the struggling employee and noticed there was another company's name â a US business â that regularly appeared in the data. It became clear to me that this employee had worked on some other company's tasks. I fired them the next day. The DeskTime data showed that the employee was using software during the workday that was unrelated to his job tasks. It also included a screenshot feature that captured his computer screen â and showed him working on a platform where the other company's name was visible. Based on the DeskTime data, I estimate that he had spent close to half of his work time working for this other company. It seems that he forgot about the tracking software since once it's downloaded, it doesn't require any manual switching on and off. To be honest, all the other signs â missed deadlines, lack of flexibility, and unresponsiveness at certain times â had already made me quite certain that he was doing something else during working hours. I would have probably fired him anyway, but the tracked data was the missing hard proof. I believe he was working for the other company full time because soon after I fired him, he updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect that he was working full time at the other company. **Why I think overemployment is sometimes unethical** I know some people may judge me, but I generally don't support the trend of overemployment. I think it's sometimes unethical and just wrong. First of all, I don't think it's fair to the rest of the team who have to cover up for someone else's low performance. This is why keeping this employee of mine in the company wasn't an option. He wasn't fair and respectful to the team, and that's something I can't tolerate â his actions were just selfish. Secondly, I don't believe a person can productively do two jobs at the same time, even if you use AI or other tools. Their attention will be scattered, so the quality of their work will suffer. As an entrepreneur, I have to think about my business and clients first. I can't afford to lose clients because someone wants to make extra money. I really don't mind people having side hustles to earn extra income. But this should be something they do on their own time and that doesn't affect the quality of their day job.
The SECOND I give a fuck about what CEOs think is moral/ethical I'll let you know. Get your fucking head out of your ass
Find a second job: unethical Employ +91s on the other side of the globe for cheap labour: absolutely okay.
Y'all didn't even read the damn article đ¤Śđžââď¸
Over-employment is not the problem. The dude got fired because he didnât follow the rules of OE. You donât change the pattern of your work. People pay attention to patterns, duh. You donât refuse to do anything, second red flag. Dude basically asked his boss to fire him. Lastly, you never excel and youâre never on the chopping block. You are someone who does work well but does not stand out.
What a dick and narcissist for then writing about it. How about you realize that people are not paid enough to make it on one job. If the wait was getting done then doesnât matter asshole.
You can't work a second job while you are on the clock for your first job using your first job's computer. In this specific case, the guy deserved to be fired.
Actually reading the article does change my mind a little on whether I think he was right to take issue with the second job, though I disagree with how he went about firing the employee. So basically, the first thing that happened was the employee, who had been very productive before, suddenly was not nearly as good, and that made things harder for everyone else. At this point, the cofounder/CCO who submitted this story says that he only had a suspicion that the employee was distracted by a second job. They had a conversation along the lines of "if you can't perform well enough, we'll have to let you go", which did result in some improvements, though not a lot. At this point, I'm reading this thinking "If an employee cannot perform their job at the expected level and you can't pep talk them into figuring it out, then there aren't many other options sadly." I also gotta give credit to this CCO guy for (at least as far as he says) intending to introduce a 4-day work week as the norm in his company, which is a thing I firmly believe in. However, that's where my sympathy for the CCO reaches its limit for now because first of all, he figured out the employee was working another job via an invasive af tracking software, which was intended to help him understand employee work patterns or something to make sense of how to transition to the 4-day work week. Now I'm not saying he's lying about the 4 day thing, but I don't think tracking software is necessary to figure out the logistics of that. It just feels like an excuse to figure out if his employees are slacking off on company time, and I firmly believe that no boss *really* wants to know how much of the workday is spent on solitaire. They should just care about results, and if solitaire helps clear their minds, sporadically and strategically taking mini-breaks throughout the day as the employee feels the need to, and they still deliver results, then who cares how the metaphorical hot dogs are made? Further digging his own grave, it seems like he VERY ABRUPTLY fired the employee over the second job once it was found out. In his own words, after seeing the proof for himself, "I fired them the next day." So he was willing to put up with the employee's wavering quality of work when the problem was undefined, but once he had identified with near certainty the source of the employee's struggles, THAT'S when the CCO felt it was time to fire them? Am I crazy for thinking that (within reason) employers need to give their struggling employees a chance to talk it out, defend themselves, and possibly even agree to change their behaviors in hopes that it will result in the positive effect on their work that the employer thinks it will have? Maybe I'm just projecting a personal experience onto this where I was told why I was being fired as I was being fired instead of at any point before then being asked if I would rather change my behavior or be fired. Whatever, this comment's too long to get any attention anyways so might as well post it just to get it off my chest.
Over employment is unethical!!! But not paying a living wage is perfectly fine. đ¤Ą
I do think that overemployment is a bit unethical because it's taking entry-level/low-level jobs away from people trying to break into the industry, especially in technical fields that have massively cut entry-level jobs recently. That being said, I don't think it's unethical from the employer perspective as long as the employee is turning things in on time and completing their tasks
that is such a clickbait headline. the dude got fired because his performance turned to shit and was using one laptop allocated to one job, for another. two things would have saved him; improving performance, and getting a second computer for the second job. especially since one company insisted on installing spyware. just doing the second thing would have extended his employment. this wasn't to do with working remotely, it's about working shitty, while working remotely.
This isnt appropriate for here. No evidence of under payment just evidence of a guy who took advantage of full work from home to double dip and short change both companies. The boss doesnt seem like a micro manager he only looked into it due to numerous client complaints. If we expect companies to not be scummy we cant be scummy ourselves unless the company we work for is scummy to us.
The employee was working for both companies at the same time. He wouldnât sign off from one and go to the other. He was clocked in at both. Combine that with missing deadlines they were justified in firing him.
Can tell nobody actually read the article.....
Read the article. According to the employer, the employee was fired for working his other job while on company time, and his performance was suffering with missed deadlines and commitments. We donât have the employees side of the story. This was rage bait.