Even if you're reporting hours accurately and either of the companies finds out about it, then you'll probably be asked to leave regardless. This is true also if you're salaried.

If it's a government subcontract, you could end up going to jail for this.

Realistically the way to do this without problems would be to start your own consulting firm, and bid on work. Then you can work on two projects at once (as long as it's not hourly, something like a firm fixed price contract). You're basically on the hook for delivering it. The customer is not paying for your time, just the product you're delivering.

Edited to add:

In the salaried world you have a conflict of interest. You may choose a worse technique or technology for company A if it means you won't be able to give company B enough time. Or you might put in shittier code than needed to be created because you had to save time for company B.

Company A would say those extra hours could have been put to use for more testing, more robust coding, more robust unit testing.

Worse would be if you stole code that solved a problem for Company A and gave it to Company B and then took credit for it.

So it would be in the best interest for Company A and Company B to let you go if either found out about it.

> Or you might put in shittier code

But what if you don't? Especially in my old sysadmin jobs I had many opportunities to work for multiple companies doing very little actual work - most of my colleagues were playing, watching movies, reading, posting on Slashdot etc. The probability of a critical incident occurring at the same time everywhere and being so grave that all sysadmins would have to participate was close to zero. I did not take another job but I wouldn't consider it to be unethical in that scenario

Even if you think there isn't, a better approach is to start a company to maintain the infrastructure under contract at some fraction of hiring full time people.

Then you can legally take on 3x workload and be paid for 2.5x current salary and everyone's happy.

As a consultant, I find many clients are genuinely interested in how other companies solve similar challenges.

Because in a lot of software engineering jobs we are given a lot of trust in managing our own workload and this is a breach of that trust.

If you have too much on your plate you can (in well functioning teams) tell your manager "hey, we can't do X" or "we need to push the deadline on Y" and that will be taken at face value. You won't be expected to put in 80 hour weeks just to get it done outside of extraordinary circumstances.

The flip side of that is that if you have so little work that you have time to work a whole other job you're meant to tell your manager "hey, I have spare cycles, what do we need to get done?".

I'll note that even if you are, your not putting in the same quality 40 hours at either job you'd be capable if you were just working a single job. There are plenty of people who think they are capable of this pace, I've yet to meet someone who actually is.

Of course if you have good management in place this is detected via the poor performance rather than needing to worry about butt-in-seat time.

He would go hide into some office in Company A for a couple hours during the work day doing some kind of meeting, hoping that no one would notice him behind the glass walls.

Meanwhile his performance sucked for Company A, and he couldn't handle apparently simple tasks either. The github check-ins were flagged by the firewall, and they summarily let him go as soon as they saw it.

I would not hire him if his resume crossed my path again.

That's absurd, unless it's accompanied with a raise. If the employer is content with the worker's output, why should the worker volunteer to perform more work without additional compensation?

There’s nothing wrong with taking a contractor mentality to a full time gig. In fact, it’s one definition of professionalism.

It’s interesting we came to different conclusions on this one — I think there’s something here worth comparing notes on, but I’m not quite sure what it is. In my experience, working a consistent 7 hours every day will quite rapidly burn me out.

I think it’s the definition we’re using for “work.” When I work, I work hard, and I dedicate my entire mental focus on the task. Doing that for seven hours straight sometimes feels like a small marathon in itself. Perhaps you’re just more effective.

“Hey, I pay you to work on my team and build something with the team” is a much healthier and happier system. It also gives people agency about how to tackle problems and the ability to propose work or even experiment. The alternative is a joyless factory line.

If youre not keeping yourself busy, it becomes pretty obvious, very quickly.

I’m not sure where this idea came from. If you want to do that, sure, go for it. But no one is meant to volunteer for more work than they’re given.

It’s practically a recipe for burnout.

To use your own words, I'm not sure where this idea came from. Any manager will absolutely expect you to tell them when you've completed your assigned tasks. No one wants the employee they have to keep checking in with to make sure they haven't completed their current assignment and are now sitting around staring at their cubicle wall instead of telling anyone.

If you complete it sooner, your estimates were off. It’s fine to slow down if you sense you don’t need to work quite as hard as you thought to meet your deadlines.

In general, estimation is a system of shared deadlines. If you give your manager the ability to think of you as always meeting your deadlines, I guarantee they’ll be happy.

Sure, as long as they never find out that you've been padding your estimates or that the project everyone thought was going to take a week turned out to be much simpler than anticipated and you got in done on Monday and just played video games the rest of the week they'll be happy. There's even plenty of bad management out there, so in some places this might hold true for a long period of time (even a career!), but it's not because that's what your employer expected you to do, or what they think they are paying you for. And a good manager is going to figure out pretty quick when the end result of your 1-week tasks is a two line PR that's something is fishy.

* Disclaimer: I have absolutely had the tasks the boiled down to two lines, but finding the right two lines took a week. A good manager is going to have sufficient understanding of the work to tell the difference.

I don't think employees believe it either. After all, I notice your not asserting that you wrap up your work for the sprint, then tell your manager your knocking off for the next week since your work is done. If the expectation is just that you get your assigned work done, why wouldn't you? Why would you instead keep your manager in the dark?

Because you're already providing enough value to justify your wage even with padded estimates and slacking off (otherwise your manager wouldn't have been happy to begin with). They just want to get more out of you via the expectation of "reasonable best effort".

In other words, your 50% effort was already good enough to provide the company the value it needed (was willing to pay for), but some managers feel entitled to 100% if you demonstrate that capacity to them. So just don't.

And the reality is that many places don't genuinely need people's best. What they actually need is "good enough", and that's already reflected in the wage via profitable business outcomes that role contributes to. Time and effort have nothing to do with it.

The exception is if both jobs are in the same field. If so, watch out for the IP clauses of the contracts.

In general, employers are expected to fire you if they’re unhappy. If they’re happy there’s no problem.

I think people are averse to the idea because they haven’t done it, and feel it’s morally wrong. But morals aren’t laws, and we live in a world of laws.

The solution is to bill daily, not hourly, and to meet all of your estimates.

It’ll feel like a marathon, but you can pull down over half a million a year if you play your cards perfectly.

If you tell me "I will need you 40 hours a week" but then it turns out you actually need 20 hours of my time a week I am not going to waste these 20 hours because life is too short for this kind of foolishness. I could tell you that I'm done after these 20 hours, but if my 20 hour output already matches the average output for that position then why should I? What is in there for me? Most likely I am not going to be rewarded for picking more work anyway, I will just work harder and that's it. Why bother if there's no incentive to work harder? I might as well prioritize myself and my finances as opposed to provide above-average value to someone who will never reward me for doing so.

If I was running a business and I would manage to effectively double my income I would be praised and pointed to as an example of a successful person. Yet if I do the same as an employee all of the sudden there's tons of problems around it. Why should I let myself be worse-off than a random company? Why should I willingly choose to earn less if I can earn more?

I've done it a few times and we usually cover the expectations for freelancing on the job. Usually this means a lower salary for this "show up in office and do whatever you want" block of time. Remote can be the exact opposite - "don't show up in office, but get more work done"

I knew plenty of kids whose parents worked multiple jobs growing up. The fact that those jobs were shitty, doesn't change the ethics of it. Unless you're violating a non-compete, it's not anybody's business what you do with your free time.

I think it is also because most of us never had to work two jobs out of necessity. So we just assume that one is supposed to have only one job.

Unfortunately, I have met many people who had to do multiple jobs in order to survive. Especially, when they had a family, and wanted to provide them better opportunities. It is pretty standard operating procedure below certain income levels.

I don't see anything wrong with 2 full-time jobs as long as one is actually performing and working 80 hours. I knew people who worked even longer hours out of necessity.

But really, don't go flaunting it because it's ridiculously easy for jobs to begin requiring things that disallow you to work 2 jobs, like a timesheet.

But everyone believes that 40 hours is the peak, maybe less, before efficiency drops. You need rest to do well.

If you can perform, then just get a better position or a better job. Take on more responsibilities. Use the spare time to fix the problems that nobody brings up. If you can't, then chances are you're not really performing. If you are performing, why aren't you in a CxO position? If you are in a CxO position, are you hitting the 10% week on week growth benchmark?

I feel that most people doing two jobs are really just taking multiple low positions with low expectations and low salary caps. It's not always laziness, sometimes just market inefficiency.

Now if you are one of the people who can do multiple jobs effectively, consider consulting, where it's completely fine.

False. The 40 hour work week in the US was won on the backs of a militant labor movement in the earlier 21st century. Plenty of bosses and company owners around the world believe more working hours would increase productivity, and laws around the world vary quite a bit too.

Eastern companies often employ 996, where the expectations are roughly 72 hours/week, and compensation is paid accordingly.

The point is that the 40 hour work week has nothing to do with productivity.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=no&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=work...

>There's infinite things to do in many software companies. You're only given 40 hours of work per week. If you had the stamina for two jobs, then they'd give you 80 hours, with more than double the pay. That's what factories and gig jobs do. But everyone believes that 40 hours is the peak, maybe less, before efficiency drops. You need rest to do well.

>If you can perform, then just get a better position or a better job. Take on more responsibilities. Use the spare time to fix the problems that nobody brings up. If you can't, ...

If you can't, you're working at a company similar to most people where taking on additional projects outside of your scope is not rewarded with "double pay". Its rewarded with leadership believing you don't have enough work.

The claim above makes sense at startups/etc where growth is determined by your output. At my employer, I'm literally not eligible for a promotion or raise until I've been there for 2 years. Regardless of how many hours I put, my (measurable) direct impact on revenue, my (measurable) reductions in cost, it is against policy to promote or pay me more.

That is why people look to get seconds jobs. That is why the only against policy raise I was given occurred when 2 coworkers left and cited this specific policy, so the company feared more people would leave.

Lets ask why I'm not cxo or even senior level, when I open my companies financials and see myself managing 6x more revenue than the next person with 15% better profit margin.

I don't want to manage people at that level. I want there to be trust so we can both grow the company together. How can I do that if I am competing with you for your own time?

Do you offer equity, then? Does an employee working harder, faster, also benefit them because they share in the company's success, or does it just increase your profits while they slave away building widgets for you?

> I want to make a list of tasks and have you work through them as fast as you can

If you treat your employees as cogs in an assembly line, well, they're just going to think of you as a checklist they gotta complete in order to get paid. Doesn't sound like they have much reason to be loyal.

I dunno, the power dynamics in these relationships can vary so much between companies and individual managers/owners. The good ones take care of their employees and inspire loyalty and share their success. The bad ones just treat them as commoditized labor, and in turn get treated as commodity jobs. It's a two-way street.

> Do you offer equity, then?

Employees complain a lot about pay, but those surely don’t deserve a dime. As an employer, I grew the company from 0 to 6 jobs. Now I employ people to delegate missions to, one of them is that each employee creates 6 jobs too. And the type of “post-Covid” employee is, in practice, useless to the economy.

You're expecting partner-level commitment from employees, are you offering them partner-level compensation, ownership and decision making?

If you're working for someone else, it is by definition meaning that Y has plenty of room in it and can be done better.

They could replace the worker with anyone else that has the same skill as them, but who would put all effort into Y, and effectively double the rate of production for not much change.

It's even better than that, because they now have one big lever to tweak the workload. Some weeks it might be 1.5Y, other times it's 2.1Y, software engineering definitely has its good and bad periods, week-by-week.

If the person who works two jobs isn't replaced, not only do we have less work done than what's possible, but they can also burn out easier.

And we can't change what their other work is telling them to do.

If an engineer is burning out or need a break, there's only so much could be done (other than stopping work altogether.. but again, why? For another company to burn out our employees?) - there's a lot less wiggle room in 1Y than 2Y.

(Note: I said "we" from pov of manager but I am not one, I'm just an engineer, and I thought about the two job question for quite a while, but determined that it's definitely not worth my time. I get more fulfilment from doing my own things.)

And why would I care about that as an employee? It's the employer's problem to use my time effectively, not mine. It is ridiculous to assume I should have interest in helping you make me work harder for the same amount of pay.

>They could replace the worker with anyone else that has the same skill as them, but who would put all effort into Y, and effectively double the rate of production for not much change.

So there's this pool of magical workers who can do twice the amount of work for the same salary as the current employee and yet the company is not utilizing this opportunity at all? This scenario makes no sense, if it was possible to do then the company should already be doing it regardless of whether someone has a second job or not.

You don't, the company cares. And whether or not you're a part of that company affects how much you care.

> It is ridiculous to assume I should have interest in helping you make me work harder for the same amount of pay.

You are making yourself work harder. Not the company.

I guess we're having a miscommunication here because you're thinking in terms of "value of labour" and all that cruft.

> So there's this pool of magical workers who can do twice the amount of work for the same salary as the current employee ...

We have people on our team who don't know what CSV files are, and who spend 3 or 4 days on typing out things from spreadsheets, rather than using copy paste. Labour is not inherently valuable for the sake of labour.

The value from a software engineer isn't from hours worked. It's the quality of the result. Man is more than machine.

As long as you can produce twice as much quality software from two companies, then there's no issue with moonlighting a job.

But I'm saying that you're painting yourself into a corner, because now you have to negotiate and do all the "non-labour-related" BS twice as much, and I would argue that the quality of your output degrades, not improves.

It would be more effective to double your money with the current employer as it gives you and them (and you) more space, vacation, room to slow down and speed up when you need, etc.

Exactly - they want to maximize Y while keeping X constant.

That's always been my experience anyway.

You can't blame people for wanting to conserve money, especially against unknowns.

If you get an estimate from someone on how long it takes to do something, and you approve that estimate, and it's delivered in that amount of time, that should be good enough for you. Realizing later, the guy could have potentially banged it out twice as fast is you imagining injury where none exists.

If that person _does_ do the work twice as fast and comes back asking for extra work, do you pay them more? What incentive would employees have to work this way?

> I want there to be trust so we can both grow the company together.

You are not partners with your employees, and the idea that someone spending their free time doing X or Y undermines your trust in them is garbage. I live in MA where everybody is an employee at will and can be fired tomorrow without explanation.

> How can I do that if I am competing with you for your own time?

This is the most toxic part. Your employees time is not yours. If they are salaried, it's expected they will pull their weight without having to track their hours. It's often expected that if the work takes longer, you'll put in the extra time, but again that's about tracking the work. You aren't their owner. Jeez.

If you want to work on a per-project basis there are plenty such consulting gigs out there, but with salaried work the general understanding is you are buying a chunk of someone's time rather than specific projects.

By this logic everyone on salary in any career must be a cheap, dumb slacker, after all there is no difference between accounting on salary, plumbing on salary, writing software on salary or working in a warehouse on salary. The exact same logic applies.

Or maybe, just maybe doing plumbing on salary has the exact same set of tradeoffs as doing any other job on salary and people choose either for different reasons.

Who are you talking to here? Surely not a wage labourer?

Paying someone for "full-time" involves some amount of spare capacity, that you're paying for in order to have them available in case of emergency. But more fundamentally, you and your employer/customer should both be honest about what is being paid for/delivered.

The real reasons are that few people can actually deliver two jobs effectively and most jobs expect you to be accessible and available for some set of working hours.

I've never worked for a FAANG, but every place I've worked made it a discretionary thing. I would agree that if the other job was literally "I'd like to flip burgers on the weekend," then the Facebooks of the world should not be able to tell you no, and I guess I'd be surprised if they tried. Working with Burger King as a software developer to build a new social engagement app though, yes.

I also think if you're employed by Facebook as a software developer, and you need to work at Burger King to get extra money, then something else is wrong. Of course you should be able to do what you want with your time but... really?

Your employment contract makes it their business. If it says you can have multiple jobs, you're golden; if not, well...

It is, however, also the case that employers can require you to inform them in advance of any moonlighting, they can demand an opportunity to vet the moonlighting to verify that it is legitimately unrelated and that you are not being hired by the second employer due to a desire to gain either and trade secrets or any favors relating to the first employer (or any other similar potential conflict of interest), and they can require that you deliver the same workload for them that you would in the event that you did not do any moonlighting.

Of course, actually going through the whole officially-saying-you-are-moonlighting process is tedious, annoying, and can lead to conflicts with the first employer (especially since they'll start looking closely at your performance, which they might not otherwise do), so many people who have agreed to an agreement like this moonlight without telling the first employer -- and then they are subject to disciplinary action if they get found out. (Also lots of people accidentally or carelessly end up using some first-employer asset/resource when moonlighting -- especially in a remote-work world where your employer might have outfitted your home office for you with property that you have agreed that they own even though everybody knows that if you left the employer they wouldn't ask for it back)

Moonlighting for an unrelated business in the same field is less likely to be problematic, but in the case of, for example, Alphabet or Apple, exactly what are you doing that is definitely not a conflict of interest.

Moonlighting a second full-time job will in general cause you to be less effective at either than you would be absent the moonlighting, because human focus and energy are finite resources.

Moonlighting a part-time gig in a materially unrelated line of business is probably entirely conflict-of-interest free -- and nearly all employers would not attempt to stop you from doing so, though they may require you to tell them about it and let them verify that it actually is conflict-of-interest-free. (Of course, telling them might make them start paying close attention to whether or not you're getting "a full day's work" done in your day job, which, if you aren't, will probably cause you grief eventually)

If you worked at a factory or a grocery store, came and did your eight hours, and worked another job, nobody would care. So why does it differ as a developer? Especially if you're in a position where they treat you as a "resource". If you're an executive or cofounder or something, it's a different story

https://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-viral-linkedin-post-engi...

(Edit, I think he found my post :) )

But I have a feeling that you would have a hard time swinging those agreements in the first place. Why would your employee compromise, unless you are irreplaceable?

I used to moonlight as a programming instructor. It let me meet developing talent, promote my day job, and do some headhunting.

Day job loved it.

I think the reason they usually object is because it alters team dynamics. Imagine if you get promoted to Senior at one job, but are still Junior at another.

Also concerns about intellectual property.

Nothing wrong with software engineers doing the same thing.

If both jobs require availability during the same hours (“business hours”), how would you juggle meetings? If I was your manager at the one company and hear from you that can’t attend a meeting because of your other job, I would probably look to replace you.

More generally: put yourself in your managers shoes and try to imagine under what circumstances they’d be less than thrilled.

Whether working two jobs without disclosing that to the employers breaks the law, or violates some moral principle, or whether you consider it right or wrong, and regardless of what you think you owe your employer or how much you deliver, you have to look at it pragmatically. Most employers don't want their employees working multiple jobs. You might get fired, and in some circumstances you may get sued.

If you want to work multiple jobs without getting in trouble, switch to freelancing. You will do the same work but as an independent contractor you can (almost) freely choose whom to work for, where, when, and how much. (I added "almost" because you have to avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of disclosing proprietary information.)

But if you are working on a team as anything above an entry level developer - the job description is more than that.

If you have extra time in your work week, you should be looking at ways to make your team better - what parts of the project are painful and can be improved?

You should be looking out for your teammates, particularly those with less experience - and asking them if they need help.

You should be coordinating with other teams that are doing similar work. Are there ideas you can offer to them to help their work, and in turn do they have ideas that can help you and your team?

Essentially, most jobs are social, and that’s embedded into the job requirements. You have to talk to people when they are working. If you’re working two jobs over everyone else’s 9 - 5, you cannot do this as effectively as someone with one “full time” job.

When an employer hires you "full-time", they're asking for your full and complete attention. I'm not saying they own you or that you should work more than what you're getting paid for. But you're short changing your team, your manager, and the company who is trusting you.

I take it you're not a manager/leader. If you were, you'd get this. Imagine every member of your team double timing. Now you're left with a bunch of people half-assing it. It's deeply demoralizing.

And without ethics, you're just a cheat. It's no different than cheating in an exam.

If you want to earn more, start a business. Become a consultant. Learn how to make yourself more valuable. Don't cheat.

If you want to retire early, I'm pretty sure working two jobs wouldn't do the trick, even if you managed to sustain such an ordeal for years.

The best way to break out of the 9 to 5 clockwork or the rat race, is to provide value far greater than one can provide in 1 or 2 jobs. That is, starting a company, providing service(s) that return greater value. Whether you end up selling of old age (e.g. 45 if you've had enough) to a broker service, or whether you end up selling out early due to an opportunity, that will most likely give you an earlier retirement than working 2 jobs staggered.

And by the way, watch most people who have sold their company and made a ton of money... Most of them still work [citation needed, I don't know any personally].

Point is, love what you do and you won't work a day in your life. Or strap up and do the work.

Most people can retire off of 2 million USD in a major city. Spend the first million on your house and you live off of the 6-8% ROI for the second million.

Even if your living expenses is over 100k/yr, you can comfortably retire after 4 million USD in most areas of the world (House + worst case scenario 4% ROI off of 3 million).

Most people with over $4m in assets do not retire because they find value in earning money, not because they can't.

If you're an L5 at Amazon making 330k/yr, saving around 100k/yr after taxes and expenses, you can retire around 15ish years assuming you don't inherit or luck into a high growth asset.

One simple answer: they know because Alice signed an employment contract assigning all IP to them, and foregoing any other employment.

There are a ton of other reasons: Alice could be party to both sides of a vendor relationship or acquisition. Alice could be short changing the jobs expecting 40 hours of her time each but only getting 30 or less. Alice could be working for competitors, where having access to Bob's datasets helps her work with Carol disproportionately and without his knowledge or consent.

> Most employees just wanna earn enough to retire

I mean, you presumably also want to retire, and not lose your job, and not go to jail. Maybe even do some good work?

Just don't get too upset when they dont share their quarterly roadmap with you or invite you to the company picnic.

A lot of this noise is from people that don't believe you can do two jobs remotely satisfactorily, and from people in management that don't like the idea they don't own you body and soul.

The amount you make as a manager, director, on up grows by more and more. Most company directors or VPs make 2-10x what a passably performing IC makes. Taking two jobs pretty much assures that you won’t grow in either one. Additionally, it only works when you don’t have too many other responsibilities and the demand is where it is for developers.

The minute demand slows down (like it’s doing now) most employers will start pushing for more in-person time from their teams; and have more options for changing out low-performers.

It’s probably one of the least efficient least sustainable ways you could earn enough to retire.

You might be able to work an 80 hour week consistently but your work may not be as consistent or capable. What happens when some one else on your team makes a mistake which requires you to work over time to make up the difference at which point where do you find the time on top of your 80 hour work week?

If you are able to consistently perform at that sort of level you can make more money by finding one job that pays more than two jobs.

My agreement with my current company explicitly spells out work not done on their equipment, their time, or related to their business as not theirs. I use this to work for my side projects, a co-worker uses it to moonlight (with our employers knowledge).

Sure Google is probably going to make you sign an IP agreement that makes this impossible, but not every tech job is FAANG.

If you work for HP designing printer software and make an iPhone game on the side, you are probably ok. If you are working for HP designing printer software, and Cisco designing VoIP phone software you stand to create a huge intellectual property risk for both companies as they both produce network switches. You can't reasonably demonstrate to either company that you aren't using their IP in the course of your work with the other.

As always, when in doubt consult a lawyer, but yes, yes you can. If you never contribute code to Cisco's switches, they can confidently say you haven't put HP's switch code into Cisco's switches.

Now neither of these is my area of expertise, but VoIP software and networking switch software sound uncomfortably close to me, and I'd be worried about causing problems there, but that has to do with the software having related needs, not the simple fact that both companies build switches. And as noted above that'd be verboten by my agreement, as it'd mean I'm working on software related to my employers business.

But even accepting your scenario as true at face value, it doesn't make it impossible to have two jobs in tech without causing conflicts. You specifically chose two tech companies with their fingers in a lot of pies. There are plenty of smaller companies that have no intersection.

But absolutely do contact a lawyer before engaging in career ending behavior.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause

I'd argue that it's unethical to put unenforceable terms into contracts in order to scare the signee into not doing something they might want to do, something that could better their family's lives, and something that's completely legal.

Many places being only California, North Dakota, the District of Columbia, and Oklahoma, and even there they're not entirely unenforceable. You'll still get fired, but you probably won't get sued. Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Washington have banned non-compete agreements only for low-wage workers. There earning more than $34K/yr and in the rest of the US, a contract is a contract, and violators will not only get fired, they're open to lawsuit for breach of contract, though I expect litigating an employee for breach of contract would be exceptional, say if the employee pilfered lucrative clients.

> I'd argue that it's unethical to put unenforceable terms into contracts in order to scare the signee into not doing something they might want to do, something that could better their family's lives, and something that's completely legal.

This is quite the straw man as noncompete contracts are always enforceable through termination with cause, and they are ubiquitous in standard boilerplate employment contracts.

ive tried 3 jobs at the same time back then, i still dont recommend it.