Much of the world needs to work two jobs. Chris Williams writes that managers should be careful in how they react to an employee working multiple jobs.
It’s because the system is designed to keep us paid just enough to live and keep buying from companies, but not enough to have true independence. Working two jobs is cheating that system by giving you more money and freedom than they want you to have. Once you have financial security you can start to wonder about how fucked up this “system” truly is.
Do you really think anyone out there actually wants you to not have more? Doesn’t seem to me that anyone cares. I think the concern is that you will perform your job halfway, not that you will become too solvent. Having more money to spend is always good for the capitalists. Hurting productivity is the fear (whether right or wrong).
It really should depend on the role. If part of your job is being available for inbound requests, or participating in group work of some kind, it seems reasonable to expect that during the business day you will be available and not randomly tied up with other commitments. It would be hard to have two such jobs.
If it’s a task completion kind of job then it shouldn’t matter exactly when the tasks get done as long as they get done.
But you should be able to have one “high availablility” job and one “task completion” job at the same time because your tasks can always be set aside if you are needed. Or two task completion jobs, for the same reason.
In all events, the point is being able to perform your job without undue obstacles. If you can do that, and you’re meeting the goals and criteria set for you, nothing else should matter.
I don’t follow. If you’re claiming you’re putting 40 hours of work in a week, or that is what your contract says, and you’re really only doing 20 because you’re splitting it between two jobs…isn’t that obviously cheating the system?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a shit if people take advantage of a corporation to milk it for cash, but it seems to me to be pretty clearly cheating the system. If you want to get paid on what you produce, and not the time you put in, then you should structure your contracts that I way. I know a lot of my side work I don’t bill hourly precisely because I know it can be done quickly ( for me with experience) but it’s worth more to them.
If you’re salaried, you’re not usually obligated to work a certain number of hours, you’re just obligated to complete tasks on time. If someone holds two salaried positions and works fast enough that they get all obligations for both completed in 40 hours a week, they’re not cheating anyone.
I manage a decent sized team of salaried people and I am 100% behind this.
If I were to have a criticism it would be of management hiring more people than they really need, not paying good wages, and/or not recognizing when one of their people is ready for a bigger role.
It’s never happened on my team that I know of, but if I were to run into that case and my guy was getting his job done properly then zero fucks would be given.
Do all of your team members finish their work at the same time, or are some slower than others? Do some require more help than others, or take up more than your time managing? Do you just fire the worst performing ones? Does anything change if you find out that the worst performing person has another job he’s doing during the same hours he’s working for you and maybe that’s why he’s performing under his peers?
If I were to have a criticism it would be of management hiring more people than they really need
A lot of companies I’ve worked at have been the opposite 😅 management making do with less by making people work harder to the point of burnout is not very helpful.
Agreed on management not recognizing when one of their people is ready for a bigger role, it’s even worse when the person is performing that role and has expectations of that role but doesn’t have the title or salary bump to show for it.
Oh definitely lots of places under hire, that wasn’t really what I was getting at. I meant if someone is in a full time role at a job and has enough free time to take a whole as other job without any apparent impact on his output, odds are good they have a lot more people on the team than they really need and a good proportion of people’s time gets spent on the illusion of work getting done more so than the substance.
Ive worked many salaried jobs in my life. I’ve never seen a work contract that simply defines your tasks you have to get done. Not saying that it doesn’t happen, but I would be hard pressed to believe it’s common. I don’t even know how you would do that because what tasks I do always shifts, especially in tech. On top of that, how long a task takes is extremely unpredictable. Sometimes I fly through something, sometimes that last 10% takes 90% of the time.
*edit: contract work is very common and definitionally does not define ‘time on the job’, and instead lays out specific metrics of performance related to production. Salaried work is definitely far more common, but to say that’s unusual or impossible is just wrong.
I think this helps elucidate the real issue here, which is the distinction between selling labor and selling your time. One of those is obviously more reasonable and the other shares a conceptual relationship with other types of indentured labor.
It used to be that the distinction didn’t matter since you had to be in a particular place to do a particular work anyway, selling your labor and selling your time looked basically the same and your employer could control and manage how you spent that time. But with remote work, the employer no longer has control over managing your time because they have no (reasonable) way to monitor your production; an employer utilizing monitoring software would (rightly) be seen as an abuse and invasion of privacy. So even though the contract hasn’t changed, people are more aware of how dehumanizing it is not to have sold their labor but control over a certain number of hours of their life.
I obviously have bias here, but I think defining labor by its measure of time is alienating and inhumane.
My point is more that salaried employees, by definition, are not required to put in a certain amount of hours. That would make them hourly employees. All salaried employees are required to do is to complete their work by a deadline. What that work is and what the deadline is are usually not defined specifically in their contract, because as you said, both those things constantly change, so it would be impossible to reflect that in some binding agreement.
It’s less about contractual and legalities and more about the feel of the workplace. A lot of places, especially remote jobs, are more laid-back and open-minded than traditional 9-to-5 ass-in-seats old fashioned office jobs.
This is how it works where I live from a legal point of view too. If you “show up” (in-person or remote doesn’t matter) to your full-time job and are “available” for work but they don’t have enough for you, legally you must be paid for your full number of hours (your entire salary). You are paid for your time, not your results. You keep your job by delivering good results, however, since that’s a different matter.
I get paid to do 40 hours of work a week and I feel like I’m cheating the system as I definitely don’t work anywhere close to that.
I think people just are comfortable screwing over companies as they will screw you as often as they can so they don’t see it as cheating in this case, but it’s a rare case where the worker gets more out of it than the business.
Mainly because I’m not naive, but more concretely because i have followed this movement because it interested me when I wanted to make more money.
But even if we want to pretend that all of these people are actually working 80 hour weeks, the article talks about juggling zoom meetings and falls, so it’s clearly talking about some kind of deception at least as to when you are working.
Not sure how that’s an argument that it’s ok to have two jobs. If people can only concentrate on work for 3 out of 8 hours, where are they getting the concentration for another job? More likely that 3 hours get divided to 1.5 to each.
It really depends on the job. For example, security guards need to be present AND vigilant. It’s not reasonable for them to be fooling with spreadsheets on their phone or something. However, a spreadsheet worker is not technically required to sit in their chair 40 hours. They need to get a certain amount of work done. Who cares when they do it? The rub comes when some people think that the spreadsheet job is mandated 40 hours in the chair but it really isn’t. That’s not in the papers you signed. It’s just a “soft expectation” or assumption that management had. If you are completing all the work expected of you during a day, it shouldn’t matter if it took you a full 8 hours or not.
Having said that, someone who only completes what’s given and never contributes extra on their own initiative, or looks for additional ways to be helpful, is not going to be as appreciated. They might not get promoted as fast. But that’s different than cheating.
Most of these people are over paid actually. Making without stock over 150k and then around the same in RSUs or more.
The issue is many folks were only doing like 3 or 4 hr a day and then double dipped to collect another paycheck because they had the time to. I don’t necessarily fault them.
Friend of mine intentionally took a boring bank job making like 50k less than he was making (so around $125k a yr) so he could coast as a high performer there then planned and did find another gig in Pacific time (were east Coast) and then pulled two checks and still only worked like 42 hr a week.
This is the true reason there making work from home optional.
so they should just sit and stare if they’ve finished their work? don’t be absurd, please. the whole system is way past its due date. our society needs to scrap it and start over. and i mean human society. the world, our species. the one we have now if fast leading us to extinction, along with most of the other creatures on earth. what he says isn’t the way, but it’s better than harassing people for doing more work when they finish their first job.
Huh? If the job can be done this fast and the contract says, you get this money for doing that, why should that be wrong, meaning why should anyone be unhappy?
Except companies are just in for the money and would rather pay you less … Hmmm
That’s the point of the clause; to fire people who tell them they’re working a second full-time job. When required to be in office everywhere it becomes quite obvious very quickly. They’re upset they can’t tell if you’re two-timing or not if you work from home, so they want to make sure you come in and work for them
Petty tactics from petty people. If someone is doing the job they are paid for, why bother? It’s like the employers are entitled to the 40 hours or something, even if all the work is done.
They aren’t if they aren’t available because they are working the second job. I question how many people saying this are actually salaried workers who’ve read their employment agreements.
And if you’re working on something for the second job, do you have to drop it if something comes up with the first one? Does the second job know you’re going to be doing that?
Why would they ever do that? Only reason they would even consider such thing if if they are forced or if it somehow directly benefits them short-term. Maybe not even short-term because not doing so helps keeping people suppressed and lessens any threats to them.
I mean, yes-ish? My friend has 5 and makes way more than any one job would ever be willing to pay.
More power to him. Is he burning bridges? Probably. Is he banking a ton of money? Yeah. Is anyone getting hurt? Not really, he gets his asks done and that’s that - I’m not about to feel bad for a megacorp grossing hundreds of millions to billions a year.
That smells like BS. No one can work 5 full time jobs and not be committing fraud somehow. Paying someone overseas to do the work, plagiarizing it, submitting the same work to more than 1 of them etc.
Believe what you will, I work multiple myself and could easily pick up more. It’s easy in software engineering at large companies with disorganized practices. I even got “exceeds expectations” at one and a raise recently. I am doing all the work myself, no hiring out. They’re all in very different industries and use different tech platforms, so there is no real copying of work.
I honestly think I just got lucky with the jobs. Low meetings, rarely overlap, largely autonomous, fully remote.
I could probably make as much or more working one single job at Big Tech and selling my soul, but there is something freeing in making a percentage of that much but spread out / diversified.
If I ever get laid off at one, I probably have others. If an acquisition or reorg happens and I become redundant at one, at least I have the others. Is this whole situation ideal for all? Probably not, but there is a bit of mental comfort and freedom it gives me that I really can’t put a price on.
I love the work I do and the people I work with, I’ll put in a 20+ hour day if I have to, to make sure I hold up my end of the deal - but I’m lucky and I really haven’t had to (yet).
Couldn’t you just pay them enough so that they don’t need a second job?
The article also quotes
As if people working two jobs are stealing and not working in exchange for proper value of money.
It’s because the system is designed to keep us paid just enough to live and keep buying from companies, but not enough to have true independence. Working two jobs is cheating that system by giving you more money and freedom than they want you to have. Once you have financial security you can start to wonder about how fucked up this “system” truly is.
Except they’re not even paying us enough to live anymore
Do you really think anyone out there actually wants you to not have more? Doesn’t seem to me that anyone cares. I think the concern is that you will perform your job halfway, not that you will become too solvent. Having more money to spend is always good for the capitalists. Hurting productivity is the fear (whether right or wrong).
It really should depend on the role. If part of your job is being available for inbound requests, or participating in group work of some kind, it seems reasonable to expect that during the business day you will be available and not randomly tied up with other commitments. It would be hard to have two such jobs.
If it’s a task completion kind of job then it shouldn’t matter exactly when the tasks get done as long as they get done.
But you should be able to have one “high availablility” job and one “task completion” job at the same time because your tasks can always be set aside if you are needed. Or two task completion jobs, for the same reason.
In all events, the point is being able to perform your job without undue obstacles. If you can do that, and you’re meeting the goals and criteria set for you, nothing else should matter.
I don’t follow. If you’re claiming you’re putting 40 hours of work in a week, or that is what your contract says, and you’re really only doing 20 because you’re splitting it between two jobs…isn’t that obviously cheating the system?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a shit if people take advantage of a corporation to milk it for cash, but it seems to me to be pretty clearly cheating the system. If you want to get paid on what you produce, and not the time you put in, then you should structure your contracts that I way. I know a lot of my side work I don’t bill hourly precisely because I know it can be done quickly ( for me with experience) but it’s worth more to them.
If you’re salaried, you’re not usually obligated to work a certain number of hours, you’re just obligated to complete tasks on time. If someone holds two salaried positions and works fast enough that they get all obligations for both completed in 40 hours a week, they’re not cheating anyone.
I manage a decent sized team of salaried people and I am 100% behind this.
If I were to have a criticism it would be of management hiring more people than they really need, not paying good wages, and/or not recognizing when one of their people is ready for a bigger role.
It’s never happened on my team that I know of, but if I were to run into that case and my guy was getting his job done properly then zero fucks would be given.
Do all of your team members finish their work at the same time, or are some slower than others? Do some require more help than others, or take up more than your time managing? Do you just fire the worst performing ones? Does anything change if you find out that the worst performing person has another job he’s doing during the same hours he’s working for you and maybe that’s why he’s performing under his peers?
A lot of companies I’ve worked at have been the opposite 😅 management making do with less by making people work harder to the point of burnout is not very helpful.
Agreed on management not recognizing when one of their people is ready for a bigger role, it’s even worse when the person is performing that role and has expectations of that role but doesn’t have the title or salary bump to show for it.
Oh definitely lots of places under hire, that wasn’t really what I was getting at. I meant if someone is in a full time role at a job and has enough free time to take a whole as other job without any apparent impact on his output, odds are good they have a lot more people on the team than they really need and a good proportion of people’s time gets spent on the illusion of work getting done more so than the substance.
Ive worked many salaried jobs in my life. I’ve never seen a work contract that simply defines your tasks you have to get done. Not saying that it doesn’t happen, but I would be hard pressed to believe it’s common. I don’t even know how you would do that because what tasks I do always shifts, especially in tech. On top of that, how long a task takes is extremely unpredictable. Sometimes I fly through something, sometimes that last 10% takes 90% of the time.
*edit: contract work is very common and definitionally does not define ‘time on the job’, and instead lays out specific metrics of performance related to production. Salaried work is definitely far more common, but to say that’s unusual or impossible is just wrong.
I think this helps elucidate the real issue here, which is the distinction between selling labor and selling your time. One of those is obviously more reasonable and the other shares a conceptual relationship with other types of indentured labor.
It used to be that the distinction didn’t matter since you had to be in a particular place to do a particular work anyway, selling your labor and selling your time looked basically the same and your employer could control and manage how you spent that time. But with remote work, the employer no longer has control over managing your time because they have no (reasonable) way to monitor your production; an employer utilizing monitoring software would (rightly) be seen as an abuse and invasion of privacy. So even though the contract hasn’t changed, people are more aware of how dehumanizing it is not to have sold their labor but control over a certain number of hours of their life.
I obviously have bias here, but I think defining labor by its measure of time is alienating and inhumane.
it definitely happens.
My point is more that salaried employees, by definition, are not required to put in a certain amount of hours. That would make them hourly employees. All salaried employees are required to do is to complete their work by a deadline. What that work is and what the deadline is are usually not defined specifically in their contract, because as you said, both those things constantly change, so it would be impossible to reflect that in some binding agreement.
It’s less about contractual and legalities and more about the feel of the workplace. A lot of places, especially remote jobs, are more laid-back and open-minded than traditional 9-to-5 ass-in-seats old fashioned office jobs.
This is how it works where I live from a legal point of view too. If you “show up” (in-person or remote doesn’t matter) to your full-time job and are “available” for work but they don’t have enough for you, legally you must be paid for your full number of hours (your entire salary). You are paid for your time, not your results. You keep your job by delivering good results, however, since that’s a different matter.
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Not sure why you’re down voted but you are right.
I get paid to do 40 hours of work a week and I feel like I’m cheating the system as I definitely don’t work anywhere close to that.
I think people just are comfortable screwing over companies as they will screw you as often as they can so they don’t see it as cheating in this case, but it’s a rare case where the worker gets more out of it than the business.
why do you assume they don’t work their full hours?
Mainly because I’m not naive, but more concretely because i have followed this movement because it interested me when I wanted to make more money.
But even if we want to pretend that all of these people are actually working 80 hour weeks, the article talks about juggling zoom meetings and falls, so it’s clearly talking about some kind of deception at least as to when you are working.
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html
Office workers are productive on average about 3 hours out of an 8 hour workday.
Not sure how that’s an argument that it’s ok to have two jobs. If people can only concentrate on work for 3 out of 8 hours, where are they getting the concentration for another job? More likely that 3 hours get divided to 1.5 to each.
It really depends on the job. For example, security guards need to be present AND vigilant. It’s not reasonable for them to be fooling with spreadsheets on their phone or something. However, a spreadsheet worker is not technically required to sit in their chair 40 hours. They need to get a certain amount of work done. Who cares when they do it? The rub comes when some people think that the spreadsheet job is mandated 40 hours in the chair but it really isn’t. That’s not in the papers you signed. It’s just a “soft expectation” or assumption that management had. If you are completing all the work expected of you during a day, it shouldn’t matter if it took you a full 8 hours or not.
Having said that, someone who only completes what’s given and never contributes extra on their own initiative, or looks for additional ways to be helpful, is not going to be as appreciated. They might not get promoted as fast. But that’s different than cheating.
Most of these people are over paid actually. Making without stock over 150k and then around the same in RSUs or more.
The issue is many folks were only doing like 3 or 4 hr a day and then double dipped to collect another paycheck because they had the time to. I don’t necessarily fault them.
Friend of mine intentionally took a boring bank job making like 50k less than he was making (so around $125k a yr) so he could coast as a high performer there then planned and did find another gig in Pacific time (were east Coast) and then pulled two checks and still only worked like 42 hr a week.
This is the true reason there making work from home optional.
so they should just sit and stare if they’ve finished their work? don’t be absurd, please. the whole system is way past its due date. our society needs to scrap it and start over. and i mean human society. the world, our species. the one we have now if fast leading us to extinction, along with most of the other creatures on earth. what he says isn’t the way, but it’s better than harassing people for doing more work when they finish their first job.
Are they overpaid, or is every other job underpaid? Seems weird to call them overpaid when the company is making a profit on them anyway.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
It’s management’s own damn fault for trying to use butt time in seats as a proxy for productivity.
Huh? If the job can be done this fast and the contract says, you get this money for doing that, why should that be wrong, meaning why should anyone be unhappy?
Except companies are just in for the money and would rather pay you less … Hmmm
All I can say is I agree with you; however, lots of contracts have you agree that you only work for that company while you’re employed by them
Yeah, I think mine has a clause too, that requires me to at least inform my employee
That’s the point of the clause; to fire people who tell them they’re working a second full-time job. When required to be in office everywhere it becomes quite obvious very quickly. They’re upset they can’t tell if you’re two-timing or not if you work from home, so they want to make sure you come in and work for them
Petty tactics from petty people. If someone is doing the job they are paid for, why bother? It’s like the employers are entitled to the 40 hours or something, even if all the work is done.
They aren’t if they aren’t available because they are working the second job. I question how many people saying this are actually salaried workers who’ve read their employment agreements.
🎯
Almost certainly the contract doesn’t say this tho.
Mine does. But I’m not working manual labor, so it definitely can and will differ I guess
Is that a job you could get away with working 2 at the same time remotely?
Not really, maybe this one and a half time job or sth, I work 4-8 hours a day depending on what’s happening (I work in it)
And if you’re working on something for the second job, do you have to drop it if something comes up with the first one? Does the second job know you’re going to be doing that?
No idea why you’re getting down votes.
sad to have to come this far down to see this.
normalizing needing multiple jobs means soon we will be much more overworked…
Why would they ever do that? Only reason they would even consider such thing if if they are forced or if it somehow directly benefits them short-term. Maybe not even short-term because not doing so helps keeping people suppressed and lessens any threats to them.
I mean, yes-ish? My friend has 5 and makes way more than any one job would ever be willing to pay.
More power to him. Is he burning bridges? Probably. Is he banking a ton of money? Yeah. Is anyone getting hurt? Not really, he gets his asks done and that’s that - I’m not about to feel bad for a megacorp grossing hundreds of millions to billions a year.
That smells like BS. No one can work 5 full time jobs and not be committing fraud somehow. Paying someone overseas to do the work, plagiarizing it, submitting the same work to more than 1 of them etc.
Believe what you will, I work multiple myself and could easily pick up more. It’s easy in software engineering at large companies with disorganized practices. I even got “exceeds expectations” at one and a raise recently. I am doing all the work myself, no hiring out. They’re all in very different industries and use different tech platforms, so there is no real copying of work.
Ok, and you’ve never delayed a meeting or communications with 1 company because you were working on another?
No, I wouldn’t feel right. Worst case is I just attend both simultaneously.
If you can do it and not impact anyone at any of those jobs you’re a wizard.
I honestly think I just got lucky with the jobs. Low meetings, rarely overlap, largely autonomous, fully remote.
I could probably make as much or more working one single job at Big Tech and selling my soul, but there is something freeing in making a percentage of that much but spread out / diversified.
If I ever get laid off at one, I probably have others. If an acquisition or reorg happens and I become redundant at one, at least I have the others. Is this whole situation ideal for all? Probably not, but there is a bit of mental comfort and freedom it gives me that I really can’t put a price on.
I love the work I do and the people I work with, I’ll put in a 20+ hour day if I have to, to make sure I hold up my end of the deal - but I’m lucky and I really haven’t had to (yet).