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A new phenomenon of folks with more than one job is upon us. COVID-19 has normalized the phenomenon of a remote position, and folks, especially in the IT space, have taken to it enthusiastically. The anonymity provided by not coming to the office in person has spawned a new employee known as the“overemployed” worker, who works at more than one establishment simultaneously.

grayscale photo of man juggling on shore — Photo by juan pablo rodriguez on Unsplash

I personally encountered this myself while staffing for my gig. The first-ever candidate who interviewed for a backend engineer job had offered to work a 20-hour workweek. I had noted in my job description that I was looking to hire only a full-time employee. To my surprise, my candidate calmly reasoned that since startups are usually low on capital, this could be a win-win situation for both him and the startup. My next question was obvious:

“Has your current employer approved this arrangement?”

“No,“ They replied and continued on. “I will work on the weekends for you and on the weekdays for them. In the remote work culture, no one needs to know.”

I initially thought that this was a one-off case. I was, unfortunately, wrong.

NBC News recently covered this phenomenon with an example case of an over-employed engineer earning almost 1.5 million from working 11 Jobs.

NBC News NOW @NBCNewsNow

High inflation rates making families reconsider their bottom line. For many people their wages are not enough to keep up with rising costs. But @isagutierreznbc looks into “overemployed” people, those working remote AND multiple full time jobs. Watch NOW: nbcnews.com/NOW

In a post-COVID India, this trend of overemployment has caught like wildfire. As part of my hiring work, I have encountered many overemployed engineers who, to their credit, were upfront about their promiscuous ventures. Numerous engineers spread their workload evenly over the day, dealing with their Indian startup during the early hours and looking to their western employment during nighttime.

“Take it or leave it,“ They say.

There are many times when I’ve had to end a conversation with astonishment and surprise that such a conversation was happening.

Here is a tweet that recently went viral:

Trung Phan @TrungTPhan

A Redditor explains how he makes $1.2m working 7 jobs. Very actionable advice:

A subreddit, website, and book cater to the over-employed phenomenon.

Bartosz Adamczewski @badamczewski01

Apparently, working two or more jobs is a thing now: reddit.com/r/overemployed/ I have one job, and I can bearly make it since I'm a Director, Developer, Data Scientist, Interviewer, and (sometimes) HR, all in one role. How do these people even manage?

reddit.comr/overemployedr/overemployed: Overemployed.com - Work two remote jobs. Earn extra income. Achieve financial freedom. Read our FAQ, join our Discord, and find your …

Missionary vs Mercenary

From a startup perspective, over-employed working is a highly problematic phenomenon for multiple reasons. The foremost and the most important is that you are looking for hiring missionary founding engineers, ones who believe in the mission of what your startup is trying to do and are constantly living and breathing the purpose through their work.

On the other hand, a mercenary engineer is focused on the short term improvement. An overemployed engineer is a more severe case altogether, as they are trying to maximize their earnings without considering the depth of their work.

It is very easy to get caught

As a result, overemployed engineers rarely work well with a startup. Furthermore, they are highly likely to get caught - it would show up in their lack of involvement, inability to perform deep architecture, odd work-hours, and general lack of communication. In fact, it would show up in their GitHub history as checking the code in 2 or 3 private repositories in the same month.

Overall, overemployed engineers are a loss of productivity to startups, both during hiring process and eventual productivity to the organization. In my experience, some basic sanity tests can be a good idea.

Getting your contracts to state clearly that overemployement is not something your startup will approve
Having these conversations during the interview cycle so that the preference of the organization is communicated well in advance.
Serious background checks (based on the country’s legal framework) can be good expense to help you avoid overemployed engineers.

In other things

This thread caught my eye - Bootstrapping vs funding debate continues

Chris Cunningham @ChrisClickUp

In 2 years, we bootstrapped @clickup from $0 to $20M What has been powering our rocketship growth? Deep Product Market Fit Our PMF strategy is so effective that we know we can do it again Here's our fool-proof method for finding Product Market Fit. 🧵🧵

And some evergreen motivation during recession years - 20 million to 3 billion in 4 years.

Everett Randle @EverettRandle

Every once in a while I look at Google’s early 2000s P&L and my mind just breaks

I have two articles to recommend based on recent readings and I enjoyed them a lot. I hope you enjoy them too.

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The Overemployed and Startups