1. They tend to work double jobs at frankly lower tier companies with lower standards and significantly lower pay. Because the companies are lower tier, they stagnate in their career growth because the company is not teaching them good skills. And you cannot put both jobs in your resume, only one on top of that, and this will show up in future background checks.
2. Because of double working, they are pretty much guaranteed to not get promoted beyond the standard terminal level.
3. They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income.
4. You cannot work at proper startups and learn a ton, because the workload would be way too high for this strategy.
Real example: One person I know has 2 $150k jobs for a total of $300k. If they joined as a jr engineer at a FANGMULA or equivalent, they would be making $300k, not be fucking stressed about the duplicity that is working 2 jobs, learn more because it's a better company and get promoed to sr engineer within a year or two and make $400-500k instead. If they have ambition, they can cross the leadership rubicon (either through becoming a staff engineer or manager) and make even more, reaching up to $700k-$1M eventually.
Maybe if your having a hard time breaking into startups or FANGMULA and your just starting out, this might be an ok strategy, but beyond that, it's not a good idea.
> Real example: One person I know has 2 $150k jobs for a total of $300k. If they joined as a jr engineer at a FANGMULA or equivalent, they would be making $300k, not be fucking stressed about the duplicity that is working 2 jobs, learn more because it's a better company and get promoed to sr engineer within a year or two and make $400-500k instead. If they have ambition, they can cross the leadership rubicon (either through becoming a staff engineer or manager) and make even more, reaching up to $700k-$1M eventually.
Sometimes I wonder if the people saying this stuff really even work there. It's not impossible, but the kind of person who would be promoted that fast wouldn't be working two crappy jobs to begin with.
Not to mention even if you were promoted you wouldn't go from $300K to $500K. You think getting promoted at FAANG gives you an over 50% increase in total comp as the norm? (edit: If you've seen this, it's almost due to the fact that FAANG stock increased drastically during COVID. If you look at 2012-2017 data for promotions a 50% increase is almost unheard of).
You should join one if you're not already there and read about how people are complaining about less than 6.7% (last inflation report) raises during company meetings and less than 10% even when promoted.
Finally, background checks work on what you give them, they're not exhaustive (unless you're trying to work for the government). So many inaccuracies in this post I wonder if it's satire. If so, I apologize.
Agreed. I was a software engineer in New York, not SF (where salaries a _little_ higher), but salaries were nothing like this unless maybe you worked at a top-end hedge fund. The myth that every other random software engineer has this kind of pay is harmful.
I think the OP is adding equity compensation, which with the current bull market, is hugely inflating that number.
If you only count take home pay in cash, it's nowhere near $500k! Closer to 200k for a senior engineer imho. Vesting of shares takes a few years, so the extra $200k that you "get" is because 2 years ago, you were paid $150k in equity, and it grew to $200k (or more).
Yes, absolutely - in case this isn’t clear to anyone reading, you need to evaluate total compensation when comparing roles. Salary, equity, and on-target bonus (which are often agreed ahead of time). For public companies you can sell your RSUs as soon as they vest.
> Sometimes I wonder if the people saying this stuff really even work there. It's not impossible, but the kind of person who would be promoted that fast wouldn't be working two crappy jobs to begin with.
In my experience, people often stumble into these situations by simply not quitting their old job when they get a new job.
The idea is to continue to collect paychecks from the old job until they lay you off with severance.
This usually catches up with people later on when someone puts two and two together or hears from a friend of a friend that the person is working at a certain company. Imagine being recruited to a new company and seeing your former company coworker in Slack and he's been there for months. Word gets around.
This absolutely destroys reference checks. Another reason to always do reference checks and always confirm someone's end dates with the other company.
"You think getting promoted at FAANG gives you an over 50% increase in total comp as the norm?"
It's like $30-50K base each level (~18-25%), but the stock grants can make a huge difference. As a junior engineer you might make ~$35K/year in stock grants; at staff it's like $200K+; and at principal it's $600K+. In total comp you can easily go from ~$350K/year at senior to $500K at staff to $750K at senior staff to $1M at principal, which is close to 50% each time.
Note that the biggest benefit is that getting promoted opens you up to having more negotiating leverage. If the company doesn't want to keep you or if they're sure they'll keep you anyway, then sure, you'll be getting < 10% raises. Same if you came in at a very high baseline because of savvy negotiating or lots of competing offers. But if you're managing a critical team with a sustained record of high performance and then you get an offer elsewhere, that's what opens you up to those $M+ stock counteroffers. Junior engineers are not going to get that regardless of performance, because they just aren't that important to the business.
I'm saying that I know a lot of people who've been promoted.
1. Getting promoted in 2 years, especially once you're midlevel is very rare.
2. People at the lowest level (E3/L3/59 etc etc) are not receiving a 50% increase in total comp by being promoted usually.
People are getting confused because FAAANG stock has increased so much, and many bullish employees have not sold their stock and so their compensation (including appreciation) went up 50% during COVID. It's a trend that will likely not continue.
I brought up the 7% raise thing to a friend, apparently Google's solution (not sure if this took place earlier though) was to change their 4 year vesting schedule to a 3 year one. This basically acts like a raise.
So many compensation discussions are hard to get into because of the reliance on adding (sold or unsold) stock as part of total compensation. It's very reasonable for a junior engineer to get a $125-$150k base salary offer these days, but whether their total comp after 1 year pushes that to $300k, let alone if they can get a promotion that adds significantly more stock to push total to $500k the next (noting their first stock is still vesting and contributing), depends so much on the particulars of the company's stock price set by the market and stock grant plans that unless you name names and package specifics people won't believe you. Like it's possible as you say that you get promoted but with no new stock and a paltry raise, yet nevertheless your total comp over the next year goes up to $500k, this can be entirely due to the stock raising. Not very useful in a discussion trying to get at actual salary trajectories that don't depend on market luck.
The job I quit last year (Salesforce, fortune 137) I reached the "Lead" position (roughly equivalent to L5/senior at a place like google, but "Staff" at other places, titles are dumb) but I only ever had two stock grants in the years I was there: one at the beginning, one after reaching "Lead", and the second one was almost insultingly tiny (much smaller than the initial one) and I wasn't phased at all to give up ~70% of it in leaving. So for all my years there my comp was basically dominated by the base salary + the annual % bonus nearly everyone always gets and peaked at a "mere" $200k, stock didn't impact it much. A random mid-stage startup in Utah of all places trying to recruit me was throwing out $200k base as comparison. This sort of experience, especially the lack of significant stock refreshes ever, is pretty common, but there are companies (like Facebook) that give significant annual refreshes not even tied to promotions and can make stories like the GP's not too crazy.
A final factor in making these discussions difficult is that there are a lot of senior+ folks who've stayed with a place for 4+ years and are essentially getting shafted in terms of their earning potential and they don't want to admit that they need to change jobs (or even just leave and come back later) to get a lot more than they currently do, which leads them to dismiss very real likelihoods of newly hired junior or "standard" roles (what do we even call just a plain "software engineer" when so many are either junior or senior) getting as much as they do after stocks are added in.
Yup, and nope (I wasn't at the HQ office in SF but the Bellevue office, formerly Seattle). Look at https://www.levels.fyi/company/Salesforce/salaries/Software-... (I never added mine there; Glassdoor is also useful https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Salesforce-LMTS-Software-En...) and pay special attention to years-at-company. I'd get more if I returned, at least $300k, but... What was amusing is that the next tier, "Principal", has many employees at it where even if they're at HQ they were making less than me as a Lead (and some Seniors). (And it's still the case for levels data judging by the distribution if not the exact numbers.) The next level after that, "Architect", is where significant stock grants actually start happening at that company, but it's rather more work to get there and as far as my interests go not really desirable since almost always it meant you stopped coding in any meaningful way.
When people talk about salaries, I feel they always just talk about SF.
I was an SMTS at Salesforce (also not HQ) back in the day on $150k~ total comp, which people in this thread regard as junior pay; and that was on my initial stock grant, never got to find out what my refresher would have been.
Incorrect on background checks - there are employment verification services that get quite a lot of data (many companies opt in to sending them payroll data).
I tried pulling my TheWorkNumber report, and I was surprised to see my weekly salary history not only at my current and prior BigCo jobs, but also at my prior small (~100 employees) company. Apparently they used ADP for payroll and that was enough to get into the Work Number database. I’m not sure I HireRight always cross references with databases like TheWorkNumber, but it would be trivial for them to do so.
In my experience, the stock grant from a promotion is generally 50% higher than the previous level, and base salary is around 15% higher. Given that stock is a majority of comp, a promotion comes pretty close to 1.5x the previous comp.
In another comment, you’ve mentioned that you don’t care about levels.fyi, which is basically saying you don’t care about accurate data. levels.fyi actually underestimates total comp, because they use base + (grant / vesting period) to calculate comp. For high growth tech companies, stock usually grows so comp gets higher naturally over time.
which company and when? levels.fyi didn't support the thesis, so obviously I don't care about it.
also, I don't believe in using appreciation of stock as part of comp. were you paid less if you held on to vested RSUs and the stock dropped? no. you just decided not to sell and faced the consequences.
same way I wouldn't count someone taking their entire salary and dumping it into options successfully as "apprecation"
If the stock price drops, yes you get paid less going forward. If the stock goes up, you get paid more. That’s how it works. Try telling Uncle Sam at tax time that you want to calculate your income tax based on your RSU grant price. I’m sure the IRS would be thrilled.
I've worked at FANGMULA for many years, I'm an immigrant, I've recently become a hiring manager and hired people on my team weeks ago, I've done hundreds of interviews within my bigtech company, I barely finished my computer science degree from a mid-tier university (so I'm not that exceptional) and on top of that I've done the research with how promo systems work at these companies. I know what the current comp packages are for jr engineers too. When I do say jr eng, I do mean the L4 level, not the straight out of college no work experience L3 level. L5 is the terminal sr engineer level.
This friend that I'm giving an example of is real, and I feel like he has the potential to get into FANGMULA with my mentorship and then get promoted within that time frame. It's definitely all real and the post was kind of my own internal speech to get him to come over.
Go look at https://levels.fyi , and look at the jumps in comp between bands. Yes some companies may pay +/- %10 more, but it is what it is. Also the market has gone up, yet again, so even levels is a bit behind.
People thinking what I'm saying is BS is just a bunch of cope. You don't have to be a super genius with the grit of god to get into these companies.
I don't care about levels.fyi. I work at one of the companies you've mentioned. You're lying if you're saying that getting 50% increase is the norm or that the average promotion time is 2 years.
Perhaps, for example, an E3 at Meta can go to E4 in 2 years, but an E3 isn't making 300K total comp at Meta in California to begin with, nor would they go to 500K after promotion.
If you're a hiring manager then I don't need to explain to you that a 50% increase even with the highest ratings isn't some normal thing that happens.
Maybe you've seen it happen, I believe you. My point is that it's not the norm and you should stop saying it like it is.
You are right, my friend, the guy that is replying your comments is taking the lower bound of the L4 and comparing with the upper bound of L5. Lol. How it works , at least at Google (and is worst at Amazon), is when you get promoted from Ln to Ln+1 , your salary increases just it surpasses the lower bound of the level you were promoted to. I know for a fact of people at Google, L4 that negotiated better TC than what my L5 has. So, but if my L5 jumps ship to Facebook, then he will be easily get a 30% increase, at least.
L4 is around $300k, L5 is around $500k 500/300 = 1.6. At many of these companies, if you haven't gotten to the next step in about 2 years until L5, you start becoming a target and managed out, and I know multiple former coworkers who have been promoted from L4 -> L5 within a year or two, especially if you have a mentor or actively research on how to get yourself get promoted vs. just being passive about it.
Again, your own levels.fyi link does not support these numbers as being the norm. I do not deny that it can happen. I'm saying that you're misleading people by presenting them as some sort of normal thing.
Google L4 > L5 (270 -> 360)
Meta E4 > E5 (275 -> 390)
Microsoft SDE II -> Principal SDE (182 -> 308K; I intentionally skipped a level just to show the ridiculousness).
Amazon SDE II -> SDE III (240K -> 330K)
Apple ICT3 -> ITC4 (222K -> 333K)
And these are midlevel to senior and these are from the site you linked. If you do junior to midlevel your numbers, on average, make even less sense.
The vast majority of applicants can not get into those prestigious companies, and to be frank - if you can get two remote CRUD jobs that pay a total of $300k - that's probably 3-5 times higher pay than the average "normal" physical job in their area.
I get that this is HN and a very SF-centric board, but sometimes users here are so incredibly out of touch with the real world, it's not even funny anymore. I'm not attacking you directly, but it's something you see here all the time ("why not just join google and become a principal engineer")
Nobody is making $300k as a junior engineer. And certainly not getting promoted to senior engineer within a year on top of that. Stop talking out of your ass.
> Nobody is making $300k as a junior engineer. And certainly not getting promoted to senior engineer within a year on top of that. Stop talking out of your ass.
>>Well I do know someone who pulls that as a junior but he also has a PhD in inverse kinematics simulation and that job was really needed.
This is the problem with using words like nobody, always, etc. Someone will usually (see what I did there?) come along with one single piece of anecdata and think the original statement is invalid.
you're taking me too seriously. I'm sardonically pointing out that the parameters for the original statement to be possible exist, but they are at least two standard deviations over the median reader of HN, even, thereby supporting the sentiment of the parent post (if not the letter of the parent post), not undermining it.
Your post does nothing but make noise and clutter the discussion. It's frustrating when someone points out a fact that is overwhelmingly true and someone else jumps in with some ridiculous counterexample, even if your intention is to do it sarcastically.
I think the point is you're being taken too seriously here because someone almost always comes into these types of discussion and makes the same point you did in a serious way, then claims victory for refuting the original claim.
The poster above is inflating by about 15-25%. The “junior”/L4/E4 , level (one above entry level and one below senior) makes ~$270k at Google/Facebook according to levels.fyi [0]. Senior comp can vary more because the band is wide but $500k year would be possible with some stock appreciation.
Explore this site, it'll open up a whole new world of SDE pay at unicorns / startups / FANGMULA. I'd look at the entry level positions for maybe ... Dropbox or something, or Stripe. Those two off the top of my head get pretty close to 300k for "junior" engineer - SWE I.
I'm just saying, the claim is that no "junior engineer" can make 300k. That's pretty false. You can also look into HFT "junior engineers" like at Citadel which will clear 300k easily. Facebook return offers for new grad can hit very close to 300k, and there are definitely other companies that pay just as much, if not more. Of course, it's rare, and these people are in elite air.
I would categorized HFT eng on a different category (they, historically, always are outside of the typical SWE)
They make 200k base but have 0.5M bonuses (or more depending on the HF perf).
That FB eng that got return offer for 300k? Most likely just the only one. Probably not because of elite but because of niche skill (SME/PhD in a specific field that happened to be relevant). Probably skipped I3 to I4. Majority (95%) of FB I3 won't get close to 300k.
I have anecdotes from the hiring side. I've only seen the two-jobs phenomenon a couple times in my career, but it always involved someone getting a new job and then simply not quitting their last remote job. They eventually realize they can collect two paychecks until their old job catches on and lays them off.
However, it's not that difficult to spot if you're paying attention. Two job workers tend to:
1. Have elaborate excuses for why they can't update their LinkedIn profile to show the new job. Obviously they can't tip the old company off that they have a new job.
2. Have mysteriously complicated and ever-changing schedule conflicts throughout the day. We support (and encourage) flexible work, but when someone is disappearing throughout the day and can't reliably jump on a phone call (despite supposedly being online and active) without ample notice, they're probably doing something else.
3. Are extreme people-pleasers in superficial ways (want to keep up appearances) but only actually deliver good work when it's high profile and they know they're in the spotlight.
4. Are loathed by their teammates after a while, because everyone they work with slowly catches on that the person is absent-mindedly doing the bare minimum to not get fired. Inevitably, the teammates have to pick up the slack and do extra work to compensate. Few people are better positioned to recognize this than the people who are in the trenches with the person all day.
5. Have a different jobs on their resume with start and end dates that don't match what you confirm with the company. That's because they need to massage the start/end dates to appear as though they weren't overlapping the two jobs.
6. Are religious about "If I get my work done, why does it matter when I work?" Sounds great, but then they play every game in the book to shrink "their work" to be as small as possible and move the "done" part as far in the future as possible. End result is that team mates suffer (see #4).
> 1. Have elaborate excuses for why they can't update their LinkedIn profile to show the new job. Obviously they can't tip the old company off that they have a new job.
Why is this being stated as if a person is required to update LinkedIn with their current employer? What employer is pressuring new hires for an explanation on why they haven’t publicly claimed their new relationship status?
I don’t often update LI, but your phrasing of someone having “elaborate excuses” means there’s pressure from an employer (or coworkers?) for an LI update before anyone could even receive such “elaborate excuses” … and that’s just plain weird.
> What employer is pressuring new hires for an explanation on why they haven’t publicly claimed their new relationship status?
I honestly don't care for in-person employees, but it's something I ask remote employees to do for this exact reason.
If a remote employee makes vague excuses for why they must keep their old employer on their LinkedIn, it's worth investigating further.
Fortunately it's usually easy to call up the old company and confirm the person's start and end dates. Companies love to learn that one of their employees has started a new job but hasn't actually quit yet.
> I honestly don't care for in-person employees, but it's something I ask remote employees to do for this exact reason.
It sounds like you're just nosy, then. The content of my LinkedIn profile is no more your business than the content of my Tinder profile, and just as relevant to my work.
> The content of my LinkedIn profile is no more your business than the content of my Tinder profile, and just as relevant to my work.
What? LinkedIn profiles are literally about your work.
It's not about being nosy. It's about noticing inconsistencies. If someone is going through the trouble of maintaining a LinkedIn profile but they're also listing a different company as their current employer, it's time to start investigating.
LinkedIn isn't the final say, obviously. However, it can act as a canary in the coalmine for further investigation.
No, my work is about my work. If you're happy with my work, you, as my current manager at a company I already work for, have no business checking up on my LinkedIn profile. If you're not happy with my work, checking up on my LinkedIn profile isn't going to make you any happier.
I wouldn't be looking if I was happy with the person's work.
Empathetic managers trust their employees when they say a task is difficult and will take longer than expected.
Double job workers (and slackers in general) thrive on taking advantage of this empathy by lying and manipulating their way into perceptions that they are doing more work than they really are. Not fair to the manager, company, or team mates.
It's basic due diligence of any manager to check these things.
No, it's a waste of time and you being nosy. If you're not happy with my work, your responsibility is to come to me and tell me that, then see if we can work together to get to a point where you are happy.
Tell me honestly for a second: if you weren't happy with someone's work, would anything on (or not on) their LinkedIn profile make any difference to that situation whatsoever?
> Tell me honestly for a second: if you weren't happy with someone's work, would anything on (or not on) their LinkedIn profile make any difference to that situation whatsoever?
The LinkedIn point was about looking for clues that you might need to investigate further. I think you're trying to twist my statement into something else entirely.
Those kinds of comment are bannable offences on HN. I don't want to ban you, but this has been a problem many times before, and we need it to stop. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future?
Can you tell me what company do you hire for, so I don't apply? People's LinkedIn profile are private to them, none of your business. I wonder if you just hire in 3rd world countries, or focus on hiring people in need with no leverage, coz, if you ask me about my LI profile, I will tell you to take a hike.
Maybe "private" was the wrong word, maybe personal fits better. But anyway, in your style, so you understand: Imagine being so oblivious as to think your employer have the right to dictate what you post or not on your social profiles.
I work 3 jobs for 1 year, had 2 only for maybe 5. Most of your observations are correct but I can tell you that I do not have it that hard to synch the meetings to make them not overlap. And I make an conscious effort of being really prompt when answering queries. I am perhaps more prompt than many that do not do what I do, since eI would not like people to suspect what I am doing.
LinkedIn has proven a fucking pain indeed, and that is why I am not active on it anymore.
> LinkedIn has proven a fucking pain indeed, and that is why I am not active on it anymore.
Yep. There's another person in this thread trying to argue it away, but I've found LinkedIn to be a huge canary in the coalmine in these situations.
Someone who insists on maintaining an active LinkedIn profile but also isn't updating it with a new job isn't a red flag by itself (people just forget, obviously). It is, however, another piece of the puzzle.
If someone updates their LinkedIn and broadcasts their new job to all of their peers then I'm much less concerned.
It's interesting that you actually spotted them. In my experience it's really hard for people to tell what I'm doing, but I guess the expectations at the companies I contracted for were much lower and by comparison, I actually did my job. Most people seemed pretty happy with what I delivered. I was the most unsatisfied with it, to be honest.
You don't have to have a LinkedIn profile at all. I really don't care.
But if someone has clearly gone through the trouble of setting up a LinkedIn, listing all of their jobs and details on it, and collecting a lot of connections, but for some reason they must continue listing their previous employer as their current employer, it's worth further investigation.
If someone joins your company as a remote employee but publicly advertises themselves as working for someone else, you investigate further.
The "why" is in the linked article: It's in the playbook of people trying to manipulate you into letting them work half as much as their coworkers (thereby screwing over coworkers, who are forced to pick up the slack).
If you care about your team, you don't sit idle while one of the employees is slacking off, putting in half the effort as their peers, or manipulating their way into doing less than others.
> If you care about your team, you don't sit idle while one of the employees is slacking off.
There we go! "Slacking off" is not relevant. What's relevant is that you, as my manager at a company I already work for, are happy with my work, or not. It shouldn't matter whether it takes 100%, 80%, 50%, or 20% of my capacity to make you happy. This would be completely non-controversial in the vast majority of jobs.
In the real world, managers don't look at a task and schedule out exactly 40 hours of work each week. We trust our employees to give us feedback and healthy estimates.
Truth is, double job workers are usually caught because they're underperforming. But smart managers give employees the benefit of the doubt and don't go firing people at first signs of underperformance. If someone has a legitimate reason for falling behind for a while (maybe overleveled during hiring, maybe struggling with real life issues, etc.) then we work with them. If they have a manipulative/deceptive reason (working two jobs, avoiding work) then it's better off that we replace them with someone who cares.
If you think that a job is a simple matter of "do fixed pile of work every week", that's not how 95% of software jobs work. We rely on a 2-way communication with employees to establish what's reasonable, and if someone is manipulating us into lowering expectations (literally the title of this article) then they must go and be replaced with someone who cares.
Not to put too fine a point on it, people like the parent are just scum who make life difficult for everyone else. Having a tough period for whatever reason? Oh, they probably have another job because that's what the cool kids do.
If, as an employee, your philosophy is to grift what you can, expect companies to do the same. And good employers actually don't.
> If, as an employee, your philosophy is to grift what you can, expect companies to do the same. And good employers actually don't.
Well said.
If the entire relationship is built on lies and deception, it begins to show over time. Employees who build their relationship based on manipulating their employer (setting low expectations, as the article suggests) aren't the same employees helping their teammates, working together to get things done, and shipping good work. They're the ones that need constant manager attention and slowly siphon the energy out of their peers and managers. Removing them from the team is a win for everyone.
Allowable small side gigs (which I've always been very open about) are totally cool. And often even positive for my employer. But this idea that so long as you can slip under the radar with working at 50% and beg off of tasks?
But pretending that working two full-time salaried jobs are OK because no one has actually caught you? Wow.
And you're basically providing a template for manager who don't believe in more flexible working arrangements to deny them. I'd love for people for that to be kicked hard to the curb.
Companies do precisely what capitalism gives them incentives to do. "Grift" is not a meaningful concept. A company can and will do anything the people managing it believe they can get away with that will increase their bottom line, yet, somehow, this behavior becomes unacceptable when it's a lowly worker doing it?
Well, let me put it bluntly to you, too, then: I don't give a fuck what you or people like you think. No company is entitled to own me body, soul, and spirit. I work the job I work solely because I have to in order to survive. If I did not, I would still be working, just not on the shit I'm working on now.
And, yes, most companies are. That's been my experience, and that's how they have to be if they want to compete in the market.
It's not "do fixed pile of work every week." It's "provide a multiple of N worth of your salary value to the company." The amount of work necessary to do so is (should be) irrelevant. Effort is not relevant, and you don't get to demand I commit body and soul to please you if I'm providing a reasonable amount of value.
No, it's about "Is this employee occupying headcount and payroll that would be better used on someone more deserving".
And you've still misunderstand the 2-way feedback loop about effort estimation.
You have this misconception that a job is an isolated 1:1 relationship with an employer where units of work are passed in isolation back and forth. In the real world, something like this does huge damage to the team by forcing everyone else to compensate for the deliberate underperformance.
Oh, wait, now I need to deserve a job in addition to being able to perform all aspects of it adequately with respect to the offered compensation? You really are something if that's what you believe.
I didn't say a job. I said the job I'm hiring for.
If you're going to come in and deliberately do as little work as possible to extract as much as possible from the team, why should I give the job to you instead of someone who is actually honest and cares?
You're not entitled to any job you want, obviously. I usually have 10-100 applicants who would honestly do the job and not sandbag their work onto peers. Obviously we would all rather have the honest employees working on the team.
In what moral system do you deserve the job more than literally any other honest employee if you're dead set on doing less than them and lying your way through the job?
If nothing else, having two jobs becomes a conflict of interest with a huge monetary incentive to continue lying. There's also the matter of trade secrets as people often come from related companies.
Again, I told you, I never agreed to work X amount of hours for any tech company I've ever worked at. In fact, it's always been made clear to me by my managers that time and effort spent is irrelevant, and only results count. Deliver on your sprint commitments, and you're gold, regardless of how long it takes.
Oh, and let's not pretend companies won't do "whatever they can get away with," either. Read the news if you need examples.
Then you're doing piecework? I thought you said you weren't a contractor. I've done piecework, too, which is deliver a product to a specification. But that's not as an employee.
And, no, I've never signed anything stating I'd work "40 hours" for a tech company. I edited this into a previous comment, but this is literally the applicable phrase from my last offer letter:
> As an exempt salaried employee, you will be expected to work the hours, including evenings and weekends, required to perform your job duties.
It goes both way, you see. I accomplish my duties in less than 40 hours, I get to be done. If my manager is happy with my work, quite frankly, why does it matter how long it takes?
Individual contributor, as distinct from, say, an executive, who is someone who actually might get an employment contract in the US. I apologize for the confusion.
Thanks for the clarification. I appreciate it. Apology accepted!
BTW, it does appear that, despite you being technically an employee, you're doing piecework like a contractor would. Piecework work is, indeed, paid for the piece, not the hours. If that is the agreement with your employer, then there is nothing dishonorable about it, and I withdraw my criticism.
You're quite welcome, and, BTW, I also edited out the rude phrase I used in my frustration trying to communicate my status here.
I don't know if you want to call it "piecework" per se or not, but, every tech job I've ever had has required me to make an estimate of what I think I can accomplish during a given period (generally a 2 week sprint). As long as there's no push back on whether that's sufficient or not from my manager, if I accomplish those things, it doesn't matter how long it takes. I can take 50 hours, or I can take 20, and I still get paid the same. I don't get paid additional money if I finish my original commitment in 20 hours, then take on more work, which, as you may understand, doesn't give me a great incentive to do so.
Recent years have seen a flurry of expensive lawsuits over the difference between a contractor and employee, most recently at Uber, so my views on that are likely outdated. I shouldn't be surprised that employers these days err on the side of caution and reclassified many traditionally contractor jobs as employee jobs.
Salaried jobs I've had all expected me to work 40 hrs. I'd moonlight on my own business, but was always careful to get a signed agreement in advance from my employer allowing me to do so. Some people moonlight and then live in terror of their employer finding out and claiming ownership over the moonlight business, but getting the agreement in advance forestalls that problem.
You're misunderstanding me again. I do the job of an employee. I simply have never had any expectation of "40 hours," or any other fixed amount of hours placed upon me as a salaried tech employee.
> as their coworkers (thereby screwing over coworkers, who are forced to pick up the slack)
Why is it their coworkers responsibility to make sure enough total labor is present? According to you, anyone not giving 100% is slacking and doing something wrong, so I assume their coworkers are already giving 100%. Why should they have to work harder than 100% because management is bad at getting workers?
>They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income.
I'd be curious to see stats on this. My experience at large corporations (multiple of FAANG) has been the opposite. For instance, at Google my L4-5 salary bump was 10-15%, my bonus target percentage is identical, and to be honest the stock grants from L4 Strongly Exceeds were better than L5 Consistently Meets Expectations. There's theoretically a higher ceiling over the long term (and the L6 bump seems to be better) but it was nowhere near 50% for me.
Yep, and if you negotiate hard and come in near the top of your salary band, they will use that against you at raise time so you only get like 3% or something. Granted, that may be equivalent to just taking your first year raise up front before you start, which is better than waiting a year for it, but that's what happens.
This is kind of an absurd counter. Not everyone can just choose to become a high level engineer at the handful of the most selective companies in the world.
For a short time I was "working two jobs" as part of a transition (everyone was aware) and I found it almost impossible to even manage one or two meetings a week at each job - conflicts were crazy.
What are you supposed to do when you have a conflict, if you're keeping things secret? "that time doesn't work for me" "uh, why? I just hired you. You have another meeting?"
Do you speak in the meetings you are in? I have a lot of meetings, but my part usually involves joining the meeting and doing little else. I could plausibly see someone doing both at the same time.
Ah. Maybe you are more senior. I speak in maybe 1 in 10 meetings that are not standup. I have muted them. Taken naps during them. Most of the time I just carry on working.
That makes sense. I am just moderately experienced run of the mill worker dev. At every company I have been with, there have been meetings between team lead/senior dev and product manager and then there are 4-10 other devs just chilling while they have this conversation.
Or the even bigger architecture convos involving several team leads and all their subordinates chilling in the Zoom. Have had too many fellow devs joke about how half our value is as a visual entourage.
Could someone be in two visual entourages at once? Probably.
How many jobs are like that? All the jobs I have had, contractor or otherwise, require at least some meetings. I can't imagine a new hire who is making $150k/yr+ not being in a few meetings a week.
this happens when you ride along rather than drive the meetings and schedules. if you stay ahead you have control. it's when deadlines become an issue that other people start acting out of line with your predicted work windows.
Just say to have it 30 mins later or whatever, problem solved. Come up with some excuse, or don't say anything at all. And then have the meeting and be as effective as possible during it. Cut bullshit meetings to a minimum. If you have more than 6 people in the meeting and you're not essential, don't attend. If you have meetings longer than 1h, try to go through the points as effectively as possible and underscore the conclusion dor each point until you get a resolution (important, so you don't get invited to _another_ meeting)
I am talking from experience here, not just out my ass. I can't imagine how it would be remotely sustainable with two full time jobs, nevermind more than that.
"If they joined as a jr engineer at a FANGMULA or equivalent, they would be making $300k,"
This assumes they could spend the time to pass the interview and then deal with the performance expectations. Losers like me could probably work two $80k jobs if they are simple enough. But I'll never get into FAANG, nor would they pay me $300k for a remote role.
"They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income."
Where the hell do you work!? My company gives a 7% raise with a promotion. I want one of these $300k jobs with a 2x promotion. Even the $150k job would be a 50% raise for me. I have been looking for a while and see almost nothing over $120k.
> and this will show up in future background checks.
I’m not interested in working two jobs, but can you provide some sort of reference around this?
My last two background checks included no employment info and I was fairly certain private sector jobs have no reporting outside the IRS, hence ridiculous interviews.
I don't think "no reporting" connects in any way to "ridiculous interviews." It is perfectly possible to do a reference call to a company, at which one's name, rank, serial number, and dates of tenure would be verified. That would be as much or more than you'd get from most background checks.
I'm currently wondering if I should try to double-dip and this nonsensically-out-of-touch attempt to dissuade people from that behavior with its ridiculously unrealistic numbers has actually convinced me that it might be worth pursuing more than the original article linked
The FANGMULA salaries that you mentioned I could not dream of reaching. I have 3 gigs and cash in maybe 70k, and that is very good for my location. I could, I suspect, if I applied myself, land a FANG job, but I would _have_ to relocate. And the COL increase alone would probably make it not worth it. A FANG level remote job would not happen and the stupid niche I work in is not as highly paid as FANG.
High tier are not accessible everywhere. I do this, work 3 jobs in paralel and it is very lucrative for my location. I do not see a path I could make as much doing what I do, without relocating. Only way I could beat it is going the SAAS way or doing my own startup. Being a local early employee would not cut it.
My employers have so far been very happy with my work, although I am aware I could have performed much better and have done very stupid mistakes because I was moving too fast.
"FANGMULA" is a dumb acronym that a cringey YouTuber made up because he couldn't get into FAANG, so he had to make up a new acronym that would include the company he did get into.
Comment on the note:
FANGMULA is from blind
FANGULTAD is from youtube
I still don't know who ULTD are. I usually just say FAAMG to mean all the like.
> Maybe if your having a hard time breaking into startups or FANGMULA and your just starting out, this might be an ok strategy, but beyond that, it's not a good idea.
Most people are never good enough to break into FANGMULA.
And, of the ones who are good enough, some get unlucky and never overcome the "interview random number generator" and always get stuck in the "interview anti-loop." [0] You would think there would be less luck involved in a process that really wants to select the best available employees, but it is not so.
It's not about being good enough. More often than not it's about having the time to grind LeetCode for months on end. Understandably not everyone can or wants to do this.
>3. They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income.
This is false on average, even at FAANG, getting promoted to the next level doesn't boost your TC that much, the company assumes that the promotion on itself is good enough prize. You usually get a better deal applying to the next level at another FAANG.
> 1. They tend to work double jobs at frankly lo.....
This is also false, plenty of people that work for small companies, even being a 10X , "rockstar" , ... developer, would never get "promoted" to the next level, because , there is no next level, and the C-level positions are reserved for friends and family, and in some occasion to outside experienced executives.
30 years ago, climbing the corporate ladder was "the way" to get ahead, nowadays, people with small mildly successful SAAS businesses, consultant companies, podcasters, indie hackers etc... make way more than any Director at FAANG.
This is a very "boomer" take in general, and is also pretty cringe.
> 30 years ago, climbing the corporate ladder was "the way" to get ahead, nowadays, people with small mildly successful SAAS businesses, consultant companies, podcasters, indie hackers etc... make way more than any Director at FAANG.
Dir at FAANG makes $1-2M with probably less stress that comes from running-your-own-business.
How many podcasters at the level of $1-2M that works less than Dir at FAANG?
I rarely seen IndieHackers at that level (a select few who struck gold, not as "common" as Dir at FAANG).
Not true either, Directors at FAANG have wayyyy more pressure than people who have bootstrapped their own business. Obviously depends on your business, but on average, running your own business gives you more flexibily than working for someone else. Once your at the Director level, the company owns your time, the pressure to deliver is way higher, because you can always spin another SaaS, but is very hard to get another Director position at another company once you get fired from one. Also, your kids/family can inherit your business, but not your job.
> Obviously depends on your business, but on average, running your own business gives you more flexibility than working for someone else
Depends on how hard you run your own business. You can't go to $1M without driving hard. The ones that got lucky (struct on once-in-a-lifetime idea) typically don't stay up at $1M that long if they continue to run it like a side-hustle doing 20 hours per week.
> Directors at FAANG have wayyyy more pressure
That pressure is pushed down to the army of EMs and SWEs (-_-"). FAANG is a body shop because they have their hiring pipeline with potential candidates; they can afford to burn bodies (hi Netflix and Amazon :D :D).
> because you can always spin another SaaS
Not to $1M level that easily within 1-2 years...
> but is very hard to get another Director position at another company once you get fired from one
I don't know... I rarely seen Dir got fired and tailspin in the career. Can always go as Senior EM and climb up again.
> Also, your kids/family can inherit your business, but not your job.
This is the only thing that might be a WIN for entrepreneurship but now you have 2 worries: 1 running the company, 2 finding your successors.
> 1. They tend to work double jobs at frankly lower tier companies with lower standards and significantly lower pay. Because the companies are lower tier, they stagnate in their career growth because the company is not teaching them good skills. And you cannot put both jobs in your resume, only one on top of that, and this will show up in future background checks.
That's bull, man, sorry. Most of the devs out there, I'd wager at least 95%, don't go through background checks ever, as a start.
Second, I work as a dev for 20 years now and I have never known anyone who got promoted by more than 20%. I have only known one guy through another guy who got promoted with 35% once and that was actually a strategy to make him accept more responsibility. He burned out and quit in less than 6 months after. Anecdotal evidence, sure, but then again, what you cite seems statistically insignificant to me so I don't know if I even believe it because I've not seen it and I haven't even heard of it.
Thirdly, "lower tier companies", really? Sure, use that connotation if you like it -- but I've been all over the spectrum and different combinations of work/life balance vs. income are literally endless. There are companies paying top dollar but there's always some gotcha, and more often than not that gotcha is not worth the extra money. I'll concede here that I have been unlucky -- or not that skilled to begin with, why not, I don't claim I am the greatest -- but it's what I've (not) seen.
2. Because of double working, they are pretty much guaranteed to not get promoted beyond the standard terminal level.
Working your arse off in one primary job is seldom if ever rewarded well. I love your positive bubble but you seriously have to think about for how many people out there it applies to.
3. They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income.
Nope, doesn't happen almost ever. Maybe in startups but let's be honest -- will you be in this startup 5 years from now? Also you can't eternally job-hop to more and more money.
4. You cannot work at proper startups and learn a ton, because the workload would be way too high for this strategy.
At least that's true, I'll give you that.
---
I realize that I've been at shitty employers most of my career (took me a while to get a good baseline data from other people and understand my position) but still, most devs out there are at shitty employers. What you're talking about no more than 5% of the total programming workforce, I'd wager it's more like 0.5% even.
> A good person will take the corporate scumbags to the cleaners so they can spend the rewards on family and loved ones.
I can't see much room for "good" in spitefully exploiting a flawed organization that likely many innocent bystanders depend on for their own livelihood, all to help yourself and kin. If you could say with some certainty that sabotaging the org actually led to a better outcome for everyone involved, that'd be different, but I doubt that situation comes up much.
The real world isn't like Fight Club, and we don't get to be heroes by blowing things up. I think the appeal of that kind of fantasy is precisely how it lends bad behavior a plausibility of goodness. It helps people rationalize, as you seem to be doing, and as execs of exploitative employers must also do, in order to not feel guilty.
I'd say a good person will divest themselves from scummy corporations and find their own avenue to honest work. They'll seek to expose bad behavior by others and set a moral example for them to follow. "Get yours and screw those jerks" isn't that moral example. It's just more of the same.
The prisoner's dilemma is a very insufficient model for the complexity of human life...
The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a little better. It's still just a toy model, of course. However, you might be interested to find that those who only screw everyone else over don't fair well in the iterated version.
I can't give you an example of anyone who's done it secretly, but, Jack Dorsey (and several others) have done it openly. Why did nobody argue they shouldn't be doing that because they owed their full effort to one or another of their companies, I wonder? Why is it only a bad thing if a lowly worker does it?
Do you really think Twitter's and Square's boards responsible for companies worth $100B+ combined are not aware and have not discussed whether their appointed CEO is up to par to do this?
Can you name me any employer who hired a full-time employee and is happy to pay them full-time salary while the employee deceives them for financial gain and works part-time and/or outputs the minimum amount of work hoping not to get fired?
If you believe you can do more work, go freelancing/contracting/self-employed.
Yep, can confirm. Worked a company where a remote employee got a new job but didn't bother quitting. He put in just enough work to pretend to be making progress and gave a lot of excuses about why his project was delayed.
Eventually someone figured it out. Management was furious. Remote work restrictions were tightened and everyone suddenly had far more check-ins to ensure we were actually working every day.
I heard they also contacted the person's new job and filled them in on the double-work situation. That person was universally hated and I don't know anyone at the company who would give them a positive reference.
Just speculation, but there is a possibility that the old employer sought retribution against an employee who left by lying to the new company to sink the employee’s career? With laws like this it’s often a case of “it happened (at least) once so we wrote a new law”.
This is ultimately what will drive stochastic based device monitoring. How long was your laptop open? Which apps were foreground with a moderate amount of activity?
There's no law that says you can't work two jobs (obviously)
But chances are good that you entered into some form of agreement with your employer that forbids holding another full-time job. You also have NDAs and such agreements that could be argued to be broken if you're working at two companies simultaneously if they have any possible competition with each other.
In practice, a company isn't likely to go after an ex-employee for damages in this case unless there really was a trade secrets violation.
What happens, though, is that the company that realizes the double-work scheme is happening calls up the other company and they both fire the employee. All of the person's managers and coworkers usually hate the person because they were likely sandbagging and pawning work off on coworkers (as is necessary to put in half time at any halfway competent company), so they can't get a decent reference.
Now they're unemployed, without references, and starting over again. Not the end of the world in today's job market, but I expect reference checks for remote work will continue to get much more aggressive to catch situations like this.
What's unlawful around working two jobs? Happens at high end (consulting CTO John Carmack, or Twitter & Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and in the US happens significantly often at the lowest end (retail workers in two jobs).
It's unethical in that the two employers are unaware of that fact, and he's advising deliberately not doing work in bad faith (whereas the boards of Meta, Twitter and Square were aware of the previous situations, and your retail shift manager knows he's not scheduling and paying a living wage), but illegal probably not.
No man don’t you understand? It’s better to not be paid and dedicated your life to the ethos posted on the ‘About’ page of the company than it is to play the system.
Remote work won't be ruined by this. In fact, it's perfect.
The premise is that the average person puts in 10x the effort for a 1% return on investment. You are an employee, sure, but are "investing" the company in terms of life-hours you could spend elsewhere. Naturally, you want to therefore minimize work and maximize salary. The ultimate situation being getting regular raises by doing 20-50% less than is expected to you.
If employers don't want this the solution is simple. It's not finding these people and firing them. It's paying people commensurate to their effort like a real meritocracy would.
If someone can hold 2 jobs working at 50% brain capacity then they are obviously very talented and quite crafty. You pay this person enough, they will dedicate 100% of their brain to your project. The employer side of the equation is JUST as exploitative as the employee side. It's just far, far, far more common for the employee to be exploited. For example, via pagerduty, poor hiring practices leading to overwork, or overtasking.
This is wonderful. Anyone who is truly a libertarian should be encouraging this. It's the perfect free market solution to exploitative labor. You dont get paid past 40 hours for your salary. Why should you reduce YOUR OWN worth to make a company's bottom line bigger? Unless you hold ITM options in the company the answer is you don't and shouldn't. You should be exploiting them at every turn.
SV is also a meat grinder: the participants are well aware of that (maybe except during the early days of Google or non-GCP Google orgs). SV participants are highly ambitious folks who want to get paid more and deliver "impact" (whatever that means). It's an ego contest.
It's just that the participants always paint rosy pictures to the point that Media buys it and sells it.
I have to disagree, they are relevant. SV needs bodies for the various profit grinders and a way to put pressure on other elites. Wastefully discarding somewhat functioning humans isn't ideal.
Contractors don't really take away jobs from people and I see this as no different. The people capable of this are relatively small in number even in an industry full of talented people.
I wish I could just be a corporate cog for a few days a week and then do my own thing. Unfortunately, at least judging from the interviews I've had the last few months, HR/hiring is still looking at things from a full-time headcount perspective. Somebody complained about having to do paperwork for each employee, which I can't wrap my head around because it's their job to do employee paperwork. But it seems to still be about extracting 40 hours and then overtime from any vaguely professional position. One manager told me that they are limited in headcount for their department.
Not to mention that working two jobs poorly is a lot more work and a lot less money than boostrapping a decent SaaS
EDIT: Pretty rich that I'm getting downvoted so much, despite multiple examples of successful SaaS creators showing up in the comments, and this being a forum started by a VC partly to promote and encourage tech startups. If you think that starting a tech business is so impossibly difficult that you're personally offended at the idea of someone recommending you do it, I'd say you should just go back to Reddit or Twitter.
If you're bristling at me calling SaaS "easy", I just meant it's easier than running a multi-year scam and probably committing fraud, depending on the details of your employment contracts.
I actually agree with you over the other comments. I think the idea of industriously trying to be the worst worker you possibly can (while not being fired) is one of those self-defeating efforts to do less work where you actually do more work in a lot of ways. You've got to justify to yourself continually that you're not being a drain or a bad person. You've got to juggle context switching between two roles during an overlapping period, making both more difficult than they would be individually and leaving yourself worse able to focus generally. (I suppose you could probably block your schedule to make this work better but I can't see a silver bullet solution for all the time.) You've got to compartmentalize your jobs and your interaction with coworkers. I know that with my personality, these factors would be major drags on my mental and emotional well-being. I would feel like a fraud for a long time before getting used to something like this.
With a business, while you deal with some similar issues (compartmentalization, context-switching), I expect they'd feel far less invalidating (again, to me/those with similar personality types) because you'd know you were actually applying yourself to do the best you could.
While it's not easy (and you should never trust anyone who says that it is), I do think that it's more feasible than most developers think it is. I'm not special, absolutely far from it, and I achieved it (in Australian dollars anyway, and focused on a B2B niche rather than B2C)
If you're going to engage in fraud anyway, you can make more than you'd pull in from working two jobs
Hell, with all the crypto madness going on right now, you could probably get ludicrously wealthy just doing freelance black hat security testing.
You aspiring fraudsters should actually read all the paperwork they put in front of you next time you start a job, and tell me if there's no exclusivity at all in it. Just because Jack Dorsey got away with running two companies doesn't mean it's right or just for you to weasel along and lie to two managers forever.
Get your life together and do something meaningful instead of stressing yourself out for the sake of whatever pair of pittances you can earn from this dumb scam.
Successfully boostrapping a decent SaaS sounds way more challenging in my eyes, got any tips on resources to read to make that be as obvious a task as it seems to be in your eyes?
Absolutely it is not. Most decent bootstrapped SaaS will have trouble getting pure profit that matches the salary of two developer jobs, and it will be a lot of work, a lot more than just engineering.
Yeah, even matching one developer job is hard... you definitely get better at it and closer as you go, but that's alot of opportunity cost in the process, if you can even survive that long on peanuts
This feels so wrong. I always understood this to mean a really good developer taking on two easy jobs, perhaps a senior developer taking two junior-mid roles that paid similarly to the senior role, so they can meet the expectation of the employer while only needing to work 10 hours a week. I thought it was cheeky but fair. To actually try and cheat employers out of wages by taking jobs and knowingly doing the minimum required to hopefully not get fired pisses me off to be honest.
Over employed examples I want to hear about is from people getting jobs in admin roles and automating themselves, or senior developers taking manual testing roles and finishing their work in an hour a week.
If you want to get paid like that be a contractor and charge an hourly rate.
If you want the security of a full time salary then you should work the 40 hours you agreed to work in your contract for the amount of money you agreed in the contract.
(And yes, I believe this goes the other way and that overtime should be paid or compensated with TIL at the employee's convenience).
What, you've never seen a contract which states how many hours a week you work? Maybe it's differnet in Australia but every single salary job I've had has specified that.
As an engineer I've certainly never seen it in my past 3 jobs. In software that's especially the case, as your performance metrics aren't based on time spent but rather on your level of work completed.
I'm skeptical you've never seen an employment contract, or had a verbal agreement (which is a binding contract, too).
In any case, if you're a "full time employee", there is a legal definition of that, which will be binding, as that is necessary to comply with all sorts of employment laws based around how many hours per week one works.
The only jobs without an employment agreement are under-the-table ones, or you're working for someone who has never run a business before and hasn't run afoul yet of the labor laws.
Believe it. I've never signed anything that constituted a binding contract. Nor have I ever agreed to anything like "40 hours." I have worked for multiple SF tech companies, including public companies. So, you're wrong on all counts.
Edit: here is literally the applicable phrase from my last offer letter:
> As an exempt salaried employee, you will be expected to work the hours, including evenings and weekends, required to perform your job duties.
Note that salaried employees can legally have a day's pay deducted if they don't work that day (Fair Labor Standards Act). So there is an expectation that you'll be working.
It's not illegal to have multiple salaried jobs. But you can run afoul of your agreement, because of things like conflict of interest, non-disclosure, non-compete, security, etc. This would all depend on what your offer letter says.
I'm curious what you'd do if they took the work you did and didn't pay you, or only paid you half. Would you be mad? Would you sue? After all, you don't have an agreement.
Sure, but that doesn't apply here. If my manager is happy with my work, by definition, expectations are being met, which means I'm entitled to be paid in full. Time and effort don't factor into the equation. The phrase in the offer letter works both ways: "hours... required to perform your job duties" can be more or less than 40.
Being an employee doesn't come with a contract you sign when you begin your employment? (Not facetious, genuine question. Every new job and promotion comes with one here.)
I’m there now too but still work for an EU startup. Weird to think there’s such a difference - I’d be freaked out leaving for something without a written agreement!
I think I agree with you - but this post suggests going below that point. This is about holding on by the skin of your teeth blaming everything on being new until you’re fired.
I don't necessarily endorse the practice, but, that's not how I read it. It seems like "doing the minimum to not get fired" is what they're aiming for, which means not getting fired.
I don't know... I think the point is not caring about being fired because they only explain timelines for a short period of time. I assumed the end of that period was being caught! But maybe you're right!
Not that I endorse this, but this seems the wrong way to do this. Take one job and do well at it. Get a reputation that you don't need to be managed. Work hard. Identify a niche for work that needs to be done but is currently underserved. Take over some of that niche while telling everyone how hard it is. In reality the niche takes 20 or fewer hours a week.
Get the second job lined up. Take some vacation from the first and come out the gate hard at the second job. Attempt to more or less repeat what you did.
If you can get yourself setup on the right little niches you could probably keep three or four jobs going. If you are just kind of jelly fishing along though eventually people will notice how all the other juniors in the same surface area out perform you. You want to be the person who went off, slew some dragons in a specific area, and we need to keep this person around to ensure the dragons don't repopulate.
I basically get promoted doing that. Of course I'm using my spare hours to go help other people in the org, build relationships, get noticed, etc. All while having an easily defended core area to handle. Just do that but collect other jobs instead of promotions.
This is basically how I did it. Max for me was three jobs. I started pre pandemic. I was thoroughly burned out after five years. Took a break before getting back in. I could retire, but keep working for healthcare and the lulz. (One job)
There are a lot orgs out there where if you can spell java, your golden.
Not that I particularly endorse this practice, either, but your way wouldn't work. You're missing the part where the reward for hard work is more hard work. You definitely can get promoted this way, but, you can't really use it to maintain a whole other job, IMO.
That's why I said you define the niche and overstate its work. You work hard and build trust and then yes if you ask for more work, you get more work. However there is a window in which to define what you do next and make it seem like more work than it really is.
I don't really understand what you're saying. Is it that you need to say "I'm really only capable at $THING, but $THING is very, very important/takes 2x more time than I'm actually saying it does?" If so, I don't understand how you hope to BS all your managers and coworkers into believing either of those things.
I really agree with what you are saying, but counterintuitively buying “into the company vision as much as possible” seems to result in the most burnout for me when reality eventually hits.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to temper my natural tendency to go all-in with the reality that everything has some shit that sucks. I can understand the hope that there might be some psychological ease associated with dissociating yourself from the vision.
Whether you're working W2, 1099, or an LLC, you're still running a business that trades in engineering labor, namely yours. That's the company whose vision you want to invest in.
If you like your current clients' vision too, great! That kind of alignment is always preferable. But remember that you're always first representing your own interests, because you're the only one at the table for whom those interests are paramount. Good clients understand and respect that. Bad clients are what you use to avoid starving while you're out finding good clients.
I can only control small parts of the tech side of a company. It’s silly to worry about things outside of your control so I definitely don’t “buy into the company vision”. I just deliver good software and hope everyone else knows what they’re doing so I don’t need to find a new job.
I , in the other hand, prefer a company that understand that they run a business, they pay me, I work, and that's the end of it. I don't need to be inspired by any egomaniac in some sort of culty "we are a family" company , or work my ass of to make someone else's dream true. Spending time with family, friends, nature, ... etc. is way more important than slaving away for some ramdo.
I hate to break it to you, but, most people in general have N "jobs that are purely about money in equals time out," where N is small. Most jobs are not inspiring, they don't make any visible difference in the world (until people stop doing them), and nobody in them is inspired by the work they're doing.
I cannot bring myself to strongly believe in putting more inputs on a CRUD app, adding some database columns, and doing some business logic on that data elsewhere. It's bog standard work most of the time. Small little incremental features that are just conveniences.
Almost no company tells you that in the interview though, and it's certainly not on their about page.
So basically you want to be worked hard like a horse and feel satisfied at the end of the day when you lay your head down to rest that you have made a difference, don’t even care much about the money because the work is it’s own reward.
Encouraging people to take two full-time jobs by lying and cheating their way around is such a terrible advice even if you only look at it purely based on self-interests with no moral considerations.
Negotiate well when starting a new job (If you haven't find a new job and negotiate well). Do great work. Use the extra time to invest on yourself: read, exercise, learn new skills, etc. You'll be happier and more successful in the long run.
The premise here, which you haven't engaged with, is that you can get 2 remote jobs and end up with 80% more income than you would have with just one of them, all without negotiating well or needing to do "great" work.
You can claim that's BS or not, but, you really need to bring more to it than "nuh uh."
You can oftentimes just walk into homes and take the things lying around in that home, and if you pick the right homes and the right times, you will avoid the negative consequences that come with getting caught.
The premise here is that you can stand to benefit from lying and stealing. What is there to engage with about that? Of course it’s true, but you weigh that against the negative consequences of your deception being discovered.
Who said anything about stealing anything? It's not lying if I don't reveal to my employer what I do when I'm not working for them generally speaking, so, why is it lying to not reveal I'm doing another job on my off hours (provided it's legal and doesn't break any other prior agreements to do so)?
It's lying to represent yourself as working solely for one employer, while actually working for two. It's stealing to accept pay for work you haven't done.
If you're not doing these two things, you may not be lying or stealing, but this submission advocates for doing these two things.
Who says anybody's doing that? If I come to work for you, that doesn't imply I'm not doing anything else for money. And, nobody's saying to accept pay for work you haven't done. The article is simply saying to set expectations low. If expectations are met, then, by definition, the agreed upon work is being done.
I say most people would be doing that, and the article suggests you do that, because the majority of FTE software development positions require you work exclusively for that company. Most even have IP control over everything you do, work or not.
Further, if you set expectations low and you work for me, you will be fired. I expect it’s similar many other places. I’m an engineer, I know what 40 hours of effort looks like.
If you can negotiate +80% on your comp every time, then, sure, that pays off comparatively. But, I doubt you can. Furthermore, you only have a few chances to do so throughout a career, and your first few attempts will likely be bad.
Good advice even for one job--whether remote or in-person. Why put in 30% more effort, when you are not getting paid 30% more. That's why stick to the average pace of your team.
The classic advice is for career advancement. For promotions and raises and for internal political capital to promote the projects you want, or the implementation you think best. Sure, if you just want to a be a cog in the machine, without broader responsibility (and the historically much higher compensation for that) then don't do more than the is necessary to ensure you remain employed.
But it probably is more lucrative to achieve some success, and then leverage that to the next thing (which might need to be a different company).
It depends on whether you believe internal political capital is gained from effort, or time spent waiting for good luck. If you believe the latter, working two jobs gives twice as many "lottery tickets".
In reality it's a combination of luck and effort, but luck is definitely a factor.
May ai suggest a different spin? Try to put 30% more effort, but into learning stuff for your own sake. This will make you a better engineer. As a side effect you may be more worth to the company you work for and/of get a better job somewhere else later.
That is possible for some people, also depends on the culture of the team one is part of. An average guy needs good mentors, good team mates who can teach, etc. Such teams are very hard to find. So, in that case, one has to be driven to learn on his own without any aid.
Sure. But it's also a matter of attitude. If you don't even try because "that looks like work and I'm not paid enough for this" you won't even know what is holding you back. It could be that you need mentors, it could need that you just need to read or watch videos or practice.
That said, it's perfectly fine to just do your job and not like it. All I'm saying is that you shouldn't conclude that working more necessary means that you're giving away your time for free to your employer. Often you can get something in return, if you make sure you pick the right kind of extra work.
I think it depends.
My current job is relaxed over hours - I'll checks emails at home, wander in mid-morning and leave when my works is done. Might be 5 if I get it done or have plans, or might be into the evening (quite pleasant/productive to work uninterrupted in a empty room).
I've got other colleagues who'll be logged in at 08:30 (so I believe) and leave on the dot of 17:00.
I think both approaches work for different people and for the company a mix gives them more flexibility without having to create a formal plan.
I think what the article was bringing up was that if you set expectations and are seen to conform to them, everybody is happy (or doesn't think about it).
If you're the person who's always there as the office opens and sticks around late - you may be noticed and get a pat on the back, but it's never going to compensate for the additional hours you put in. This might be fine if you have one job and a career - but if you're trying to hold down 2 jobs, those extra couple of hours each day are 50% of the effort of holding down that 2nd job. They're worth 50% of a whole new salary.
German work culture outside of startups is a bit more like this, get in on time, work hard, don’t fuck around all day, punch out after 8 hours and don’t socialise with colleagues outside of work. Obviously I’m generalising a lot and exaggerating but it was something I observed.
Love being on an old fashioned “clock”. I log my time by the minute and if I work 41 hours one week I work 39 the next week. Worst case I aggregate maybe 20-30 hours over a few busy weeks and then I use it to take a day or two off.
My theory is that you have 2 sets of 4 hours per day.
If you work 8 hours for the same employer then that is kind of 1x results for you.
If you do 4 hours work and 4 hours "networking" then that often becomes 2x results - at that one company. This is considered good career moves. It's what all these 300K job discussions revolve around.
You could do 4 hours and 4 hours slacking off. That's usually 1X as well. sometimes more !
You could do 4 hours work and 4 hours writing blog posts. That sometimes is 2-3x or more. Not often.
Finally you could do 4 hours at each of two companies. This seems 2x as well.
> In the 30-60 day window, you should set goals with your boss if that’s not already done. Drag out the newbie card and claim slow ramp-up time. Identify what absolutely needs to be done, communicate that as your goal, and meet them.
In my experience, this will already make you more valuable than most employees working at big companies
Finally! Someone who actually gets it! Truth be told, you can substitute "realistic" or "sustainable" with "low" and have a good guide to performing well at one remote job here.
Word of caution: don't over develop this habit as it will stay with you for the rest of your life and in all areas of your life. You think you're being clever and getting away with 2x more money, but in the end you're hurting yourself the most. If you pretend you are working, if you're not moving as fast as you can, you won't be sharpening your skills. You're in fact most likely not only sharpening your skills, but making them more dull. It's when we challenge ourselves that we grow.
Americans are finally catching up to Third World standards. It's pretty common to work two jobs and juggle between them, it's just that you used to be able to have a decent life with one revenue stream. It seems that after covid this will no longer be the case. ;)
I know younger joking, sort of, but an averagely talented and experienced engineer can easily support a family with one income now. This article is really about how to do some game theory stuff to maximize income and be “financially free”. Something working two jobs in the third world will never provide.
I genuinely don't get the point of 2 remote jobs. The tech wage scaling is absolutely bonkers right now and the value proposition of this system is not clear to me.
Assuming you only work 20 of your 40 hrs/week in each job, you are still working a fulltime job with 2x your salary. If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
Now work a couple of years in this job, and soon you'll be able to complete its responsibilities in 20ish hrs/week. Every job gets easier overtime in that sense.
> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job
Haha, at what company? I've met few people who've been able to work at a company long enough (and for the company to be successful enough) to double their salary. Apparently, it's much faster to just get two lower paying, easy jobs.
I've doubled my compensation every time I switched jobs, plus doubled once through internal promotions, and another 50% increase through stock appreciation since most recent rehire. It's been about 5 doublings over a 20-year career. Most recent employer is in my username, and income history is here:
God I wish I could make anywhere close to that. I'm 3 years in and my highest TC offer was about $300k at Square. I ended up taking slightly less for a more interesting startup but even that's still just $275k.
Life at the bottom rung is not pretty in the slightest!
I don’t know if this is satirical or not but 275k for 3yoe is near the top of that band (assuming the startup equity is liquid). I think the parent has very generous stock appreciation going on, as $GOOG roughly tripled in the past 3 years
I believe you. But, the point isn't "is there someone out there who can do it?" The point is "is this typical, and can I do it." And, the answer to the latter is clearly "no."
Depends when in your career, and what the company is doing. I went from my first starting salary of $72k at age 23 (in 2003) as engineer #2 to $150k as chief architect about 5 years later. After another 5 years we sold the company, and I was making better than $300k salary plus bonus in 2013. So that’s two doublings in 10 years. But it’s also probably the exception that proves the rule.
I’ve more than doubled my salary every 4 years in Silicon Valley. I’m 11 years in and 16x my starting salary my first year out of college. Yes this includes equity comp, but this is not dominated by appreciation. My current employer stock performance hasn’t been great or even mediocre. But my career growth has ensured that doesn’t matter.
Silicon Valley is insane, but that's nothing new, when I look at the money offered elsewhere, I really regret not trying harder to move there in my 20s.
Fellow European here. Indeed possible but unlikely.
Started working for 43k (Euro) directly out of university. Joined SV startup 2y later with 50% higher salary (60k). Now four four years and one promotion in, almost doubled my salary at 110k.
Every salary increase I had so far has been 2x. Once I hit a ceiling, I got 2 gigs in paralel, so I 2xed again, I guess. Even so, I did not reach SV income level. I cash in about 100k a year. I am comfortable though.
I'm sure it's harder to get when you're more senior, but I started working as a graduate in London for £30k 3 years ago and am now on £60k. I think this is pretty typical in London.
I know for a fact that at Meta (Facebook), even if you literally are a genius and were promoted twice in 2 years you wouldn't be doubling your total comp.
That almost never happens, at least at Google, unless you are running a very important project and you also bring offers from another FAANG. Otherwise, good luck.
When was this? It also isn't the norm. I've also heard of people double their TC during COVID, but it was mainly due to the stock increase. It's not sustainable, nor is it the norm.
Within the last 4 years for sure, and before that as well. Not the norm, but for high performing engineers it’s definitely possibly without equity appreciation. But I do think it speaks to the parents comment — if you put in the extra work the payoffs at the right company definitely have higher ROI than two jobs where you’re lying / hiding / stressing about being mediocre. Just my two cents.
Note, it’s not just the initial promotion. It’s the wider compensation band it opens up.
which company? I've had friends get promoted at then Facebook and Amazon and not receive a 50% increase with EE/S let alone double. I doubt it happens very often even for top people unless they were underpaid.
I edited my comment but will reply here to for clarity.
It’s not the initial promo that necessarily gives you doubling. It’s the wider compensation bands the promotion opens up. Sustained performance can have high upside in a 2-4 year time horizon for high performers.
"If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job."
Between the two extremes (mediocre and rockstar/10x), there are many 'competent' people who can't get promoted to their 2x salary jobs. And these people are competent in a particular niche, not like those who aced programming olympiads, compiler gurus, kernel hackers, etc.
> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
I don't know the numbers but in my limited experience, in western Europe, this is just not possible (or very very rare among C level people if any, not mere engineers). A good senior salary (gross) is like 80K Euro/year. As a senior engineer working in Europe, you cannot expect reach 100K Euro easily. Now, thinking that you can go from 80K to 160K just by being an engineer that is "competent enough" is just plain naive. Not even the CTOs are making that around here.
Where are these mythical promos with 2x salary? I have never met someone who got one. Heck, where are the companies that even keep up with market rate for devs? Every company has short tenures now.
> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
I've found the opposite is true. If you are extremely competent at your job your manager is motivated to keep you in place because that's what you're good at. It's easier to promote lower-accomplishing people-pleasers because it won't affect _their_ software throughput as much (higher level engineers write less code).
> If someone is competent enough to sustain 2 jobs, they will also get quickly promoted to 2x their salary if they are working one job.
One of the benefits of this is that you don't have to be competent enough to sustain two jobs. There are people who do this and just swap their jobs every year or less. Another side benefit of that is that people have lower expectations for the new hire, and if you're perpetually a new hire...
I love that we are collectively acknowledging that we're all lazy as hell. First that askHN about lying about working and now the HN hug of death for this article
Lazy? Not true. We are getting more comfortable admitting that we don't give a shit about our employers beyond what is required. If only the rest of the economy had the same luxury.
Think about it. It's a post about how to avoid going over capacity while serving multiple concurrent requests.
(Just because somebody taught you to snark at that Alanis Morissette song doesn't mean that every instance of irony that isn't immediately obvious to you is a false instance)
Hmm, you contradicted my belief about what is ironic based on knowledge of what I "seem" to have expected? Remarkable mind-reading powers, sir.
The definition you quote is silly when taken literally, since it makes irony a completely subjective matter. The fact that you're quoting it to me while failing to correctly apply it (since you could not possibly know what I expected) is richly ironic in itself :)
You think a site called "overemployed" about working multiple jobs is really about slacking off? shrug okay?
The guy is putting himself forward as an authority on how to juggle these multiple jobs. I don't think he ever really says it's easy or for slackers. He says you have to manage expectations while staying afloat. But his web infrastructure couldn't handle the expectations placed upon it.
Oh, I don't think it's about slacking off, either. But, clearly, most people in this comment section do. I thought you were one of them. I guess not. But, it's still not ironic that the site goes down when HN hits it. If anything, that's expected.
I have a younger relative, making a very very comfortable living, who has taken on the developing the software for a number of small companies as a solo dev, each pay him for features and a pretty decent (non software decent) annual wage for ongoing maintenance. He makes no secret that he has multiple clients, there's no duplicity, and he gets to have a flexible life where he travels when he wants and exercises a couple of hours a day. Every client he's ever picked up has kept him on. He's got the full skill set to be able to be sales negotiator, designer, tester, dev. It may be that many of us don't and are more valuable, and will be paid more, in a team that blurs our deficiencies.
disagree with the overcommunication. overcommunication means your boss has too much sense of where you are or where you are claiming to be. and more work will be tossed over to you. always accept new work and just drop 50% of it without further reporting on it.
otherwise, yeah I always set low expectations. On day 1, I show up late to orientation. always. It's worked great for me over a long career. (single jobs, not dual, although in school I always maintained 3-4 concurrent part time gigs)
website worked for me but the menu part didn't load correctly. it looks quite poor. too bad it's not intentional.
there's only 1 time of year when you perform. the 2 months before perf eval.
This is a litmus test. If your mentality is that you are paid for your time, not for your value, then I guess you will always carry guilt about working multiple jobs.
If however you feel zero guilt, it is because you have internalized your true self worth. It shows you understand the value you bring to a company and the value of a company having a fully onboarded developer hot and ready to go whenever a crisis happens. You are not merely an ass sitting in a chair.
Once you learn that your value as a developer has no relation to time and space, you can truly ascend to the next level of social class.
The page is inaccessible now, resource limit reached.
for any given hi-tech job these days, the employee agreement always states this is your sole job per contract and all your inventions belong to your employer too(not just the 40 hours per week), especially for full-time w-2 jobs. How could you have two in parallel? are we violating the hiring contract here?
Assuming two jobs have no conflict of interests of course, otherwise it's illegal in most cases and nobody wants to do that(other than it's too unethical)
In California, yes, you can, provided the employers don't compete in the same areas of business. Your work on your off time is yours, provided it doesn't relate to your employer's businesses.
I’m amazed by the amount of resentment and anger in these comments and how off-base they are to my own experience.
I had two full-time jobs during the pandemic for 1.5years. One I had been at for 3 years previously and 70% of the time I had a very manageable work-load. I was only 100% remote for 3 months at the start of the pandemic, then in hybrid office/wfh, they are highly flexible and I can work Saturday instead of a Wednesday if I want, etc.
Other position was 100% remote (even before pandemic), semi-flexible, and was for such a large organization and had so many stake-holders on every project that I barely needed to think. Pick-up a ticket, follow instructions.
A typical day for me would be to wake up at 6am and start job B, have a scrum at 9am for job B, then head into job A (10minutes commute), work at job A until 1pm, come home for a 2 hour lunch and work job B, then back to the office for job A, around 6pm come back home and finish up any work for job B and job A. When things piled up I would work 10-15 hours on the weekend.
At job B, I saw many coworkers fired for underperformance. At job A a few were also fired during this time period, but not in my dept.
I did burn out after 1.5years and left job B, also gained a bunch of weight from sitting at a desk so often. I would do it again, I saved up a down-payment for a condo in HCOL.
I have put both positions on my resume and will happily talk about this experience, have had no qualms talking to recruiters about this. Some like it, some don’t. Have been talking to one about a potential role in sales, they seem to be pretty ok with this/slightly impressed.
Also, for those that didn’t grow up poor, this is called making things work. This isn’t some crazy decision with no rationale behind it. I am used to putting my head down and working hard for long periods of time. I had a full-time job my senior year of high school (still able to earn a double ride to undergrad), I’ve had a full-time + part time job some college summers, have had 3 part-time jobs other college summers. I worked part-time through 50% of college and 70% of high school. I worked a full-time job while in grad school part-time.
So as you can see, from just wanting to exist and get ahead in life, I have unintentionally trained to be able to work two full-time jobs for awhile without fucking anyone over and delivering fair value in return for my paychecks.
Your experience is not what the linked article is about. You sound like you essentially put in 80 hours of work a week to work two full time jobs. The entire website is about how to not actually do any work for either job while talking making it seem like you are with the ultimate goal of getting laid off on one job to collect severance.
A more upfront way to do this is to get contract work as a consultant, and have at least some of your clients paying by project or retainer rather than strict hourly billing.
Unfortunately that site seems to keep reloading forever (/e/ Browser which is a Chromium/Bromite fork). I haven't been able to check the original site though, so the issue might be present there as well.
Redirect loop for me but I can load the page if I disable Javascript.
Here's a copy of the text (keywords: mirror, archive):
> How To Set Low Expectations At Your Two Remote Jobs
> On April 12, 2021 By Chloe T. In Corporate Life, Multiple Remote Work, Tactics
> One of the keys to success while working two remote jobs is communications and setting low expectations with your boss. You want to give the perception of meeting standards while striving to overachieve in your primary “keeper” job. You want to set yourself up for success, and by success, we mean keeping the two remote jobs for as long as possible. Naturally, with working two jobs, one job will be more demanding than the other. The strategy is to set the workload low in at least one of the two jobs so you can navigate spikes in workload. Remember, the end goal here is to have dual income streams and reach financial freedom sooner.
> Why Is Perception And Setting Low Expectations Important For Remote Work
> We’ve heard it before, perception is everything. This HBR article illustrates a great example of how perception matters at the end of the day, not the real story. The fact is if you’re perceived as a hard worker, it doesn’t matter what you do behind the scenes. In the two job game, you want to be perceived as someone who meets expectations. While in reality, your aim is to do the minimum and get by; don’t get fired while secretly hoping to get laid off. A strategy to achieve a positive perception (and outcome) is accomplished by setting low expectations with your manager.
> Why Setting High Expectations With Your Boss Is A Waste Of Time
> Let’s first start by going over what everyone tells you to do – set high expectations, get promoted. Yes, this leads to more money. That’s great. But let’s look at the ROI because all great employees and MBA’s should care about the ROI on behalf of the company.
> But what about your Personal ROI’s? Indeed’s research concluded that the average employee raise is 3%. It may be a bit higher in tech, so let’s say 5 – 10%.
> You might need to put in 30% more hours, more stress, more work to get a minimal increase in your salary. To me, setting those high expectations to get a promotion is a waste of time. You can get a second job and easily give yourself an 80% “raise” for your work. Also, I’m a good employee by being mindful of ROI’s, my own.
> What I’ve Learned About Setting Low Expectations From Years of Working
> What I’ve learned is expectations need to be set from day 1. I once worked with a new senior manager who always left at five o’clock since his very first day. New hires usually stay late to ramp up quickly. Not this guy. He set the expectation that he would leave the office by five and stuck by it every day. It was genius. A year into the job, he’s still shutting down at five while the rest of us kept working.
> For managers, it’s typically hard to have that conversation, “can you put in more hours?” If your manager adds new tasks, just be clear you cannot complete them in the timeframe given. If you’re labeled as the “guy who leaves at five,” people won’t give you more work knowing you can’t get to it. More work is assigned to you once you do a great job, and it is an endless circle. This story is just one example, but the lesson is to set expectations early and set them low. That way, the only place to go is up.
> Once you set high expectations, you’re always going to fail if you don’t meet them. Like the concept behind the HBR perception article, you can have done great work but once you fail to meet the expectations that’s what people remember. How many times you think you did a great job, but when you have your review, your boss mentions all the “failures” and missed expectations. Sound familiar?
> How To Set Low Expectations At Work With Your Manager
> Let’s get into how you can set low expectations while working your two remote jobs. As we mentioned, set these expectations early.
> Be The One To Drive The Conversation
> Don’t ask what your boss’s expectations are; set them yourself. Instead of going into the conversation by asking what their expectations are, set and communicate them to your manager. By asking what their expectations are, you are putting yourself in a corner. In developing your own low expectations and communicating them, you are placing the burden on your boss to have that difficult conversation with you to say otherwise. Psychologically, it’s harder to say no, than to say yes. Let your boss be the one to say no to you. As a new employee, you’re most likely to slide by for the first review cycle with this method.
> Communicate Often And Early
> Being a great communicator can be a great asset. Think about those who do great work and are not great communicators. What about those who do mediocre work but can communicate. Who do you think will be looked upon more favorably? Set your expectations and make them visible to everyone to know what to expect. Take this as an opportunity to improve your communication skills. With practice comes mastery.
...
> As you can see from this example, the employee overcommunicating comes across as more trustworthy and in control. That’s the perception you want to convey. Even though something is not on track, or you haven’t started at all, just the fact you are communicating the details along the way, people are more comfortable. Also by communicating frequently, you can soften the blow of the miss.
> Explain The Reasons Behind Your Low Expectations
> While setting expectations is excellent, if you can back up your thought process to come to those expectations, you have a better case. Always come to the table with your examples of how you thought through your goal-setting process. For example, if you are new to a particular field, you can put the small milestones to achieve “xyz” goal. With each milestone, you can explain how difficult it was to reach that milestone and drag out the timeline to the next set of milestones to achieve “xyz” mastery.
> Good communicators always over-communicate. They are perceived to be in control, even what’s said is the same message just repeated many times. If you have project updates, and the updates are the same for weeks, you’re still being perceived as a good project manager since you are visible and proactive in communicating. Again it’s about perception. Like the deft hands of magicians, mastering resetting expectation is just as important as setting low expectations at the beginning.
Leverage Your Newbie Card In Setting Low Expectations
> Being new has its advantages. No one knows you, so you start off with a clean slate. You can take advantage by setting low expectations with your manager for your first review cycle. There are many barriers to mastering your remote jobs, such as ramp-up time, company culture, new systems, and different procedures. Let these barriers shine in setting your low expectations – and all the more reasons to have unambitious goals.
> Leverage The Review Cycle
> Understand when the review cycle starts and ends. Set and time your goals to the review cycle. Usually, people set goals for the year, but keep in mind you’re evaluated on review cycles. There’s no use in setting goals for eight months when the review is only four months away.
> Be A Follower Not A Leader
> Realize that not everyone needs to be a leader in every job. Everyone is different and it takes employees of all types to make the company hum. There’s nothing wrong with being a follower and doing what’s expected. Remember, there are no leaders if there are no followers. Avoid the slippery ladder in your career. Take the side door instead.
> Setting Low Expectations And The Two-Job Game Plan
> The game plan for two remote jobs is to set the expectations low with your manager and prolong your hustle until your exit to another job or you’re laid off with a severance. For the second non-primary job, you’re there for one reason only, to collect a paycheck. A paycheck that is 500%+ more than a raise. The goal is to keep the paycheck going for as long as you can with minimal effort.
> 30 days – The first 30 days are easy due to ramp up but are critical to set low expectations. Set yourself up for success in working two jobs. Be that guy or girl who always logs off at five o’clock (even better at four), and let people know. Once you start extending yourself, answering emails and messages after hours, your co-workers will see that as the norm and more work will creep up on you. If you’re never available after a certain time, your colleagues won’t message you because they know you won’t respond.
> 60 days – In the 30-60 day window, you should set goals with your boss if that’s not already done. Drag out the newbie card and claim slow ramp-up time. Identify what absolutely needs to be done, communicate that as your goal, and meet them. Again, it’s all about the perception that you meet expectations, not the work you’ve actually done. You can do little work but as long as you met the communicated expectations you’re golden.
> What If You Don’t Feel Right Low Balling Expectations At Work – Put The Ego Aside
> We’re primed at a very young age to be the best we can be. We look up to leaders in society. If your ultimate end goal is financial freedom, you have to strategize and optimize for that and put your ego aside. You’re aiming to be a leader in your personal life and the truly ambitious one land two jobs. Who cares if you’re not a leader in the public eye of a workplace. You can channel the guilt, if any, towards donating the extra money to a good cause, like the YMCAs. Go do something you care about. Work is just means to an end. Join us in the counterculture towards work.
OMG, again? Are we going to see this every week now? This guy has two jobs already and still has time to brag about and promote his blog? Please don't ruin the remote work for us.
All outsourcing companies follow the same formula: set low expectations, add more billable hours. Just go and look at how WITCH(wipro, infosys, tcs, etc) operate. In fact, many Indian middle managers get bribed by transferring money and assets to their relatives back home. Next time look at these managers and why they have 20 contractors in their team and not delivering any improvements. The moment employees slack, mortal wizards come from the wood work.
Just be careful what you wish for. One coworker of mine at a previous company did this and burned out really quick. He had a family (16 year old son and 9 year old daughter) and could never use vacation to spend time with them. He would use vacation time at one company to catch up on work from the other. He offered me once to join a team to have two remote jobs but I declined. But I did admire his tenacity and sacrifice for his children.
Can I ask, was this sacrifice necessary? Were you earning decent wages or was he actually struggling to make ends meet? It is far more selfish to pursue more money than you (or your kids) need and miss out on your children's formative years than to just hold a single decent paying job.
So the company was a startup in the Bay Area, SF-based. At that time the wages were very competitive, and he was more senior than I was so most likely he was getting paid very well. He told me he wanted to save up as much as possible while maximizing his income, so he could buy a house in a cheaper cost of living area. He did succeed in that endeavor, and last I spoke with him still does the two job thing.
I know for me personally, one job is enough, especially considering that I like to maintain a very generous work-life balance (leaning heavily to the life side of the ratio). Not sure if his sacrifice was necessary, as I was also able to buy a house, it just took me longer. But some people are very type A workaholic types.
The two job setup is just a brilliant way of exposing the fact that almost every tech worker is in a position where pay/effort is falling as pay increases. We all know there are 10x’s but you’ll never see anyone getting 10x the pay no matter how productive they are.
So for most its better to take two jobs at 50% the effort at 75% the pay each.
There's a time i worked like 4 jobs at the same time. Such a nightmare and my advice is, just keep at most 2 jobs only.
The key to success to me, is to kill procastination as fast as possible, seeking for help as soon as possible. Relax well, eat well. The job is getting the job done, not broken.
When you show people that hard work is just rewarded with more hard work, and isn't compensated at a rate that's worth it, what else do you expect? I wish I could find the link, but I read about a study which showed explicitly that this is true (the reward for hard work is more work), and, surprisingly, that hard workers didn't like that. Seriously, why would you bother?
This makes no sense unless both jobs are coast-mode situations with no worthwhile upward mobility. Every job I have had and every career trajectory I have seen in the industry involves a growth curve that looks way better.
My former skip level manager was bad for this. He told everyone they are not allowed to squash commit and that they should commit every work day. He was located in another city from my team and this was how he checked to see who was a slacker.
When one of my co-op student's term ended he wanted to hire him full-time because he thought he was a rock-star from his high number of commits. In reality the student wasn't very good and we just gave him simple tasks to write unit tests. He wasn't even good at writing unit tests because when he was unsure about edge case behavior he would just see what the function currently outputs and then write a test to expect that result. The worst is when a unit test would start to fail so he'd change the existing test to expect the wrong result.
Before anyone asks, I eventually left the company and I did repeatedly tell the student how to write better unit tests in his code reviews.
Lovely to see the "how dare you to have 2 jobs!" boomer crowd going nuts. All those comments about , "you are destroying you career", and "you wont get promoted" , are so cringe. If you hire a dev, that is delivering and is a decent person. Why do you about care what he/she/* does on the side? That's like saying you should only be able to own one business. In the other hand, if a employee is not performing , you should fire him/her/* regardless of how many jobs the person has.
They are long term consulting (or you can call them outsourcing, rather) jobs for quite big companies. I am weary of saying the domain, but it's... Really not the domain most people would expect.
I guess I'm just lucky stuff doesn't overlap. I try to keep meetings at a minimum and solve things as promptly as possible so I avoid being dragged in them. If I have some overlap I reschedule or if it's not critical I simply don't join.
The expectations are pretty fucking abysmal to boot. People in this domain do not know how to fucking write software and I've been at it for a while and I know my stuff petty well. The funny part is the customers are quite happy with my work. If you also them, they will say I am one of the higher performing members of their team. I do tend to solve trickier problems and I understand the parts I build quite well so if issues arise I am quick at solving them. But, again, the level of competence is really really low! Clients will suffer most in a couple of ways. It will probably take me longer to do things than if I were to be uniquely employed for them. But, again, expectations so low, they don't have a good comparison. If one of the clients has a really serious problem, I will pour most my time in it to fix the burning issues, so the others will get neglected for a bit. Sometimes I run out of gas and I have mini burnouts so I will have these mini slumps, but I quickly snap out of it and get back on track.
Just to expand how bad competence is here, at one point we had a team we worked in and out of about 4 people I basically did the whole work, while working 2 contracts at the time.
As mentioned, this field is deeply dysfunctional. I worked in it as a normal consultant for a long time and really really tried improving client's stuff but.. I gave up. Most clients don't even use git and they won't fucking listen when we tell them the decisions they take are bad. They just go ahead out of inertia with horrible horrible standards and bad approaches. So I guess I'm now jaded and kind of... Resigned to be just a pawn and just bill hours.
I’m firing someone after the holidays who tried to set expectations low, and couldn’t do the work I gave him in anything remotely resembling a reasonable time frame.
He may have been doing something like this, but honestly it doesn’t matter. The work I need done takes 40 hours to do, and sometimes more. How it gets done, or what he does otherwise isn’t really my concern, as long as it gets done.
By the way, you can do this legitimately by working as a contractor. Some companies will ask you only work on their project, but many will not. The deception is not necessary.
1. They tend to work double jobs at frankly lower tier companies with lower standards and significantly lower pay. Because the companies are lower tier, they stagnate in their career growth because the company is not teaching them good skills. And you cannot put both jobs in your resume, only one on top of that, and this will show up in future background checks.
2. Because of double working, they are pretty much guaranteed to not get promoted beyond the standard terminal level.
3. They think that promos (like this article), are at most only %10, while promos are more like a x1.5 to x2 of your income.
4. You cannot work at proper startups and learn a ton, because the workload would be way too high for this strategy.
Real example: One person I know has 2 $150k jobs for a total of $300k. If they joined as a jr engineer at a FANGMULA or equivalent, they would be making $300k, not be fucking stressed about the duplicity that is working 2 jobs, learn more because it's a better company and get promoed to sr engineer within a year or two and make $400-500k instead. If they have ambition, they can cross the leadership rubicon (either through becoming a staff engineer or manager) and make even more, reaching up to $700k-$1M eventually.
Maybe if your having a hard time breaking into startups or FANGMULA and your just starting out, this might be an ok strategy, but beyond that, it's not a good idea.