At 9 am every weekday, Abel clocks in from a private office he recently started renting in Chicago. He doesn’t have breakfast and works solidly until 2 pm, when he logs off and eats a meal. But that’s where the similarities with most other tech workers ends. Abel isn’t working one, but four full-time jobs in secret, all for enterprise startups. His combined annual salary is $680,000.
He started juggling jobs on the sly a year ago, when he realized he was completing tasks to a higher quality and at a faster pace than his colleagues. “I found myself with a lot of free time,” says the 35-year-old. “With rising inflation and annual raises not matching that, I figured taking a second job was a good way to get ahead of the curve. My wife and I have three kids and we’re trying to save to buy a house.”
He’s been doing the first job (which he calls “J1”) for just over four years, and started J2 and J3 just over a year ago before taking on J4 at the start of the summer. Ideally, he wants to keep them all for the next year, which he thinks is sustainable, especially since he now has a dedicated space for his army of laptops and electronics.
“One of the points of stress is the sheer amount of meetings, many of which could be written up or dealt with in an asynchronous Slack,” says Abel, who, like the other tech workers WIRED spoke to for this story, asked that we not use his real name so as to protect his privacy. If two meetings clash in his diary, Abel attends both with two separate headphones. “It takes some practice, but now I can process both streams of information at the same time and pay loose attention to both,” he claims. Abel will tune in if he hears his name mentioned. Excuses of a bad connection help if ever there’s a delay. Three-meeting overlaps can get “crazy,” Abel says.
With four salaries, Abel isn’t fazed by the tech downturn and mass layoffs. He sends out applications for new roles on a monthly basis to keep the interviews, and the job pipeline, going. “Then I can jump into another role if something goes wrong—I’ve seen people do five roles, but I’m at my limit right now.”
In the solitude of their home offices, employees are able to work far more flexibly than before the pandemic. Without having to excuse themselves from in-person engagements, they can fit in virtual meets and interviews with other companies; some of them are able to accept and juggle multiple roles. Faced with stagnating wages and increased living costs, the practice of having more than one form of employment has risen steadily over the past decade in the US, and the national unemployment rate is at a 50-year low.
Overemployment was exacerbated by the pandemic: The US Bureau of Statistics found that in April 2020, 4 percent of American workers had a second job, but by August 2022, this statistic had leapt almost a full percentage point. While there are no figures on remote workers holding down more than one full-time job without alerting their employers—usually with overlapping hours—it is unlikely to be a wholly new phenomenon.
Many tech companies were fully remote before the pandemic, but the burgeoning Reddit community r/Overemployed, a community of 92,300 members that fields advice and tips on how to juggle jobs without anyone noticing, shows how workers freed from their offices are able to operate under the radar.
Marten runs a weekly advice session on the community’s Discord channel to help people “optimize their earning potential,” but doesn’t believe there are that many people actually working multiple remote jobs. “I’d venture to say that for every 100 people interested in doing it, only 20 are capable of pulling it off, and of that number, only half actually do,” says Marten, who is also US-based. He is one of them. Marten works a 70-hour week and earns between $150,000 and $220,000 a month as a senior management consultant focusing on strategy and deals, and has worked on contracts in Big Tech, finance, and auditing during his 15 years of overemployment.
Greg, who is doing two tech jobs from his home in California and earns an annual salary of $200,000, feels the crunch when he’s working toward several deadlines simultaneously. He deals with diary clashes by refusing certain meetings, saying that “a couple of lies never hurt them, provided they get good work.”
Recently though, his second job asked to tag him in a LinkedIn post—which would, of course, have alerted his first job to his predicament. “I told them a doctored truth, that I was getting hounded by recruiters, so I decided to hibernate my account,” Greg explains. “I expect these clashes will continue because the work culture in the United States is a death cult. I just have to suck it up until I can retire.”
Most people’s overemployed journeys begin with a second job offer and a concrete financial goal. Greg wanted to pay off his student loans and fund home ownership, and takes pride in the fact that he’s no longer living paycheck to paycheck. Abel wanted to save four months’ salary as a downpayment for his home. As they get the hang of leading double, triple, and even quadruple professional lives, temptation to take on another (and maybe another) grows in potency, particularly with encouragement from the community. Greg is looking for his third role, and has his eye on early retirement, while Abel recognizes how hard it is to not just keep taking jobs. “If I had no kids and no responsibilities, I’d probably be on job seven,” he says.
From a legal point of view, it’s a little murky. Most employment contracts will have some sort of exclusivity provision, which outlines that the employee will dedicate their working hours to the job and won’t work for someone else, and certainly not a competitor. “Having a second job in those circumstances would clearly be in breach of contract,” says Beth Hale, a partner at law firm CM Murray LLP who specializes in employment law. “But there’s a good argument to say that even without any clauses in a contract, working simultaneously on another full-time role is not acting in the best interests of your employer, because you can’t possibly do multiple full-time jobs, can you?”
Doing so poses a serious risk and, as Hale explains, would amount to gross misconduct or dismissal, and an employee could be dismissed without notice. “Companies would need to decide whether they care, because if someone’s doing the job well enough, does it matter that they’re doing other roles?” she asks. “If a company has employed someone because they think they’re brilliant and want exclusivity over their skills, they need to decide where they stand on a case-by-case approach.”
In India, company leaders are already publicly condemning overemployment. In August, Rishad Premji, CEO of the multinational Wipro, called it “cheating—plain and simple,” and in late September, his company fired 300 employees on the grounds that they were moonlighting for competitors. Another IT company, Infosys, warned staff in mid-September that they would face termination if they took up a second job during, as well as after, working hours.
Without comparative data, it’s hard to say whether overemployment is more prevalent in India, or simply that more business leaders there are catching wind of it. But not everyone sees it as a negative: The CEO of IT services and consulting company Tech Mahindra, C.P. Gurnani, says he has no objection to his employees taking second jobs, and Indian food delivery startup Swiggy even introduced a policy enabling workers to take on gig economy work and temporary contracts outside work (although nothing that is categorized as full-time).
Overemployed veteran Marten thinks those coasting in all of their jobs could ruin matters for others, and he fears they could trigger more widespread calls back to the office. “Overemployed only works long-term if there is continued delivery of expected value. If employers get that, they’re far more likely to turn a blind eye or even outright OK it,” he says. “The quiet quitters who are overemployed don’t realize they’re architects of their own failure by bringing unwanted attention and scrutiny on not just themselves, but everyone.”