Is Overemployment the Best Path to Early Retirement?
If you find yourself looking at memes at work due to boredom, this could be for you.
During the capital growth stage of FIRE, all advice distils down to the following two points:
Spend less than you earn.
Try and earn more.
For most people, try and earn more means either to become a contractor, bounce between jobs, push for promotion or try and get lucky on the startup lottery. However, another way has recently been brought to my attention and based on the 162,000 members of the subreddit, I think lots more people are discovering it too: overemployment.
What is Overemployment?
Overemployment (OE) is the process of having more than one job at once. Although I doubt this is a new thing, it’s becoming more prevalent (particularly in tech) because it works incredibly well for those who work remotely.
On the overemployed subreddit, some users even claim to have as many as 4 jobs at once. There is plenty of posts from people who are managing ~$500k a year.
How Do People Manage This?
There are a few different approaches to OE that people seem to take.
The Hard Way
Approach one is just to work really long hours. To do this you would find remote jobs in timezones with minimal overlap and just work long days. This is by far the worst way to do OE and it will likely lead to burn out.
However, it is a reasonable option if you have a short term goal and the extra cash will be helpful. This is arguably the most morale way to OE, since you are giving both jobs as much as you can.
One post described working 11 hours a days and sometimes more outside of work hours.
I feel like I have no life… currently doing 3 jobs right now. Some are east coast some west coast so in total it takes up about 11 hours of my day each day….
Sometimes I work outside of normal hours to catch up on work..
The problem is… I feel like I’m just working all the time? But at the same time I don’t want to quit anything because I love the money that’s coming in and I get a literal high when I have 3 paychecks coming in at once..
I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m just going to slave myself away, at what point do I quit doing this…? All this money and no time to use it.
It’s an addiction… I can’t stop… I’m trying to find a possible 4th even though I feel like I want more free time.
Why am I doing this to myself?
The Easy Way
Approach two is the complete opposite.
In this approach (called the churn and burn), you take lots of extra jobs knowing you are going to get marked as a low performer and potentially fired. However, in the time it takes to realise you really aren’t doing much and should be fired, you can be collecting pay cheques. Here is one such post suggesting how this might work:
Most jobs (at least in tech) basically expect nothing of you for the first ~3 months. Has anyone ever taken advantage of this by accepting a second job, and then just quit once they start asking anything of you?
It seems ultra easy to exploit - you could just do this a couple times in a row and basically make an extra salary without delivering anything.
In terms of it coming back to bite me, I would just get a job at some bloated insurance company across the country or something like that. I'm having trouble seeing the consequences here.
Just wondering thoughts or potential drawback of this if you have any!
The Middle Ground
The middle ground is to perform at or slightly below expectations at all your jobs so that you fly just under the radar. You do enough that you are not going to get fired but you may get some performance concerns flagged now and again which is normal and you can work on. The tips and hints provided in the quote below are nearly all applicable to working just a single job and doing it well.
Do not be overworked. My personal goal is to work 8 hours a day + some weekends if I am in a mood to finish some jobs for the following week. I sometimes am able to do J2 and J3 during the weekend so I dont have to think about it much during the week.
Work on your skills. Always try to increase your chances on the jobs market. Sometimes it could mean that you can take on more junior level jobs and finish them very quickly with low stress.
Go full technical. I stand by this 100%. The more technical skills you have, the more you are respected in your field and it doesnt matter what field. It is always better to be more technical.
Dont be afraid to negotiate. It is your life and the company doesnt give a damn about you. If you know you are valuable then be direct to your managers about it.
Never stop interviewing. Not only it keeps you updated with new jobs and potentially replacements for the old ones, but if you learn how to be great in interviews and refuse the offers for reasons like "the current project offered me a huge raise", or "I think I want to move into different direction" and at the same time you do damn well on the interview, the company and the recruiters will remember you for the future.
Dont try to get promotion or management position. This is simple. Promotion or management position means usually more meetings and more responsibilities. You do not want that. You want to be that guy who might not be ambitious but is reliable and managers love him cause he does his tasks on time.
Get your managers to love you. I have great relationship with my managers and in return I have great autonomy. If I dont want to attend some meeting they just reschedule or let it pass. I can go workout at 11AM and tell them I will have the task done.
Create an image of hard working individual. I started booking slots into my calendars named "Deep work" and explained my managers that I mastered the art of the deep work and can finish lots of things within the deep work timeframe. In that timeframe they know that I have all the notifications turned off and they cant reach me. Of course this is just a cover for meetings in other jobs but it helps.
Is This Legal/Ethical?
In their article, Metro noted that breach of contract is the main legal challenge you may come up against in the UK. Some contracts have a non-compete agreement or may explicitly say that you cannot have a second job. Whether a company would actually enforce this or not is yet to be seen.
From an ethical standpoint, that’s up to you. I think it’s a fairly compelling argument that as long as you are performing satisfactory in both roles, there is no issue. If the company doesn’t know how to measure your work or productivity then that is on them. Furthermore, 180 of our Members of Parliament have second jobs, so why shouldn’t you?
What do Companies Think?
In the move to work from home, many companies have started using monitoring software in an attempt to monitor productivity and potentially to crack down on people being OE. The simplest form of monitoring is making sure your screen is active; the most intense being monitoring your webcam.
For those working multiple jobs at the same time, you can buy devices that jiggle your mouse to keep your screen and make it naively look like you’re working. These can either be small bluetooth USB devices you plug in or something like this:
which are even harder to detect unless you are watching the screen or tracking the mouse coordinates or movement velocity.
Some companies are just straight up asking if you have another job, such as this application form for 2K games:
However, very occasionally you come across posts like this one titled “My J2 is aware of my J1 and is totally ok with it”. It is definitely the minority, but it seems if you look hard enough you may end up somewhere that takes the attitude of “if you match performance expectations, then its fine”.
Impact on FIRE
If you are trying to retire early, then having more income always helps. Therefore overemployment and FIRE could certainly be complimentary. However, whilst perusing the UK version of the FIRE sub-reddit, I was unable to find anyone that made more than a FANG+ salary, even whilst OE. This suggests that for those that are so inclined, following a more traditional path of switching companies often and levelling up your skills could yield a higher salary in the long run.
There is no doubt that if you don’t want to grind leetcode, you work to live or you need more money today, then OE might be the fastest way to achieve your goals (assuming you can find a second or third job).
Would you ever consider becoming overemployed, Mr FAT Software Engineer?
I have already been doing to some extent I think. I have always thought of it as “side-hustles”.
As well as my main job, I have written a book, attempted to build an Amazon affiliate site, consulted at a startup and done paid for mentoring. All of these bring in extra money but I have always worked on these things outside of core work hours and been very careful not to use the same laptop for any of them.
I personally think I’d find having multiple OE jobs too stressful. I would be paranoid I would slip up, that my Linkedin would give me away or that my performance was not up to scratch. When I think about it, I really really care what my colleagues and manager think of me. The idea that I’d be “scraping by” at work does not sit well with me and I need to be promotion chasing. I appreciate this isn’t the same for everyone though.
I think OE is for overachievers. If you are bored at work, have great communication skills and excellent time management, you can likely succeed at OE. However, you could also likely work towards being a highly paid software engineer in a single Big Tech job too.
Some Finance Related Warnings
If you do take more than one job, be carful with your pension payments. You can only pay £60k into your pension per tax year. If you are working multiple jobs, you may accidentally breach this if each employer is contributing.
Be wary of HMRC’s new starter checklist. There is some discussion of this here.
Be wary of some of the more complex tax legislation as your salary increases. If you are OE, you will almost certainly hit the Personal Allowance Taper and perhaps the pension taper too.
Be wary of lifestyle creep! OE is not forever, so live off the pay for one job and save the rest.
Closing Thoughts
In a world that is getting more expensive to live in and with layoffs becoming more common, I certainly see the attraction of going OE.
OE highlights a glaring problem in Software Engineering in that we do not really know how to measure people’s performance. We have tried lines of code written, tickets completed, story points completed and featured delivered but none of those are great measures as they can all be gamed.
Along as you are showing up and completing at least the same amount of work as your colleagues, contributing to meetings now and again whilst being a decent person, I find it hard to believe that any manager would be able to identify you a “underperforming”. In fact, to some extent, an OE employee is a dream employee to a manager. If they are just trying to slip by, chances are they are not pushing for promotion and will likely avoid career conversations.
OE is here to stay. Companies need to learn to live with it or find ways to measure people that makes it impossible. Alternatively, they need to reward people so it is not a compelling option. If companies continue to try and enforce it through monitoring mouse movement or screen capture, they will fail as people will always find a way to evade it.
If you are OE and working towards FIRE, I’d love to hear from you.
> I personally think I’d find having multiple OE jobs too stressful. I would be paranoid I would slip up, that my Linkedin would give me away or that my performance was not up to scratch. When I think about it, I really really care what my colleagues and manager think of me. The idea that I’d be “scraping by” at work does not sit well with me and I need to be promotion chasing.
I feel the same way. It already feels bad enough to unperform on one job, let alone multiple jobs