What happens when engineers work more than one job

There’s a news story going around about an engineer called Soham¹ who was routinely “overemployed”: he maintained remote jobs at multiple tech companies simultaneously, collecting their salaries in parallel. When one disgruntled employer shared a warning on Twitter, a shocking amount of other companies posted on Twitter and Hacker News to say that they too had hired Soham. How can any of this work? Particularly in a difficult engineering market, how can someone get hired at multiple jobs at the same time and stay long enough to make it worthwhile? And if they’re able to be productive, is it really a problem?

Holding down multiple jobs

Tech companies are surprisingly vulnerable to this strategy for a few reasons.

First, they support remote work, which obviously makes this whole thing possible: you can’t be physically at multiple workplaces, but you can be sort-of-active on multiple work laptops at the same time. This goes double for async-first companies where you don’t even need to be on Zoom calls.

Second, becoming useful at a tech company requires a long process of onboarding and becoming familiar with the existing codebase. It’s normal for new hires to spend weeks or even months getting up to speed before they’re fully productive, so someone who’s willing to half-ass it and run out the clock can plausibly claim that they’re still onboarding for a while.

Third, the skill of doing well at a tech company is broadly separate from the skill of interviewing at a tech company. If you prioritize your interviewing skills, it’s possible to come across very well. By all accounts, Soham interviewed exceptionally well - as you’d expect, for someone who’s based their career around interviewing a lot.

Fourth, lots of small tech companies want to hire really strong engineers but don’t pay really strong compensation. If you’re a strong engineer willing to work for low compensation (because you’re collecting it from many different companies), I imagine tech companies will see you as a bargain and snap you up. It’s an example of the classic con-artist principle that the best cons are ones where the mark thinks they’re conning you.

If you’re doing useful work, is it a problem?

Many of the employers who claim to be now firing Soham say that they’re firing him because he’s overemployed: i.e. not because he’s performing badly. First, is this plausible? Can you be performing well (or at least well enough) at multiple tech jobs? I think you can.

Skilled engineers can do a reasonably good job in a shorter amount of time than many people imagine. An hour of focused work can produce something really useful, and the asymmetrical nature of software work means that a few big wins can be enough value to make it worth employing you for a long time. Because tech work is also famously impossible to estimate, it’s also very easy to claim that you’re working on something for longer than you’re actually working on it. At the end of the day, the engineer working on a project is the only one who really knows how hard it is. Even if the final result is just two lines of code, those two lines of code could plausibly have required days or weeks of careful work.

Of course, if you’re only working for an hour or two a day, you’re not going to do as well as if you were putting in a full workday. There are two reasons for that². The first one is obvious: you simply won’t have as much time to do the work. Even if you’re aiming for low-effort high-value tasks, you’ll have to be right every time. If any of your one-hour sprints ends up being wasted effort, it’s as if you wasted an entire day.

The second reason is a bit subtle. Particularly for more senior engineers, when a company employs you, they’re not just renting the time you spend sitting down and typing code. They’re renting the ambient processing you’re doing for the rest of the workday. Or even the ambient processing you’re doing in the shower, or while you sleep, and so on. I have worked with very effective engineers who only spent an hour or two a day actively “working”. But they were so effective because they spent the rest of the day thinking. When they sat down to work, they had hours and hours of background processing helping them make the right decisions and come up with useful new ideas.

Final thoughts

If you’re working multiple jobs, you’re cheating your employers out of that ambient processing time. You can’t usefully reflect on three jobs’ worth of problems simultaneously. You might still be able to do some good work, if you’re a strong engineer. But you won’t be able to do great work.