I don't think it's illegal to work multiple jobs at once. At most, this person might be violating a company policy at one of their jobs (or, more realistically, any would fire them without cause as an at-will employee/contractor).
That isn't meant to be a defense of this (I think it's unhealthy on a personal level, and immensely risky on a reputational level); just that fraud might be the wrong nail to hammer.
Edit: On the other hand, some of their other posts imply willful deception of their employers (like outright lying about being unable to attend meetings[1]). It's possible that would constitute employment fraud.
This whole "movement" is really strange to me, because, as always, this depends on where you live.
Where I live, this is entirely illegal. So, to me, it always is just a different word for fraud.
Then again, we have actual employment contracts where a whole lot of legalese will say what restrictions each party of the contract (employer and employee) has.
I am under the impression that employment contracts arent really a thing in the USA.
It's illegal to work two jobs ? Are you sure about that? Can you point to a specific law ?
It may be against the employment contract but I think it's totally wrong to say it's illegal. That would mean the government has legislated against having two jobs.
> I am under the impression that employment contracts arent really a thing in the USA.
I think for most tech companies in the USA they actually do have contracts. The contract will state things like medical benefits ...etc. They are less common for working in a local bar or suchlike.
I was talking about full time jobs, which these "overemployed" stories generally talk about.
Its technically legal to work two jobs, but in reality it simply isnt because of employee protections.
Such as its illegal to work more than 40 hours average in my country. Company cant force you to work more than 40 hours per average, and neither can you choose to.
Its ok to work 50 hours in one week, but you need to work less than 40 hours another then.
Its also illegal to work more than 10 hours in one day. Or have less than 11 hours between job days. (Ie. you cant stop working at 11pm and start working again at 9am the next day.
Theres many other issues, such as you arent allowed to work while on holiday. So you cant work a different job while on holiday from your other job.
Or the fact that basically 100% of employment contracts say the amount of hours you have to work. And telling your employer you did without doing so is fraud.
> Such as its illegal to work more than 40 hours average
You are also confused about this law. In the EU you can't force employees to work more than these hours but it's up to the employee they can agree to work more hours if they want to. It's NOT illegal to work more than those hours.
> Its also illegal to work more than 10 hours in one day
Wrong again the law is that a company can't force you to work these hours. That's different from being illegal for you to work more than those hours.
> Or the fact that basically 100% of employment contracts say the amount of hours you have to work. And telling your employer you did without doing so is fraud
It's a breach of contract NOT fraud.
You really need to actually read the rules on these protections as I think you're misinformed.
Ill translate the relevant part for you (you can use DeepL or something if you want to crosscheck):
"Für Arbeitnehmer mit Hauptjob und Nebenjob gelten diese Arbeitszeiten
- Man darf in der Regel maximal 48 Stunden die Woche arbeiten.
- Wenn man (zeitweilig) die Stunden pro Tag erhöht, ist eine wöchentliche Arbeitszeit von bis zu 60 Stunden möglich, wenn innerhalb eines halben Jahres die Wochenarbeitszeit auf durchschnittlich 48 Stunden ausgeglichen wird."
Translation:
The following working hours are relevant for employees with main and sidejob:
- You are only allowed to work maximum 48 hours per week on average
- If one decides (temporarily) to increase the time worked per day, a maximum 60 hours per week is possible, as long as the average worked hours stay at 48 hours per week in a 6 month timeframe.
I can't interpret German legal documents correctly so I'll take your word. Note that this isn't an employee protection as it places a severe limit on your rights. It is strange this hasn't been challenged based upon the fact it contravenes Article 23(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically "free choice of employment".
That's not to say you are wrong but if working too much means you get a fine I don't think I'll ever want to work in that country. I would go so far as to say that's way worse than the limited laws in the US.
I would note here that the overemployeed here is generally not work 100+ hours but working two full time jobs in 40-50 hours so they well could manage to be within that work time law.
Here is a more appropriate discussion about overemployment in Germany without fraud being mentioned at all as it wouldn't be fraud if you stick to the 48 hours:
These kind of laws are called „Schutzgesetze“. Protection laws. Where individual rights are limited to protect individuals from what lawmakers perceive as negative effects.
You are definitely free to your opinion on this. It’s a social difference. I wouldn’t want to have it differently. Otherwise employers tend to force employees to work more than that time „by choice“. (Read: force by peer pressure etc)
The problem with the second part is that contracts have hours you need to work noted in them. If you have one contract for 40 hours and another for 8 per week, without telling either employer about this, you’re likely not committing fraud. Just fireable offices due to the contract disputes you mentioned.
But if you have two 40 hour contracts, either you will have to work 80 hours a week (the lesser offense, and in reality „wo kein Kläger da kein Richter“. German Idiom for „where there’s nobody to sue, there is no justice (to rule on this)“ ) or commit fraud by not working the 40 hours for at least one employer. (I’m talking about Arbeitszeitbetrug here) (Betrug = fraud)
The issue is, generally people in these kind of stories always work less than they should. I’d be majorly annoyed if a colleague fucked me over because he was working a second job at the same time.
Personally, my code of ethics is pretty simple. Be fair. That means I expect my employer to be fair to me, and I will be fair to my employer. So this whole overemployment thing rubs me the wrong way, just as an employer forcing people to do overtime would.
To be 100% clear. I have nothing against sidegigs. Those are also semi-common in Germany. But you should be open with your employer about it and not fuck over your colleagues by scheduling work for both at the same time.
As for your link. They’re talking about the employer side and how to deal with sidegigs. All relevant from what I saw. They didn’t touch on what to do if an employer is lying about his hours worked, unless I missed it.
They are very much correct with the part about being a freelancer being a possible „workaround“. Freelancers aren’t bound to the work time issues, as they aren’t employees. Being a freelancer is more complicated than in the USA though, from what I understand.
As a general point, in Germany working multiple jobs is less common than in the USA, at least from what I can gather from US social media. So that might explain one of the disconnects we are having here.
If you work "at-will" there's explicitly no restriction against working multiple jobs unless its specified by an employment contract (which few people in "at-will" employment regions have).
Of course, each employer may have a policy forbidding it and thus could fire you on at-will terms if they found out, but that's a long way away from fraud in any legal sense.
Fraud is a lot more specific than just lying (either outright or as would be the case most often when it comes to having multiple jobs: lying by omission).
I'm not defending the act of working multiple jobs with full-time expectations here, I think in many cases it would be at best unprofessional, but it would take a very specific set of circumstances for it to come close to reaching the high bar of fraud.
>”there's explicitly no restriction against working multiple jobs unless its specified by an employment contract”
I feel like there is no such restriction for working multiple jobs concurrently because such a thing wasn’t feasible or widespread before remote work. I have a feeling that working multiple jobs at the same time won’t be considered fraud in the legal sense, but employment contracts will quickly adapt to include clauses to preclude overlapping employment.
But it's not uncommon to sit on multiple boards at the same time that a person is the CEO in their full time job. It can all start to add up a bit. Are they working extra hours? Does the CEO position not require a full 40 of their time? I suspect there are many in both categories.
He also owns less than half of SpaceX. But SpaceX's management is probably just fine with him going off and focusing on Twitter, they can do fine without him playing an active role.
Which reminds me, I've been meaning to keep tabs on his former head of engineering at SpaceX. That guy is probably the one you should be watching, not Musk.
I was curious so I looked at the employment agreements for my last three jobs, and as far as I could tell, none of them explicitly forbade working elsewhere, nor required or expected 8 hours a day dedicated to work.
You didn't explicitly have a clause saying something like "40 hour work week, Monday to Friday 8 AM to 5 PM"? Pretty standard where I live (Sweden), making this type of shenanigans virtually impossible (at least I haven't heard of this being a thing). I mean, it may not say "you have WORK these 8 hours a day", but they expect you to be available for this job exclusively.
Not sure fraud is the right word, but the companies are expecting him to be working 40hrs a week and I'm guessing he is not doing that, which is at the very least dishonest. Perhaps he is actually working 80hrs a week in which case this is not fraud for sure.
But he mentions someone had 7 jobs and was working 20(??) hours a week which means he's basically scamming all those companies.
In my experience of highly paid tech jobs you're generally on salary and your work is managed by some clueless project manager with some notion of how many points you can accomplish in a week. If you find yourself in that situation, and you can do "40hrs" of work in 10 hours, getting a second or even third job of that nature seems like the quickest way to increase your earnings.
You will not convince me you can complete "40hrs" of work in "10 hours," doofus.
That's just 10 hours of more effective work. The other 30 hours you're lying to me and cheating me out of what I'm paying you.
Of course, you can get away with it, because you're clever, there's way too much money in tech jobs sometimes, and people are trusting - and you deliver! Even if the work product is only meh; it's better than what those other chumps were doing, right?!
Until you get caught; until someone in the recruiting community in your field/stack/industry catches wind of this post or that post; or you slip up and double book stakeholder meetings; or your background check shows multiple employers; or ....
I disagree that an employer is paying for 40 hours of my time: They're paying for output and results. I think rational employer would concede the same.
> Until you get caught
It's not as true today, but across 2020/2021 that couldn't possibly matter less. If this person was caught, then what? They fire them and give them 4-12 weeks severance? A year ago a good dev could have another job lined up before sundown.
Regardless of whether the managers are clueless or not, software companies operate on trust that the engineers' estimates of how long work will take, is based on the difficulty of the work with the natural assumption that you are devoting all your working hours to that work, and that there's not some hidden multiplier in your work estimates because you're splitting time with other jobs.
Unless you tell your team and your manager "I only work 1/x of my time at this job", it is deceit.
Typically most full time jobs say nothing about time commitments. In the old days, pre-remote work, presence was often valued more than productivity at many companies. Today, “presence” is about keeping your slack dot green. Could you pull off over-employment with a small startup? Probably not. But a couple of bloated corporations? Absolutely.
I've only worked at 2 different mid-sized US tech companies but they both had "we expect you to work full-time, full-time is defined as 38-40 hours of work". Even if they didn't explicitly have that, if you're working a full-time job then that means you're working at least 30 hours otherwise it's not a full-time job by definition alone.
I typically avoid anything other than small companies. But with the last mid-size company I worked for, there definitely was not enough “real work” to fill 40 hours, or even 30. I had to learn to pace myself. But I still had to be available, on-site, during that time. With remote work “over employment”, people are taking advantage of those inefficiencies.
My contract says absolutely nothing about the amount of time, times of arrival & departure, or anything else of the sort. It's a straightforward document that lays out compensation details with a job description attached, nothing more.
I'm not an OE nor do I seek to be, but once I get over the cognitive dissonance of the deeply embedded social construct of a 40=hour work week, I see no reason why a person who fulfills all of the requirements in a job description to the complete satisfaction of their employer in under 40 hours should owe them anything more. Will they be paid more for it? (I'll answer that, because I do it. the answer is nope nope nope)
Thought experiment: two people sit next to each other in identical jobs and identical work loads split between them, jobs spec'ed out as needing to complete X work each week. Emp_1 is mediocre are requires a full 40 hours to complete their X/2 tasked each week and earn their $100k. Fine. Emp_2 is smarter and faster and can solve the same problems and work more efficiently complete their X/2 tasks in only 20 hours for the same $100k. That's fair! they both did the same amount of work only in varying amounts of time and the workplace puts a price tag of $100k on that chunk of work.
But what's Emp_2 to do? 20 hours to fill. Massive stretched of boredom. Perhaps even the appearance that they're lazy because they often don't seem to be working. Sure, they could seek out other tasks, but why? That wasn't the labor contract. That wasn't the agreement. And for damn sure they can't go to their boss and say "Hey I've got 20 hours a week to fill let me do a second job for an extra $100k". Not. Going. To. Happen.
The worker-employer relationship is not a benevolent one No matter how well you get along with your boss the inherent nature of the relationship between an employee and a corporation is tinged with a hint of adversarial. The company isn't paying out of altruistic goodness of their hear motives. They're paying $X for @Y work. (This is all assuming a salaried and not hourly wage). If you take $X, you owe @Y, and nothing more. If you finish @Y in half the expected time then the explicit contract, if not the implicit social construct, does not say you own @Y*2 work. (Barring contract that may actually set performance benchmarks and additional compensation that employees are obligated to work towards, of course)
I see no reason at all why a person capable of doing a chunk of work predetermines to take 40 hours and pay a given sum of money should be obligated to fill time above & beyond that chunk of work when completed under time, and without additional compensation.
When I go above and beyond, I'm not doing it for the company, I'm doing it out of loyalty to co-workers and an excellent boss who makes my life easier in countless ways.
> My contract says absolutely nothing about the amount of time, times of arrival & departure, or anything else of the sort.
Where do you live? Is that common where you are? In my experience, my contracts in the UK have always had some kind of language about working hours.
E.g. my current contract has a clause saying "Your working hours will be from 9:00AM to 6:00PM from Monday to Friday (inclusive) with a one-hour break for lunch."
In practice, I work from home and no-one is checking my exact hours, but I'm pretty sure that most if not all of my previous tech jobs have had a clause like that in their contracts.
I work in the US. My contract reappointment letter-- essentially the mew contract in effect as of my reappointment after annual review-- is basically a paragraph that says "blah blah reappointed for next you subject to available funding blah blah" and I sign it and send to hr.
I just checked the employee handbook to be sure, and there's nothing about standard work hours/break etc. Probably because most workers are in a union where the union contract spells out some of those things in more detail. But I'm not in a union, I'm an exempt "unlimited" employee which essentially means I do not have a set amount of hours I'm obligated to work. I'm obligated to work the hours required to perform the work I receive. In theory the expectation is a person will mainly have about 40 hours of work to do, and in practice that sometimes there will be crunch time and you'll have to do a bit more and you can't complain or ask for overtime. With respect to OE, it seems perfectly reasonable that this be double edged, and should I accomplish all expected tasks in < 40 hours I'm no more obligate to work longer than my employer is obligated to pay me more when I exceed 40 hours.
In all honesty though, my work does roughly take 40 hours to complete, my job there's always more to be done that time allows and my boss & I work together to prioritize without any expectation that I regularly go over 40 unless something either 1) goes horribly wrong or 2) comes out of nowhere and needs to be addressed ASAP. There's some, but not complete, overlap between #1 nd #2.
All of which is to say that I can easily see how someone could meet the average expectations of a job in much less than 40 hours, especially at $Large_Company where employees are interchangeable widgets and 40 hours is the socially defined amount of time that a least-common-denominator person meeting the minimum requirements needs to complete the job's tasks.
I'm fascinated by this (new) concept, but I'm absolutely not looking to jump over into the OE world. There is enough ethical murkiness that I'm just not interested even if I think a person could, if careful navigate that path. I also like my current job and, as I said, have a backlog of work. I'm in a position of high responsibility of critical importance and it is not the sort of job where I'm only expected to do a discrete pre-define chunk of work each week/month/etc. So I would very much feel bad and unethical if I cut into it's time to do some other work. But I can see how that's not true of all jobs.
