It shouldn't matter if people work multiple jobs. The former VP of HR at Microsoft shares how to react to double dippers — 'get over it.'

Because we aren't people, we're meat machines. We don't deserve a living wage and it's expected of us to be working every second we're awake. Do you let your tools rest?

It's because the system is designed to keep us paid just enough to live and keep buying from companies, but not enough to have true independence. Working two jobs is cheating that system by giving you more money and freedom than they want you to have. Once you have financial security you can start to wonder about how fucked up this "system" truly is.

It really should depend on the role. If part of your job is being available for inbound requests, or participating in group work of some kind, it seems reasonable to expect that during the business day you will be available and not randomly tied up with other commitments. It would be hard to have two such jobs.

If it’s a task completion kind of job then it shouldn’t matter exactly when the tasks get done as long as they get done.

But you should be able to have one “high availablility” job and one “task completion” job at the same time because your tasks can always be set aside if you are needed. Or two task completion jobs, for the same reason.

In all events, the point is being able to perform your job without undue obstacles. If you can do that, and you’re meeting the goals and criteria set for you, nothing else should matter.

I don't follow. If you're claiming you're putting 40 hours of work in a week, or that is what your contract says, and you're really only doing 20 because you're splitting it between two jobs...isn't that obviously cheating the system?

Don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit if people take advantage of a corporation to milk it for cash, but it seems to me to be pretty clearly cheating the system. If you want to get paid on what you produce, and not the time you put in, then you should structure your contracts that I way. I know a lot of my side work I don't bill hourly precisely because I know it can be done quickly ( for me with experience) but it's worth more to them.

Are they overpaid, or is every other job underpaid? Seems weird to call them overpaid when the company is making a profit on them anyway.

so they should just sit and stare if they’ve finished their work? don’t be absurd, please. the whole system is way past its due date. our society needs to scrap it and start over. and i mean human society. the world, our species. the one we have now if fast leading us to extinction, along with most of the other creatures on earth. what he says isn’t the way, but it’s better than harassing people for doing more work when they finish their first job.

This is why we can't have nice things.

That smells like BS. No one can work 5 full time jobs and not be committing fraud somehow. Paying someone overseas to do the work, plagiarizing it, submitting the same work to more than 1 of them etc.

CEOs and executives do this regularly, so unless their jobs are a lot simpler than they're claiming the "attention" argument is moot. They pay me to do a thing. I do the thing. They pay me what they'd say they'd pay. That's it.

I would like it if Microsoft employees would do the absolute minimum. Every time they get an idea we end up with Cortana on desktop or moving the start button.

If both sets of 40 hours are meeting goals then the company can shut the fuck up, morally speaking.

What if a compile job takes a long time? Would that be a good reason to context switch?

If you're getting the work done you're getting the work done.

Bottom line is that companies don't pay you for being more productive, so you have to pay yourself by working two at the same time and getting both done. If you fail to perform, sure, get fired. As long as the product is there, it's just a worker ensuring they are getting the money they deserve for their production capacity.

Yeah but the alternative is that I spend the rest of the time on on here. If the company aren't keeping me busy that's their problem

They underpay you knowing you won't work as hard for them? I don't understand business owners.

If you're getting the work done for both jobs, what's the problem? If they want to double your workload, they can pay you double.

Im not conflating anything. A job is an expectation of work to be done for a wage. I do the work, I get the wage. If the expectation is outlined at the beginning as the job monopolizing my time and me doing whatever work comes along when I'm on the clock, then that's the job I took and I need to be available to them. But in a lot of jobs the expectation is just to meet certain targets of work to be completed. If I meet those targets, the employer owes me the agreed upon wage. To imply that doing anything less than as much as humanly possible is some sort of fraud normalizes exploitation and abuse.

If I pay the grocery store a dollar for an apple, am I entitled to as many apples as they can possibly deliver me? Obviously not.

If I pay a worker a dollar for a task, am I entitled to as many tasks as they can possibly deliver me? A lot of employers seem to think so.

Not even two part time jobs, or one full time the other part time?

I have twice worked two jobs at once. Both times I was young, late teens/early 20s. Once I was working for one bike shop, but getting fed up with management, when the owner of another bike shop started hiring me on occasion when he needed extra help- which eventually led to me quitting the first shop and working at the second one full time. The other time, I was working for my uncle's construction business, and I took a second job at a video store one day a week mainly for the benefit of free movie rentals.

charge of chose

Riiiight... because nobody is coerced to do anything in a capitalist society because starvation and homelessness is easy, isn't that so, genius?

imagine not having to pay bills.

Jesse what are you talking about? That is not what the article is about. How is that relevant?

Lol you think anyone gives 100% effort to their job? Not even the CEO cares that much.

Its this, and especially with WFH there are is a pretty large spectrum of "productivity" among users. Some people are much slower than others, but we don't fire them because of it. People that think it's ok to have 2 jobs at once as long as they "meet their expectations" seem to be applying hourly assembly line or warehouse performance metrics to much more subjective work. It just doesn't work that way. If my less productive employee does good work, albeit slower I don't think he should be fired. If I find out the reason he does it slower is he's working a second job while I wait for him, then that's a different story.

they’re really only giving 1/2 effort to each job

total possible effort from an employee is a shitty, exploitative way to measure job performance. is someone who sucks at 100% effort a better employee than someone who does an amazing job at 50% effort? better to measure it based on whether the job's requirements are being met. if they are, you get paid. if they are not, you get fired. as you said yourself: if the targets are being hit the employer is getting what they pay for, and they're entitled to no more than that.

No, not like your example. If a CEO is secretly serving on another companies board you may have a point, but we’re talking about people having two jobs with the clear implication that their employers don’t know it.

“Doing what they are hired to do” is very often defined in employment agreements as working x number of hours. You can’t really say you’re doing what you’re hired to do if you take a second job that you perform during the same hours when you’re not allowed to under your agreement.

If someone wants to work 9-5, then 5-1 and somehow can manage both that’s different. For liability sake alone it’s a problem.

They aren’t fulfilling their contractual obligations if they aren’t allowed to have a second job and are doing it anyway, so this notion is nonsense to begin with. If you get paid hourly you can’t be working for someone else while getting paid by the first company for the same time. For salaried, typically there are expectations of how long you’ll be working or even your availability.

The company I work for has more than three decades of experience with WFH, and it’s almost always clear when someone is trying to double dip. It’s impossible to keep it hidden for long. Eventually you will have conflicting schedules, and excuses start piling up. Even if the work is good, very few jobs are done in a vacuum where you never need to talk to anyone or work things through. Most situations like that are handled by subcontractors who have all the freedoms you’re talking about. In fact the only situation I can even think of that would fit the mold of how work is being framed here is through contractors.

It’s preposterous to think you CAN simultaneously do so without impact either at all. All it takes is two meetings or two impromptu phone calls at once. You will choose one over the other, in which case the company you didn’t prioritize is hurt as well as the other employees that you’re collaborating with.

Become a contractor if you want to double dip. You set your own schedule, work as many jobs as you want, and even get to choose your own raises.

The other perfectly qualified person out of the job so that you could buy a second house?

They want it both ways - we are 'overtime exempt' because we're 'paid for the job' but also after the job is done - they think they own us.

This is not true. Salaries only means your pay is decided on a yearly basis and divided into each paycheck and not calculated and tracked per hour. Other conditions of employment including working hours and specific job duties are all part of your employment agreement. If your agreement has no set hours of any sort or limitations for other work, then there’s no problem. If a company is going to agree to pay you a salary, they are going to set how many hours you should be working, and reasonably expect you not to be double dipping.

The truth is they can't, and that's how they get caught, and why it comes up.

To be clear: If you Tell two employers that you are working for them from 1pm to 2pm, you are double dipping. The title of the article doesn't line up with the content. Having a second job that you work outside of the hours / commitment of your first job is fine as long as you didn't agree not to do so with your first employer. If you want to work 9-5 earning 6 figures in a WFH white collar job, then go out and get a night job at Target and are somehow able to succeed during your first job the vast majority of employers aren't going to give a shit. The reason employers give a shit is this is a largely fake narrative. Studies have shown the 40 hour work week is too long. People working two jobs cannot keep it up for long and be as good at their jobs. Second, people are conflating having 2 separate jobs with working two jobs at the literal same time. Working 9-5 at two companies and juggling email and meetings between them. The article touches on this, but I completely disagree with the author. So much of business is based on collaboration that having to wait for a peer who is doing work for another company now costs the first company for every person that is waiting on them. Maybe 2% of my work can be done without a single other co-worker being involved in some way. During regular business hours the expectation is that you are being paid to work and collaborate with your co-workers on a regular basis outside of normal PTO etc.