Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?

This is insane, there is a Reddit, of course there is, of almost 500K people, https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ , who discuss all of the strategies to do this.

Just imagine being one of the people who legit joins a startup, is passionate, working long hours, earning your vest, to have your coworker pretending to be working.

There are plenty of people employed at a single job who only pretend to work. That's life.

Every manager and employer should skim through that subreddit. When I stumbled onto it I felt like Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense, where the truth was revealed and every flashback moment suddenly made sense and lined up. Until then, things just felt “off” but it was hard to put a finger on what was actually going on.

I guess impromptu Slack huddles work for quickly finding this out in the first weeks...

Anecdotally I'd argue that it's not just "plenty", but the majority of people who only work one single job barely and/or pretend to work. I regularly see Principal+ engineers, VPs and Directors waddling around looking important or just staring at their monitors with a glazed over look.

Most corporations don't need nearly as many employees as they actually have, so if you can deliver exceptional results in 20 hours, why not dedicate the remaining 20 hours to another corp, and double your comp? Everyone wins.

HackerNews dudes claiming they do a true minimum 40 hours per week, every week, forever, of heads-down hard-work are deluding themselves. I really don't understand the overemployment hatred this forum has. There are plenty of folks who really do solid work at 2+ jobs, not half-assing and politicking.

Disclaimer: I am not OE.

The VPs, heads of, and C levels of most of the companies I have worked for were also pretending to be working. They knew the company wasn’t profitable, they gave a couple of advices here and there, and then left the company. Big pay checks. Now they are doing the same all over again in other companies.

Tired of considering this “normal” and nobody talking about it. But when one simple engineer does it, well, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, yada yada.

Taking current state of Reddit, with all the rage-bait and other sorts of creative writing, I wonder how much of that is legit content.

This is why there’s a push to the four day workweek. People get just as much done, they just use their time more efficiently.

but these people attend too many meetings; the OE ones miss everything.

Get real. There's a difference between a self-proclaimed fraudster and an ineffectual executive. In intention, if not in effect.

When people with no integrity or ethics defraud their employers, "it's life"?

In as much as there is a difference between a performing magician and one who shows you how a trick is done maybe

How is it an ethical issue? If you don’t have enough in front of you and the pressure isn’t on to be superman, why take the slackoff job your employer is incentivizing for you? Rational take is to do this. See yourself as a consultancy sees itself. If the barriers towards forming your own LLC to represent your own labor in this way weren’t so high this wouldn’t even have to happen; we’d all be contracting projects because that actually makes sense over salary or even hourly. That is even how your own boss sees you without this arrangement: a sort of kept contractor to be let go of should restructuring happen after a project ends.

Yes. It's the same with wage theft.

Wage theft vastly outstrips other forms of theft[0] and it's considered a complete non priority by law enforcement, politicians, and the media.

These kinds of things just aren't a priority for one reason for another. Let's brainstorm some solutions to wage theft and overemployment.

I suggest a synergistic approach -- fix wage theft and it'll have a knock-on effective with things like overemployment or people pretending to work a single job.

What do you think?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft#/media/File:Wage_th...

This makes no sense. The whole thing is idiotic. Seems to be a combination of LARP and some people trying to push a narrative.

If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.

> to have your coworker pretending to be working.

I don't think this is uncommon.

Only when all jobs do this at the same time.

That makes you the sucker.

We pretend to work, they pretend to pay.

How many of those are bots? How many are teenagers? How many are playing pretend? 90% would be a conservative estimate.

>If you really can work multiple jobs, just go freelance. Offer some consulting or whatever. You will earn more and have less stress than juggling multiple jobs.

You won't earn more. I've considered that at one point and most adverts on freelance sites like Upwork are written by people who are either clueless or downright insane. These people usually want you to create a completely new system from scratch using technologies of their choosing and the offers are like $8-$15 per hour or $800 for work that is supposed to take months to complete. Why would anyone want to agree to do that when apparently getting steady paychecks from multiple companies is an option?

For trusting people to fulfil their employment contract?

What is the alternative, micromanage and monitor everyone? I am in the camp I want to trust people, especially highly skilled and highly paid employees.

On upwork you are competing with people from third world countries who can offer vastly lower prices.

Also the quality of the work is bottom of the barrel.

What you want to do is look for small to mid sized companies in your area and solve problems for them. You gonna build up your network and reputation.

There is a good reason many people don't go freelance, it is not for everyone. You need some really good social and business skills and it can be stressful. But the money is sure there.

> one of the people who legit joins a startup, is passionate, working long hours, earning your vest, to have your coworker pretending to be working.

Why.

I have worked in VC-backed startups for over a decade. The individual employee isn't going to change the direction of the company regardless of how hard they work.

The people who make or break the startup are the founders. Even the middle managers do not matter. If the founders / top level leaders have no idea what they are doing and do not want to make money, nothing a single engineer does even matters.

The best thing an engineer can do in that scenario is give advice and do work as prescribed. Trying to save the founders from themselves is a recipe for going crazy and burning out.

There are other platforms that are not public and require vetting.

Also, most of my contracts have come through referral. It's absolutely possible to survive freelancing as a software engineer.

So it's no different than landing a regular job if you have no network.