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.