[throwawaywork14]

The easiest way to make a lot more money…

Get a job making 120-180 but 4 days a week. It is possible to do this. Make sure it is not an exciting company, but rather a corporate, slow moving one.

Now you can pick up a contract making 100+ per hour. 15-20 hours a week.

Do 4 hours of the main job. Do 4 hours of the freelance work.

You’ll easily be making 250k.

Another thing to note, as a developer you can solve a problem in 1 hour that may take others 4,5, or 10. At your full time job, schedule your work and spread out when you complete tasks.

I’ve found this is a solid way to make a lot of money 200-300k, at non FAANG, and I have been able to fit it all into 4 days every week. I also work less than 40 hours on average. I’m not affiliated with it, but there is a site called overemployed with more tips on doing this.

The key is getting a really slow, easy remote job first. This is easy to manage if you’re a good senior dev

[PragmaticPulp]

> The easiest way to make a lot more money…

Finding two separate jobs that each pay median developer salaries while requiring only half-time input, working them concurrently, and then constantly finding new contract jobs that fit your criteria is not what I’d call “easy”

FWIW, I’ve managed remote teams for a long time. It’s not hard to spot the people who are playing games like this to put in half-time.

[throwawaywork14]

Not every place is a startup first off, there’s many companies that hire separate frontend, backend, every little thing is a separate team. I’ve found these places to be the easiest workplace to get work done in less time.

Finding the second, part time contract is incredibly easy right now.

There’s 2-3 recruiters per day that email all of us on linked in. All you have to do is say “I’m only open to part time contracts at this time” and every other day you’ll have a request to interview and they don’t mind a part time commitment.

People make this seem so much harder than it is. It’s just networking well, and becoming an expert at your chosen language / field. Then you can easily produce enough output to keep everyone happy.

[wpietri]

It might not be hard for you to spot those people. But as best I can tell, the median software developer has a not-very-good manager. So I suspect quite a lot of people could get away with some sandbagging.

That's a shame, as that's exactly the fear not-very-good managers have of remote work. I expect we'll see a reaction toward proctological monitoring of remote workers, even professional software developers.

[snapcore]

The person probably is doing more work than they claim.

Is it that easy to spot people? I always felt like the baseline for work at my jobs was 2-3 hours a day of productivity + 5 hours of screwing around for most people.

There were always the outliers who seemed 2X-3X productive. Anyway, you would be still doing double the work of the lazy people.

[kortilla]

> It’s not hard to spot the people who are playing games like this to put in half-time.

Only if they suck.

[throwawaywork14]

Exactly, if they’re doing a good job, how will you know.

You are biased because you’ve found people out, you don’t know how many others are doing extra work on the side, that you don’t ever catch.

[gorbachev]

Does it matter, if they don't suck?

[sbilstein]

yea tbh working hard and iterating on skillset to climb the promotion ladder sounds/was much easier for me.

[throwawaywork14]

I am able to fit all my work into 4 days and make 275~. I think that is tough to have in a single company. Unless you are FAANG and even then, I doubt you’d be at 4 days. I’m curious how your hard work was able to get you such substantial raises?

[randomopining]

What’s your strategy if the 2nd job is more time-consuming than you hoped for? Quit within a month?

Or do you only go for part-time contracted stuff, so you can prioritize your original job and then fill in the gaps with paid productivity at the part time gig?

[throwawaywork14]

I would make sure the contract work is a skill area you are very comfortable with. Since it is only a contract, I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to leaving that quickly. But I would prefer to stay for 3-6 months at least.

I originally was going to try to do the full overemployed suggestion of two full time jobs but it’s much harder.

If you can find two jobs that have zero meetings. Go for it. With one being contract and part time, it’s much easier to set time boxes for things and ensure you are not stressed trying to join overlapping meetings.

[randomopining]

Yeah the thing is, if your current job has random meetings that pop up from time to time or if they change the recurring time of your scrum or something…. And it overlaps with the 2nd jobs scrum, then you’re pretty much screwed.