[gdfgjhs]

I am so confused with comments in this threads. Since when did tech employees became so submissive and scared? As far as I know, having 2 jobs is not illegal, not unethical.

Many, sadly, low income families have to work two or more jobs. We in tech make enough but what if you are bored and need more challenges.

My current second job is family but I know multiple single engineers (or in one case, with grown up kids) with 2 jobs. They work 16+ hours each day but with pandemic there was nothing else to do, so might as well do more work. At least, one guy is pretty open about it with both of his employers. Others hide it but they get the work done.

Also you can list 2 jobs on your resume. When I started my career, I didn't had very high paying tech job, I did freelance work on the side and listed on my resume. Never been problem.

Your company doesn't own you.

[filoleg]

Having 2 jobs isn't inherently illegal. But pretty much every single full-time employment contract for an SWE that I've seen, stipulated that I am not allowed to have any other full-time job for the period of my employment.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

To add an opposing anecdote, after 30 years in the biz I've never seen this. Not once.

[baud147258]

In both of the contracts I had signed so far, there was an exclusivity clause saying that I would only work (as a software engineer) for the company I was signing with.

[nsonha]

Legal or not, if you tell your manager that you are also working for another company half the time (unless you work odd hours), will they be OK? If so then good. If not then it's a matter of transparency and trust.

Also doesn't the contract has something about the number of hours? It may not be enforceable, but it's on paper.

[altdataseller]

Do you tell your employer you are looking for a new job?

[nsonha]

I do not tell my employer everything, that is a scenario to demonstrate that you doing a second job violates basic trust, or even the contract. That is different than you looking for a new job, which should always be at the back of any manager's mind.

[rosndo]

Who cares about this “basic trust”? Except the employer, obviously. Not exactly a balanced power dynamic there.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Don't care. As long as I can do the job they pay me to do, that should be their only concern.

[nsonha]

great, then go on social media and bad mouth your employer and see if HR bats an eye, they should be only concerned about your output right.

[gdfgjhs]

Yes, they should be.

It is not their concern what I do on social media. It is unfortunate that there is so much power imbalance that most employees are afraid to criticize their employers in public.

[als0]

It is real

[Apocryphon]

Maybe in only some states?

[filoleg]

Why would it vary by state, if it isn't a legal requirement in any of them.

It is purely on the employer's end, and I cannot find a legal restriction against it in any state. So it would only vary by employer.

[BizarroLand]

For SWE or other programming/code related positions I can see that making sense. You may only write 30 minutes of code in a day but the other 7.5 hours is spent either cogitating over the problem and creating the environment that allows you to solve the problem or participating in your team to make sure everyone is on the same page.

You split that 8 hours between 2 companies and unless you are significantly under-employed at both jobs (2X in both locations or more) you're not going to be able to give your all.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

That's the problem, isn't it? You don't have to give it your all. You have to give it your enough.

[winterplace]

Or you spend 7.5 hours x2 on creating good environments that can be used in both companies and so each company gets 7.5 hours of free benefit

[rosndo]

> you're not going to be able to give your all.

Why would you want to? You’re only working for money.

[ttyp3]

There's a lot of crab mentality in tech.

[b20000]

agreed

[saagarjha]

Working a side job is typically not allowed for most full-time employees, at least not without permission.

[gdfgjhs]

My current Fortune 500 tech company's contract explicitly said that if I moonlight, I cannot work for their competitors. And if I get a second job or contract work, I should discuss it with my manager or HR. It does't say anywhere that I cannot have second job at all.

I know 2 SWE in the company who actually discussed this with their managers and got okay in writing for their consulting businesses.

EDIT: Really curious if SWE actually read their contracts or they just assume that they are not allowed. I don't remember my contracts from earlier jobs. It would be interesting if we can have a site like levels.fyi for contracts.

[SauciestGNU]

I moonlighted for a while, and I checked my primary job's employment agreement first. All it said is that I can't be simultaneously engaged by competitors. No requirement to inform my manager or the company. Lots of people in my company have side businesses (some rebuild and sell laboratory instrumentation, others contract, etc).

I was surprised when I discovered the permissive nature of my company, but I've never seen it be a problem for anybody.

[ghaff]

There's probably something in the business rules about conflict of interest and how strictly that's defined/interpreted with respect to side gigs will probably depend on the employer. I doubt many explicitly say you can't have a second full-time job similar to what you do here because, well, that's obvious isn't it?

At the same time, so long as you get your work done, most companies aren't going to object to your (mostly) nights and weekends hobby business or getting a degree (assuming you've worked out the details with your management).

[thfuran]

That's how mine is as well.

[mech422]

Ditto - mines the same. Basically, no working for competitors.

[nscalf]

Does that stipulation that they write into the contract have teeth though? A lot of companies put a lot of stuff into contracts, it doesn't make it enforcable.

[gregjor]

The contract may not have teeth, the employer doesn’t own 24 hours of an employee’s time and has no legal basis to dictate what an employee does outside of the workplace.

However, in the US “at-will” employment is the norm, which means either party can terminate the employment at any time for any reason, or no reason. If the employer finds out an employee is moonlighting or freelancing in their spare time they can simply fire the person, and cite violation of policy or give almost any reason that isn’t illegal. The contract would only matter if the case got into court, and that’s unlikely to happen since the employee has no right to a job in the first place.

[stuntkite]

I have a friend who took two in office sysadmin jobs and automated them enough that he never had to come in and was able to basically do nothing except work on cars and play video games and hang out for like 5 years. I'm still proud of him to this day.

[winterplace]

IT department or just a one person sysadmin role.

[stuntkite]

They were both online companies with fairly small teams. He was the sole IT administrator managing the networking on bare metal infra. He did a good job and would respond to emails, calls, or texts, but essentially when he was let go from both organizations (nearly at the same time) it was because they realized they had long ago outgrown the need for a classic sysadmin and mostly their services were starting to migrate to AWS as that was kind of the new thing happening.

[maximus-decimus]

You don't see the problem in working 16+ hours a day considering the average person needs 8 hours of sleep and needs to ingest food?

[schwartzworld]

I don't believe there are many devs in the us working a full 8 hour day.

I have children and they take up as much or more bandwidth than a second job would. I totally believe someone could work 2 dev jobs at once.

[maximus-decimus]

You could. You just couldn't while having a healthy amount of sleep or a life beside work. And unless the person is on drugs, I just don't believe they are actually productive 16 hours a day.

[mstipetic]

Most software engineers don’t work fully productive 8 hours a day. In my experience I’d say maybe 2-4

[rosndo]

You don’t need to be productive for 8 hours a day in order to collect a paycheck. Often not for even a single hour.

[s1artibartfast]

No problem IMHO if they are a consenting adult. I wouldn't object any more than if someone wanted to run an ultramarathon or raise 5 kids.

Not for me, but your desires may different

[b20000]

I would not say that "we in tech make enough". with the crazy high cost of housing, health care, education, and more, it's no longer clear that people in tech make enough. people in the baby boomer generation could say that with much more confidence than our generation can.

[adamsmith143]

Imagine someone making over 200K complaining about CoL when the median income in the US is 36K... Astonishing lack of self awareness

[b20000]

if you want to experience lack of self awareness, go talk to some lawyers charging $800/hr

[adamsmith143]

If the client is a Corporation that might be totally appropriate. If that lawyer then goes on to say how expensive his Latte has gotten then you might have an argument.

[b20000]

do you think that lawyers make 200k per year?

[adamsmith143]

The vast majority make less than that. At large law firms 1st year law school grads routinely make that. A lawyer billing 800/hr might bill 2000 hours in a year for over 1M per year. Not sure you have a point?