absolutely nothing wrong with working more than one job if you can get away with it. It's not a lifestyle I want to live myself, but more power to anyone who wants or needs to in order to make their livings.
When you are salaried, you are rewarded based on your deliverables. If you can deliver two jobs of output to satisfactory results, then who cares.
Some employers may require the full 38 hours, but let’s not forget the whole point of salary is for flexibility on behalf of the employee AND the employer. The employer may ask you to work a bit of overtime, but likewise it shouldn’t be expected that the employer “buys” you as a salaried employee. You get benefits like leave and the employer gets benefits such as you turning up every day. They pay you, you deliver results, if you don’t perform you get fired.
This is a different argument for contractors who do get paid by the hour so that starts to descend into some very ethical grey areas. Those grey areas mostly exist though because a lot of employees treat contractors like salaried employees (I.e. expectations are the same but no benefits).
I could never do it, but there isn’t really anything REALLY wrong with it.
>When you are salaried, you are rewarded based on your deliverables. If you can deliver two jobs of output to satisfactory results, then who cares.
What you said is true, but only on a practical level. On a theoretical/legal level, it's certainly not true because (most?) salaried position contracts contain clauses that prevent you from holding another job[1][2].
In principle it could be okay if everyone agrees. There may or may not be something wrong with it, depending on what they agreed to and if they’re lying to anyone about what they’re doing.
I have yet to be in a performance cycle that ever whipped out my timesheets. It has always focused on the things I have achieved, and that has resulted in a pay increase/bonus. Maybe timesheets are whipped out in a performance cycle but I think that would be an indicator you're about to hit a PIP cycle.
The only time people care about a person's timesheet is usually when they're failing to meet standard. There are some jobs, say like, manufacturing where you have to stay on a line BUT that's still not paying you for your time, you need to be on the line to meet your performance obligations as an employee. It just so happens that the time spent on the line adds up to the time you're expected to be there as an employee.
Now, that's not to say that performance expectations aren't influenced by the time a manager can squeeze out of someone. BUT, if you consistently can exceed expectations you can reduce your output to meet expectations and do something else (another job, working on open source, playing games, walking your dog, etc).
The opposite argument of course is that when you aren't meeting your expectations you are expected to work extra hours (and not get paid more). If a company has "extra" work outside of the normal expectation, they will a pay overtime or offer TOIL.
There are plenty of jobs where work is ticket based and so long as you're maintaining your work queue and communicating well, it doesn't matter.
The problem is that many creative jobs like software engineering (and yes, even the scutwork of software is still a creative endeavor) require more brain power on context than you can comfortably do as a single person.
And I say this as a SRE Consultant who explicitly has built my business on having multiple jobs. I have to reject work because it would overflow my ability to juggle and the fairly limited amount of things I currently know really well.