These Remote Tech Workers Secretly Juggle Multiple Jobs

He rents an office in Chicago and works from it at 9 am every day. He doesn't have breakfast and works until 2 pm when he eats. That is where the differences with most other tech workers end. There are four full-time jobs in secret for enterprise startup. His yearly salary is $670,000.

When he realized he was completing tasks at a faster pace than his colleagues, he started juggling jobs. The 35-year-old had a lot of free time. With rising inflation and annual raises not matching that, I decided to take a second job. We have three kids and we want to buy a house.

He started J2 and J3 just over a year ago and took on J4 at the start of the summer. He would like to keep them all for the next year since he now has a dedicated space for his electronics.

"One of the points of stress is the sheer amount of meetings, many of which could be written up or dealt with in an asynchronous Slack," says Abel, who asked that we not use his real name so as to protect. If there are two meetings in his diary, he wears headphones. He claims to be able to process both streams of information at the same time. If his name is mentioned, he will listen. There are excuses for a bad connection. A three-meeting overlap can get crazy.

The tech downturn and mass layoffs aren't going to affect him. He sends out applications for new jobs on a monthly basis. I can jump into another role if things go wrong, but I am at my limit right now.

In the solitude of their home offices, employees are more flexible in their work. They don't have to excuse themselves from in-person engagements, they can fit in virtual meets and interviews with other companies, and some of them are able to accept and juggle multiple roles. Faced with stagnant wages and increased living costs, the practice of having more than one form of employment has risen over the past decade in the US, and the unemployment rate is at a 50 year low.

According to the US Bureau of Statistics, in April 2020, 4% of American workers had a second job, but by August 2022. There are no figures on how many remote workers hold down more than one full-time job without notifying their employers.