Two Jobs, No Shame
Photo by Matteo Di Iorio @shot_by_te on Unsplash
“Hey, can you jump on a quick call?”
Pause.
Silence.
“Ah, they must be in deep focus”
You might find yourself making excuses like this for other people. Surely they are working for the team, aren’t they?
Our Codebase, or Someone Else’s?
You start to wonder about your colleagues. Are they focused on our codebase, or are they pounding out the code for someone else?
Welcome to the new era of remote work, where the freedom to choose your schedule has also become the freedom to choose your employer…or employers.
Because working from home has changed everything. It started as a productivity miracle. But lately, it’s been feeling more like a ghost town. Or more accurately, a haunted house where the ghosts still draw a paycheck and claim they’re optimizing our codebase.
My Experience
I — Sleepy
At one past job, I had a colleague. Let’s call him “Sleepy.” He had a mysterious ability to miss every standup without fail, regularly “forget” meetings, and push the bare minimum of code just before the sprint review. Turns out, he wasn’t just sleepy. He was also…overemployed.
And the kicker? I kind of respected him for it.
Sure, during working hours he was also drawing a second salary mentoring other engineers. If I remember correctly he kind of whispered into his microphone so management didn’t hear, ignored Slack and pretty much went rogue each weekday afternoon. It was almost elegant, like a performance art piece about modern capitalism.
II — Two jobs
After the whole of engineering got laid off, none of the team were too interested in working.
I bonded like never before with some of my colleagues. So much so that one of them confided in me that they had two jobs.
Sure, they’d taken the second one after being told they might get laid off. The thing that surprised me was that they told me, and they were getting away with it. One job remote, the other required two days a week in the office — and they pulled it off.
They managed this by showing zero motivation or interest in their main job, and they got away with it.
Neat?
Not really. We’ve created a system where disengagement is disguised as flexibility. If you’re thinking, “My team isn’t like this,” then congratulations — you’re either naive or you are the person working two jobs.
The worst part
Managers assume silence is golden, when in fact it’s a red flag. We don’t ask what people are working on anymore — we just wait until the Jira ticket magically disappears from “In Progress.”
Conclusion
In the end, everyone loses. The primary job gets a zombie employee. The side job gets a flaky freelancer. The developer is stressed, underperforming in both, and no one’s really accountable for anything.
Unless, of course, you’re “Sleepy.” He seemed pretty chill and happy.