@spidey07

My current gig, HQ is in Toronto, and the broadband situation up in "America's funny metric hat" is absolutely shit-tier.

Their entire office and server rack (aka the data... uh, closet) sips from a RG-60 coax Cable modem that struggles to give them 200 mbit/sec. (And if someone understands how coax works... you "share"... a lot with your neighbors who also use it...) And the funky Canuk quasi-socialist bullshit telecom laws mean they can't even get a second independent provider for redundancy. So when Rogers goes down, the entire company is dead in the water.

Meanwhile, here in the only nation to put humans on the moon, ho-hum burbs of Milwaukee, I've got 5 gbit/sec fiber. And I can do & move stuff faster than people literally in the office on the local 100 gbit Ethernet LAN.

AND during the HUGE Roger's Outages of 2021 & 2022 I was able to keep servicing customers. Because uh... during the nights, kinda thinking this might happen, I copied a few TB of the critical code base to the home NAS, which is a Rube Goldberg contraption of old drives from long dead PC's amd laptops.

While everyone in Canada, both office & WFH were struggling to tether through their phones on 3 & 4G. And there wasn't shit they could do when it "worked."

I can understand both @Tallahasseezz and @burnprocess positions here.

One is a rather common sense moral opinion, as to what constitutes unethical behavior, or a "scam." The other correctly recognizes that multiple WFH jobs is categorically not illegal, and points out if imployers "add hats" to workers without additional compensation on a strategy of "doing more with less," That's somehow acceptable and generally flies under the radar. Or, if the issue is forced, the basic response in an "at will" job environment is a somewhat dismissive: "Go quit and find something else then." And moral opinions on employers doing that just never seem to carry as much weight.

That's all assuming there's no work or employment contract involved, of course. And even then, it is not a criminal matter, merely one of civil contract law. Although, I must note that when the employer is in abeyance, the legal resource and cost burden advantage is generally heavily tipped in the employers favor, should they be stubborn.

ProTip: If you should be trying to pull the "multiple WFH jobs" ploy, the FIRST STEP is to FREEZE your "EQUIFAX The Work Number" credit reporting account.

It's far from complete, as not all payrolls auto-report to them, and they're not the only such system out there. But they're the biggest, and all the large payroll processors, ADP, Paychex, Intuit, etc. all dump into Equifax TWN.

Ostensibly, it's pay verification for getting credit cards, or other consumer loans, etc. But it's becoming a resource for finding out if people are working multiple WFH jobs. It could also be used against you in salary negotiations too.


However, Equifax TWN is still a "credit reporting service" and your rights are the same, so you can freeze it. And no one can query the info without your permission.

This is NOT some "one & done" panacea. An employer  can potentially ask why your Equifax TWN is frozen, you'll naturally say: "Because I had a fraud issue..." or maybe: "Dunno, maybe LufeLock did that?"

Then, the employer will say, "Okay, makes sense, please get us a one-time inquiry PIN from Equifax TWN..."

Now you're fooked, or have to hope you can stall them, play dumb, "Sorry, trying to log into their site and figure that out.." and hope they forget, or the matter otherwise drops.

And of course, there's a bunch more to know about. Scrubbing your LinkedIn, requesting a ZoomInfo opt-out. Checking on what First Advantage, ADP Screening & Selection Services, Hire Right, & Sterling have on your background check reports... just for starters.

And depending on the service, you cannot "freeze" them like you can the credit bureaus. However, employment verification & background checks are absolutely a minimum effort/maximum profit endeavor, and freezing or cleaning up where you can and will affect a great deal of stuff downstream.

Of course, that's just payroll & background check info. Someone trying the "overemployed" gambit obviously needs to understand everything else going on, schedules, meetings, webcams, phone numbers/VOIP, VPN, broadband, how they keep everything separated & compatmentalized. And there's obviously the issue of actually accomplishing the work.

I find the surface area of all of this fascinating.

However, the effort involved in doing it WELL, seems to me that its almost more like having three jobs. Job #1, Job #2, and Job #3 is the effort of keeping all that straight.

And it seems better suited to things like coding or software development etc. where there's potentially perception gaps on the part of management as to how long it takes, and when it's finished. Perhaps they're "management" but devoid of critical technical knowledge to make such judgments.



Or, it could be a business model failure. The employer is arguably shooting themselves in the foot. If an employer's compensation is relatively flat across a job title, but they lucked into a 95th percentile employee that's potentially 2X more productive than everyone else (subject to QA/QC of course...) and their systems & process either utterly fails to recognize this individual at all, or their "reward" is simply 2X work for 1X pay...

Whether it's unethical or not, businesses need to consider if they've failed in any way, and if they're doing anything to incentivize things like people attempting to double up on WFH jobs, or disincentivizing . That can be tracking, metrics, performance, deliverables, or compensation.

Being all "free market" and "at will" over employment & productivity matters... until possibly the shoe is on the other foot is rather hypocritical at best, detestable slimeball at worst.

Employer/Employee loyalty is a two-way street. Or, if one wants to be super hard-nose and transactional about it, the term in contract & civil law is "consideration."

My ultimate take is, it's not illegal. And assuming it's an uncontracted at-will employment situation, and the work product is otherwise acceptable, as is meeting attendance, or other deliverables, it seems difficult to articulate actual "harm." But, with at-will, the employer is 100% free to terminate. So... (shrug?)

I'm sure Tallahasseezz feels strongly that the double-jobbers always perform poorly. Possibly true, or it's just the ones they catch, and there's some selection bias going on. They can push RTO, and see how it goes. Or they can try other strategies.

As they say: "It's just business." Sometimes you're the bug, sometimes you're the windshield.

My emolyment area? No way in hell would I try it personally. Travel to different sites for physical process implementation, and variable workload and projects, Critical Hypercare support windows, and unscheduled emergent issues... that all makes it impossible from a pragmatic standpoint before I even need to consider it ethically.