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Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

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Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#61

Contractors/consultants do it all the time - in fact it's frowned upon, including by US government/IRS, if you don't do work for multiple clients, including in parallel. What's the surprise?

I think OP is referring exclusively to people working 2 or more salaried full time positions.

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#62

Great idea, but do remote employees get paid the same? Say 100k+ for an SF based company?

My experience is that yes, there are companies paying 100k+ for remotes. I think they're just happy to get someone qualified for low six figures, whereas in SF they would probably pay twice that amount (I'm a foreign contractor, so they don't pay for any benefits, health care, social security etc.).

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#63
post #60

I had a DBA, very senior, who was working for me on contract while maintaining a full time job at another Silicon Valley company. I was paying him $50K/Year to ensure that none of our Oracle Systems ever had an issue, and in the event of a problem, he would fix it. What I liked about this arrangement is that he was highly incentivized to ensure that he would have to do the least amount of work, so his deployments wer…

Was the other company aware of this arrangement too? Just curious.

> I'm pretty sure his other manager knew that he was working two jobs

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think I said it's evil, just wrong. Obviously it's how the market works, and I've taken advantage of this myself. Just saying that, aside from "well, we can get away with it", it's not that defensible.

> Don't think I said it's evil, just wrong. OK. But I'm saying it's not wrong either. It is exactly how our economy works. Other large scale economic systems have not been successful. We know no better way of arranging things. If companies didn't compete, the economy would not be functional and we wouldn't be able to have nice things.

I sincerely doubt you have enough data to state that paying same-skilled remote employees somehow makes the economy non-functional.

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#65
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't think I said it's evil, just wrong. OK. But I'm saying it's not wrong either. It is exactly how our economy works. Other large scale economic systems have not been successful. We know no better way of arranging things. If companies didn't compete, the economy would not be functional and we wouldn't be able to have nice things.

I sincerely doubt you have enough data to state that paying same-skilled remote employees somehow makes the economy non-functional.

I don't need data. My argument isn't based on a such a claim.

Our entire economy relies on free actors being able to buy goods and services from their choice of supplier, based on price, quality, or most other factors.

It's clear that this is required for our economy to function. Therefore it can never be "wrong" for some entity to do this unless you can identify some other unfair distortion in a particular case, but you haven't.

An employer not offering more in a particular region is just exercising this ability to choose, the general form of which we must grant to have a functioning economy.

If you want to argue that it's wrong, then the onus is on you to explain why the general case of free market competition should not apply in this case. But you haven't.

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#66

Double dipping is the wrong phrase here. Having two jobs or two gigs is not double dipping. Double dipping is typically a form of cheating by getting paid 2x for 1x amount of work. Say I was being paid to create a website for two clients and it took me 100 hours to finish it. Then I used the same codebase for another client, spent 5 hours modifying it, and then delivered it to them billing another 100 hours. That wou…

Even that's not double dipping. Depending on how your contract is structured, it might be the smart thing to do.

If I tell you that I'll produce a certain product for $15,000 and you're OK with that, does it really matter in the end if it took me 5 hours or 150? Either way, you pay the same amount.

Now, if you have a contract that specified time & materials and I pad the hours, then I can agree we could have a problem.

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#67

I had a DBA, very senior, who was working for me on contract while maintaining a full time job at another Silicon Valley company. I was paying him $50K/Year to ensure that none of our Oracle Systems ever had an issue, and in the event of a problem, he would fix it. What I liked about this arrangement is that he was highly incentivized to ensure that he would have to do the least amount of work, so his deployments wer…

What happened if you​ did have an issue? Did you mandate service credits into the contract?

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#68
Does it matter? In software engineering you should be judged by the quantity and quality of the code, nothing in those metrics disqualifies double-dipping. If anything contracting on the side gives employees exposure to tech stacks and processes outside their normal day to day.

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#69
post #40

Since when is working two jobs a bad thing? Plenty of people work two or three jobs to make ends meet. If you can make both work, and you aren't violating any contracts or NDAs, I don't see why you should feel bad about that.

It is ok when you don't lie in the process. It is not ok when you pretend to work full time while actually working only equivalent of part time in each workplace (does not matter all that much whether drop in productivity is due to burnout or cheating on time spent by working). The productivity of programmers is often hard to measure, if you don't take advantage of it then it is fine. There are jobs that dont require…

> Workaday without overtime (and working that much is too little I was told by people here) is 8 hours. Assuming you work it twice plus take 2 hours a day for shopping, food and shower, you have only 6 hours sleep remaining. With such persistent sleep deprivation, you wont be able to produce all that much for each employer - your productivity will go down.

If you can only work 5 days a week, and need to put in 40 hours per week per job, then yeah, sleep is going to be a problem. If one or both of the jobs are such that you can do less than 8 hours some weekdays and make it up with some weekend work then two full time jobs should be possible without sleep problems.

168 hours per week - 40 hours per job x 2 jobs - 8 hours sleep per day x 7 days - 2 hours for shopping/food/shower per day x 7 days = 18 hours. You could almost take on a third half time job!

Re: Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

#70
I wonder if there is anyone who is working remote has outsourced themselves? Get a remote job that pays quite a bit more than you need to live comfortably in your area, then hire a remote worker from India to do the work for you.
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