James' World 2

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Early in the pandemic, Bryan Roque lost his job as a software engineer at Amazon. Part of him was relieved. He’d been working himself to the bone for months on end, and he felt completely burned out. But the timing was tough: The company was dumping him into the worst job market since the Great Depression.

Roque called his parents to give them the bad news, then packed up his apartment and moved back in with them. He eventually found a new job, a position at IBM that was fully remote, but an underlying anxiety stayed with him. “It just felt like I had no control,” he told me. “I didn’t like that I was under the whims of a company that gets to decide whether I’m employed or not.”

So less than a year into the job at IBM, when a recruiter from Meta came calling, Roque had a thought. The normal thing would be to quit his old job and accept the new position, which was also fully remote. But what if he kept his old job, and secretly took on the new one, too? All he had to do was two-time IBM, and he could double his income as well as his job security.

As he mulled the idea, he discovered that he wasn’t alone. There’s a whole community of professionals online who trade tips about juggling jobs on the sly. They describe themselves as “overemployed” — and remarkably, they seem to be getting away with it. Helping them evade detection is a guy who goes by the pseudonym Isaac, who started the blog Overemployed in 2021 to share his secrets as the OG overemployed worker. Today there are some 300,000 members of the community on Discord and Reddit who celebrate one another’s successes, commiserate on their failures, and swap secrets for fooling their bosses.

So Roque set out to join them. He clinched an offer from Meta, landed another from Tinder, and after negotiating the two against each other for more pay, he accepted both jobs — in addition to keeping his gig at IBM. Fifteen months earlier, he’d been unemployed. Now he was suddenly employed three times over — and on track to earn a combined salary of more than $820,000 a year.

Holding down multiple jobs has long been a backbreaking way for low-wage workers to get by. But since the pandemic, the phenomenon has been on the rise among professionals like Roque, who have seized on the privacy provided by remote work to secretly take on two or more jobs — multiplying their paychecks without working much more than a standard 40-hour workweek. The move is not only culturally taboo, but it’s also a fireable offense — one that could expose the cheaters to a lawsuit if they’re caught. To learn their methods and motivations, I spent several weeks hanging out among the overemployed online. What, I wondered, does this group of W-2 renegades have to tell us about the nature of work — and of loyalty — in the age of remote employment?

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Remote workers are “double dipping” — taking two or more full-time jobs at the same time — without their bosses knowing. Tyler Le/Insider

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