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If you’ve grown suspicious of your coworker’s away status on Teams or their refusal to turn their camera on during meetings, there’s a chance they might be trying to earn two salaries at once—and fit it all into a normal workweek.
The practice went viral on social media last month when a single software engineer was found to be working at multiple Silicon Valley startups at once, prompting other companies to check whether they had fallen victim to similar deceitfulness.
However, holding down more than one gig at a time—sometimes even up to five—may be bigger than some companies expect. After all, the continued prevalence of remote work has made it more challenging for employers to know exactly what their workers are up to.
“If you’ve worked in corporate America, it is a lot of fluff and not a lot of substance,” said one worker who spoke anonymously with Fortune. (Fortune is withholding names in this story to protect the sources’ identities, but they shared documents with us verifying their employment.) This person currently works three gigs, making about $725,000 altogether.
At one point, they were balancing five roles total, something they said has been made possible by AI productivity enhancement, with new tools making it easier than ever to send emails, compile meeting notes, and draft deliverables—and get it all done under relatively normal work hours.
“At this point it kind of became a game to me, how many jobs can I do at once and stay sane?” they recalled.
Maxing out on jobs certainly paid off. While juggling five at once, this person estimated bringing in more than $1 million a year.
“I have zero loyalty to a corporation,” they added.
No regrets about taking work from others
Fortune spoke to a second worker who currently holds two jobs in the health care technology industry. And despite being a full-time worker making a combined amount of nearly $250,000, they are able to get all the work completed within 40 hours. They don’t have concerns over taking jobs away from those struggling in today’s rocky job market.
“They’re hiring me for my knowledge and my expertise, not for hours worked,” they told Fortune.
And while holding more than one job may raise eyebrows next time you have to put your work history on a résumé, they said they will just write the best full-time role they had at a current period to avoid having to answer for holding two jobs at once. However, the demand for talent in the health care tech industry has not made it much of an issue.
“I don’t go look for jobs; jobs come and look for me,” they said. “To be honest, I don’t remember the last time I went to apply for a job. And since 2017, I’ve had four different positions.”
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In fact, they said they got so many recruitment offers from firms trying to snatch up talent, the companies practically enabled overemployment behavior.
Holding more than one job might be legal, but some people, including Lewis Maleh, CEO of executive recruitment agency Bentley Lewis, don’t recommend people emulate the behavior.
“If someone is doing a full-time perm job and being paid accordingly, they should not be doing another full-time perm role unless the company is okay with it,” Maleh previously told Fortune. “I don’t think it’s ethical and will cost you down the road if you get found out. If you are doing a few part-time gigs, that’s of course a different story.”
A trend that might continue, but maybe not for long
Though both of the sources Fortune spoke with are fully remote employees, some users on the overemployment Reddit community have deemed it possible to secretly work at a second job while on site elsewhere. But by and large, working multiple full-time jobs has been enabled by the ability to work from home.
Despite calls for workers to return to the office from large Fortune 500 companies like JPMorgan Chase, remote work is still common. In fact, 33% of all workers worked from home in 2024, down just slightly from 35% in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s latest American Time Use Survey.
Remote work has stuck around far more than Jerry Jacobs, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, expected—but now bosses are slowly getting better at gauging workers’ productivity realities.
“The longer [remote work] lasts, the more I think people will get used to this as just being, you know, one way that people work,” Jacobs tells Fortune. “And I think the longer it lasts, the more you know, people are going to get good at managing it.”
And as a result, he doesn’t expect the trend of having multiple full-time jobs to carry on—but rather something people are experimenting with.
“It’s hard to convince people on your first job that you’re really doing your job, if you’re spending a lot of your time and energy on your second job,” he adds.
Similarly, Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor–human relations at Penn State University Abington, believes working more than one full-time job has the potential to grow, but it remains to be seen what that will actually look like.
“The question is, will the ethics, the productivity, the rules and regulations catch up with this?”
Written by Preston Fore for Fortune as “Workers are making over $1 million by secretly holding down multiple gigs—and they’re doing it all within the 40-hour workweek” and republished with permission.
