Not sure fraud is the right word, but the companies are expecting him to be working 40hrs a week and I'm guessing he is not doing that, which is at the very least dishonest. Perhaps he is actually working 80hrs a week in which case this is not fraud for sure.
But he mentions someone had 7 jobs and was working 20(??) hours a week which means he's basically scamming all those companies.
In my experience of highly paid tech jobs you're generally on salary and your work is managed by some clueless project manager with some notion of how many points you can accomplish in a week. If you find yourself in that situation, and you can do "40hrs" of work in 10 hours, getting a second or even third job of that nature seems like the quickest way to increase your earnings.
You will not convince me you can complete "40hrs" of work in "10 hours," doofus.
That's just 10 hours of more effective work. The other 30 hours you're lying to me and cheating me out of what I'm paying you.
Of course, you can get away with it, because you're clever, there's way too much money in tech jobs sometimes, and people are trusting - and you deliver! Even if the work product is only meh; it's better than what those other chumps were doing, right?!
Until you get caught; until someone in the recruiting community in your field/stack/industry catches wind of this post or that post; or you slip up and double book stakeholder meetings; or your background check shows multiple employers; or ....
I disagree that an employer is paying for 40 hours of my time: They're paying for output and results. I think rational employer would concede the same.
> Until you get caught
It's not as true today, but across 2020/2021 that couldn't possibly matter less. If this person was caught, then what? They fire them and give them 4-12 weeks severance? A year ago a good dev could have another job lined up before sundown.
Regardless of whether the managers are clueless or not, software companies operate on trust that the engineers' estimates of how long work will take, is based on the difficulty of the work with the natural assumption that you are devoting all your working hours to that work, and that there's not some hidden multiplier in your work estimates because you're splitting time with other jobs.
Unless you tell your team and your manager "I only work 1/x of my time at this job", it is deceit.
Typically most full time jobs say nothing about time commitments. In the old days, pre-remote work, presence was often valued more than productivity at many companies. Today, “presence” is about keeping your slack dot green. Could you pull off over-employment with a small startup? Probably not. But a couple of bloated corporations? Absolutely.
I've only worked at 2 different mid-sized US tech companies but they both had "we expect you to work full-time, full-time is defined as 38-40 hours of work". Even if they didn't explicitly have that, if you're working a full-time job then that means you're working at least 30 hours otherwise it's not a full-time job by definition alone.
I typically avoid anything other than small companies. But with the last mid-size company I worked for, there definitely was not enough “real work” to fill 40 hours, or even 30. I had to learn to pace myself. But I still had to be available, on-site, during that time. With remote work “over employment”, people are taking advantage of those inefficiencies.
My contract says absolutely nothing about the amount of time, times of arrival & departure, or anything else of the sort. It's a straightforward document that lays out compensation details with a job description attached, nothing more.
I'm not an OE nor do I seek to be, but once I get over the cognitive dissonance of the deeply embedded social construct of a 40=hour work week, I see no reason why a person who fulfills all of the requirements in a job description to the complete satisfaction of their employer in under 40 hours should owe them anything more. Will they be paid more for it? (I'll answer that, because I do it. the answer is nope nope nope)
Thought experiment: two people sit next to each other in identical jobs and identical work loads split between them, jobs spec'ed out as needing to complete X work each week. Emp_1 is mediocre are requires a full 40 hours to complete their X/2 tasked each week and earn their $100k. Fine. Emp_2 is smarter and faster and can solve the same problems and work more efficiently complete their X/2 tasks in only 20 hours for the same $100k. That's fair! they both did the same amount of work only in varying amounts of time and the workplace puts a price tag of $100k on that chunk of work.
But what's Emp_2 to do? 20 hours to fill. Massive stretched of boredom. Perhaps even the appearance that they're lazy because they often don't seem to be working. Sure, they could seek out other tasks, but why? That wasn't the labor contract. That wasn't the agreement. And for damn sure they can't go to their boss and say "Hey I've got 20 hours a week to fill let me do a second job for an extra $100k". Not. Going. To. Happen.
The worker-employer relationship is not a benevolent one No matter how well you get along with your boss the inherent nature of the relationship between an employee and a corporation is tinged with a hint of adversarial. The company isn't paying out of altruistic goodness of their hear motives. They're paying $X for @Y work. (This is all assuming a salaried and not hourly wage). If you take $X, you owe @Y, and nothing more. If you finish @Y in half the expected time then the explicit contract, if not the implicit social construct, does not say you own @Y*2 work. (Barring contract that may actually set performance benchmarks and additional compensation that employees are obligated to work towards, of course)
I see no reason at all why a person capable of doing a chunk of work predetermines to take 40 hours and pay a given sum of money should be obligated to fill time above & beyond that chunk of work when completed under time, and without additional compensation.
When I go above and beyond, I'm not doing it for the company, I'm doing it out of loyalty to co-workers and an excellent boss who makes my life easier in countless ways.
> My contract says absolutely nothing about the amount of time, times of arrival & departure, or anything else of the sort.
Where do you live? Is that common where you are? In my experience, my contracts in the UK have always had some kind of language about working hours.
E.g. my current contract has a clause saying "Your working hours will be from 9:00AM to 6:00PM from Monday to Friday (inclusive) with a one-hour break for lunch."
In practice, I work from home and no-one is checking my exact hours, but I'm pretty sure that most if not all of my previous tech jobs have had a clause like that in their contracts.
I work in the US. My contract reappointment letter-- essentially the mew contract in effect as of my reappointment after annual review-- is basically a paragraph that says "blah blah reappointed for next you subject to available funding blah blah" and I sign it and send to hr.
I just checked the employee handbook to be sure, and there's nothing about standard work hours/break etc. Probably because most workers are in a union where the union contract spells out some of those things in more detail. But I'm not in a union, I'm an exempt "unlimited" employee which essentially means I do not have a set amount of hours I'm obligated to work. I'm obligated to work the hours required to perform the work I receive. In theory the expectation is a person will mainly have about 40 hours of work to do, and in practice that sometimes there will be crunch time and you'll have to do a bit more and you can't complain or ask for overtime. With respect to OE, it seems perfectly reasonable that this be double edged, and should I accomplish all expected tasks in < 40 hours I'm no more obligate to work longer than my employer is obligated to pay me more when I exceed 40 hours.
In all honesty though, my work does roughly take 40 hours to complete, my job there's always more to be done that time allows and my boss & I work together to prioritize without any expectation that I regularly go over 40 unless something either 1) goes horribly wrong or 2) comes out of nowhere and needs to be addressed ASAP. There's some, but not complete, overlap between #1 nd #2.
All of which is to say that I can easily see how someone could meet the average expectations of a job in much less than 40 hours, especially at $Large_Company where employees are interchangeable widgets and 40 hours is the socially defined amount of time that a least-common-denominator person meeting the minimum requirements needs to complete the job's tasks.
I'm fascinated by this (new) concept, but I'm absolutely not looking to jump over into the OE world. There is enough ethical murkiness that I'm just not interested even if I think a person could, if careful navigate that path. I also like my current job and, as I said, have a backlog of work. I'm in a position of high responsibility of critical importance and it is not the sort of job where I'm only expected to do a discrete pre-define chunk of work each week/month/etc. So I would very much feel bad and unethical if I cut into it's time to do some other work. But I can see how that's not true of all jobs.
