A man named Robert is boarding a $20,000 cruise that he paid for in full with cash somewhere in suburban Florida. Technically, he is at work as well. Actually, there were two of them. Perhaps three. In between deck changes, he’s responding to emails, sneaking into Zoom calls from a corner of the ship’s business lounge, and turning off his camera just long enough to avoid any awkward questions.
Last year, Robert made about $335,000. His employers (plural) don’t know one another. Most people are unaware of how big, quiet, and well-organized the world of overemployed people is.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Phenomenon Name | Overemployment (OE) |
| Core Concept | Secretly holding two or more full-time remote jobs simultaneously |
| Primary Industries | Tech, Software Engineering, Network Engineering, IT |
| Typical Earnings | $200,000–$400,000+ per year |
| Origin Period | Gained significant momentum during COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2021) |
| Key Community | Overemployed.com — founded by Chloe and Isaac |
| Demographics | Predominantly Millennials and Gen Z; some Gen X professionals |
| Legal Risk | Potentially fireable offense; not illegal in most U.S. states |
| Common Fields | Software developers, network engineers, product managers, IT consultants |
| Notable Stat | 37% of workers in a 2023 Monster survey admitted to holding multiple full-time jobs |
| Reference Website | Overemployed.com |
The reality is surprisingly human, despite the term’s almost clinical, even bureaucratic, sound. They are neither con artists nor con artists. Many are network architects, engineers, and developers who have spent years witnessing companies give out 3% raises while the price of everything from groceries to rent increased.
Some people eventually start making their own arrangements instead of waiting for their employer to make things fair. The overemployed community, which is loosely organized around Discord servers, forums, and a website called Overemployed.com, refers to their jobs as J1, J2, and J3. Clear, clinical labels for what is actually a fairly complex balancing act.
Chloe and Isaac, the creators of the Overemployed website, nearly unintentionally adopted this way of life. During the pandemic, they were looking for work. After landing jobs, they asked each other, half-seriously, half-jokingly, why they should stop looking. Chloe remembered, “If we don’t do well, they’ll just fire us, right?” So they continued. They were taken aback by what they discovered on the other side: it was manageable, it worked, and they weren’t alone. They created the website to record their own experiment, but it soon became a hub for hundreds of others who were doing the same thing in quiet areas of their home offices.
It’s important to comprehend why so many people in the tech industry in particular find this to be logical. According to Layoffs, the industry laid off nearly 263,000 employees in 2022 and 2023 across businesses like Amazon, Meta, and Google.FYI. These were large-scale events that left seasoned professionals scrambling all night; they weren’t small operations losing a few jobs.
In 2022, Joseph, a Gen X network engineer, made $344,000 in three covert positions before losing two of them at the same time. He would have had nothing if he had been working a single job, as his employers believed. He actually still had a third. He also had a mortgage that was paid off.
Listening to these employees speak gives the impression that they have come to a conclusion that many have not yet fully expressed: corporate loyalty was always a one-sided arrangement, and they just stopped acting otherwise. Although working remotely didn’t produce that emotion, it did create the circumstances necessary to act on it. The tools of the trade include different laptops, distinct email addresses, meticulously organized calendar blocks, and the silent miracle of the mute button.
Overemployed.com even provides helpful advice on the finer points, such as the genuinely smart recommendation to set up autocorrect entries so you don’t inadvertently type the name of your J2 boss in an email intended for your J1 manager. Little details, but the kind that are crucial when your entire plan depends on no one making the necessary connections.
However, critics do have a valid point. The percentage of remote postings on LinkedIn decreased from over 20% in April 2022 to about 10% by the end of 2023, indicating the growing scarcity of remote jobs. When someone accepts a second full-time job, they are, in a sense, taking up a position that could have been filled by another job seeker.
The overemployed community doesn’t completely ignore this tension, but the majority of members resist the framing. Robert’s argument is straightforward and not wholly irrational: if businesses can quickly eliminate thousands of jobs in a single afternoon, why should employees feel compelled to provide a loyalty that those same businesses obviously don’t regard as obligatory?
This sometimes feels like a story about a rarefied group of highly skilled workers with a very specific problem because of the earnings figures involved. And that is true. Some people lack the technical skills necessary to land two six-figure tech jobs at the same time. However, the underlying reasoning—that wages have stagnated, that job security is a polite fiction, and that the pandemic has permanently changed people’s perceptions of the employer-employee relationship—applies to a wide range of income levels.
According to a 2023 Monster survey, 57% of people who currently work one job said they would think about taking on another, and 37% of workers acknowledged having multiple full-time jobs.
It’s still unclear if businesses will have the resources or the incentive to take significant action against this practice. Although there is some monitoring software available, it is very challenging to enforce exclusivity throughout a remote workforce. It appears that most of the obvious risks have already been taken into account by the workers who have been doing this for years.
When making delicate calls, they turn off their cameras. They have a certain brutal precision when it comes to managing their calendars. They have gradually and frequently learned which risks to take and which to avoid through minor near-misses.
As this develops, it’s difficult to avoid feeling that the overemployed community is more of a symptom of something that broke a long time ago than a scandal waiting to blow up. It’s somewhere between the flat wage curves of the 2010s, the widespread layoffs of the pandemic years, and the gradual dissolution of any unwritten contract that may have existed between an employee and the employer.
Robert is currently on a cruise. Joseph settled his debt. And somewhere on a Tuesday afternoon, someone is thanking themselves for setting up autocorrect while meticulously typing the name of their J1 boss into an email.
