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Ask HN: Remote Employees Double-Dipping?

70 points by le-mark ↗ HN
Confession time, has anyone ever done this? Given the number of bored developers in this thread[1], it seems like a given that this happens. Have any of you maintained more than one remote job at at time? If so what obstacles did you encounter? Would you do it again? Any tips or techniques to go unnoticed?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14290518

103 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] thread
senatorobama
Great idea, but do remote employees get paid the same? Say 100k+ for an SF based company?
jaboutboul
In my experience, yes. Any good company will not want to lose the right person because of location or pay.
EduardoBautista
Lol I had to negotiate to get about a quarter of that salary. I know Travis CI limits your pay to your region. GitLab as well. Difference from Mexico to San Francisco is about 4x.
MichaelGG
That's messed up. Unless there's a separate component like local-cost-of-living-adjustment where you get extra for living in a high-rent area.
fragmede
...yes?

Cost of living between Mexico to San Francisco probably in the neighborhood of 4x, depending on which part of Mexico. 500000 MXN rounds to $25k, which is 1/4 of $100k.

viljar
Cost of surviving(food, shelter, boose) - yes. What about cost of having trip around the world for vacation, building your retirement fund, price of the iphone, car?
jldugger
Well, the retirement fund might be more CoL adjusted, if you intend to retire to the same region you currently reside.
MichaelGG
You shouldn't have to decide that up front. Plus someone living in a high-rent area then gets a huge retirement bonus and allows them the option to move somewhere else. Someone in a low-rent area doesn't get that option at all.
jldugger
All true, and yet I imagine a lot of people think in different terms about retirement.
EduardoBautista
iPhones and car loans are more expensive here in Mexico.
foobarbazetc
it's not messed up. Otherwise you're overpaying by 4x compared to local positions. Which means the person will probably never leave if they're unhappy etc.
MichaelGG
If it's more than just a cost-of-living bonus for high-rent areas, then yes it is. You're saying "Hey engineer A, you're just as good as B, but we're going to pay you less because people that live near you aren't getting paid as much. If you'd like a raise, move somewhere where engineers get more money."

Again, if it's just the cost-of-living bonus (like, all our engineers get $80K, plus $X/month where X is average rent and groceries, plus Y% for taxes) then it's fine. Otherwise it's valuing someone less purely on their geographical location.

Edit: Also, really, overpaying so they might be unhappy? "We're giving you less money for your own good!" Presumably if they're a world-class engineer and can work remotely at one place, they can find another remote job, too...

rlpb
> "Hey engineer A, you're just as good as B, but we're going to pay you less..."

Let's face it. As an employee, you want to earn as much as you can. As a company, you want to make as much profit as you can, which means that you base your target pay on market rate (be it above or below market rate).

Market rate is set by the competition. Really it's "we're going to pay you enough that you don't leave to work for someone else", and that's it.

If an employer gives you a cost-of-living bonus for high-rent areas, the reason is that they're competing for you against other companies who do the same thing. The same applies to any pay difference based on locality, whether local or remote. It simply depends on who they're competing with for your services.

This isn't evil. It's how the market works.

MichaelGG
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.

rlpb
> 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.

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

ohstopitu
While I can't comment on Travis CI, Gitlab from what I understand, used to hire a 3rd party company that would perform research (based on cost of living, taxes etc.) to gauge your salary (across different regions).

That said, what's stopping remote engineers starting to work in expensive regions (say Vancover/Toronto) and then moving to cheaper regions (Saskatchewan/Manitoba/Alberta) for example - would salaries be adjusted every time someone moves around?

In my opinion, one of the biggest benefits of working remotely would be the ability to travel the world!

dasmoth
That said, what's stopping remote engineers starting to work in expensive regions (say Vancover/Toronto) and then moving to cheaper regions (Saskatchewan/Manitoba/Alberta) for example - would salaries be adjusted every time someone moves around?

Gitlab people on here have previously said yes: pay gets adjusted when you move.

scalesolved
So move to Monaco, get your pay adjusted upwards crazily. Then leave but just rent a PO Box there and use a VPN to make it seem like you are there. Simple :D
eloisant
It's not messed up, it's supply and demand.

Someone living in SF will have many high-paid opportunities so they have to match that.

On the other hand they know someone not willing to relocate won't have the same opportunities locally or with remote jobs, so they can afford to pay them less.

MichaelGG
That doesn't make it right. You can get away with ("afford") lots of things that aren't correct to do.
bbcbasic
Easily hacked. As long as you stay in the timezone, start off in expensive city, then quietly move to cheap city.
taternuts
No. Not unless you get lucky or are incredible and in demand from other SF companies they know. Remote work is fantastic for people who don't care about living in a place with a higher cost of living. I personally think it's a huge perk that companies are willing to pay your rent if you move to a beautiful place, but then again I've come to dislike a fully remote job after doing it for a couple years.
scalesolved
Yes it happens, I work for a remote company and location has nothing to do with the offered salary. (USA based company).
taway_1212
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.).
remoteEmp80
Yes, I work for a very large Bay Area company and make $170k total comp as a 100% remote employee. I however live in a somewhat expensive COL city with other tech jobs, so that helped in negotiations.
bowlich
My employer is not SF based, but they do pay the same to all employees regardless of location based on the market rate for their base city. Lots of folks taking advantage of that to live in cheaper environments. Although there are a couple oddballs who use it to live in SF and not get the local rate for there.
pplonski86
No! I'll feel bad to cheat someone else - and I don't like to feel bad:)
moduspol
I don't want to be "that guy," but...

If it's a salaried position, you're presumably not filling in an hours sheet dishonestly.

Is it truly cheating if both companies are happy with your work and you're not breaking either company's rules? Even if you don't explicitly tell them you're doing it?

rubidium
Most salaried positions require you don't have any other paying jobs.
logfromblammo
Most of my salaried positions have been "at will" with no employment contract in place, so the only thing that corporate policy tells me in the employee manual is that I may be fired if they find out. But as an "at will", I could also be fired for any reason, or no reason at all.

As an "at will" employee, the one and only consequence I have to fear is being fired. There is no contract to breach. And in that situation, I would feel a lot more comfortable about going from two jobs to one than from one to zero. The incentive is overwhelmingly in favor of doing it and hiding the evidence, rather than not doing it at all.

If you do everything that is expected at both jobs, neither has any reason to investigate.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
ChicagoBoy11
I can see how this would go south really quick once skype meetings / in-person events start to collide. I think for the RIGHT type of remote work one may be able to pull this off for a while, but I can't imagine that full-time, well-paying remote dev roles could be juggled like this.
tracker1
But think of it this way... can a senior person output more than twice what a junior/mid person can? If you take two mid-level FTE roles, putting mid-level throughput would that pay more than a single senior FTE role? It might be worth considering.
marktangotango
I heard second hand about a guy at a Carribean resort who was doing this. I've been tempted to do it myself :)
ShakataGaNai
There are more than a few stories of things like this happening (or my favorite, outsourcing the actual dev work to China or india) but why would you when it's a lawsuit waiting to happen? Freelancing on the side a little bit is one thing (Basecamp's handbook which was recently posted on HN even had a section on this https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/moonlightin... ), but working a full on second job? If either found out they'd probably extremely concerned about IP theft either direction.

Plus, why have the stress of two jobs and two sets of potentially colliding meetings? Mrs Doubtfire for the corporate world sounds like a funny movie, terrible life.

santoriv
I did a short term contract once at the same time as my main remote job. I never lied about my hours or got overpaid though. I won't ever do it again as it was a hellish amount of work for a few months. For me the cost of context switching on my productivity was higher than I anticipated.

Of course you could probably get away with having two remote jobs at once.... for a while. Unless you're monstrously productive, it seems like either it would get noticed eventually or you would get burned out. But everyone is different I guess. I'd rather have a life that isn't so stressful and complicated.

tracker1
I was thinking, upon reading the question that it might be possible to do two mid-level jobs at the same time, making more than a single senior level job. It isn't about being at your max level in both jobs... so long as you can match peers for that job/level, and get work done in a timely manner, shouldn't matter.
Daishiman
It's possible, but really it's actually no different than holding an office job in which you're not being checked upon. More than one person has been selling things on the side, outsourcing work to their own devs, and schemes like that.

Not really a good idea as far as developing a reputation for trustworthiness.

zupreme
This actually happens all the time. We've had a couple of remote employees I'm aware of who did this.

As a company we don't care. As long as they are getting all of our work done in a timely and effective manner what they fill their time gaps with is not our concern.

Note that our remote workers are not hourly workers. If they were, then we'd take a much different approach to time management and dedicated focus.

acconrad
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.
watwut
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 full time, it is cool to combine them.

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. Then it is just a question of whether either management finds out.

candiodari
Isn't it wrong for a company to lie about things like remuneration and money too ? Is it okay for companies to pay people they claim internally have the same pay (for the same work), but pay them differently based on things like location ?
alexandercrohde
That's actually a really interesting parallel to draw. I have certainly seen a non-negligible amount of dishonest management ("Sure we'll promote you, we just need a few more cycles" to a friend who was about to be fired). From a legal perspective I'm sure what's signed in writing makes the difference.

But we're not really talking legal here, we're talking ethical. And ethically, I'm not sure why dishonesty on paper is worse than dishonesty in a 1-on-1.

You'll find all kinds of notions/norms in our culture that are inconsistent with each other. Usually it takes a standup comedian to point out our own hypocrisy.

candiodari
Given that I keep reading things like that some 90%+ of employees across a wide range of companies would deny their employer a $1 million contract if it got them, personally, $500 ...

Given those I think the norms in our society are very much consistent. It's just that we assume we're all employees here, and therefore there is no need to lie to each other.

But we'll lie to our employer, or at least leave stuff out. And our employer will lie to us, and leave boatloads of stuff out.

This is the norm. It is also the norm to lie about it.

watwut
"Isn't it wrong for a company to lie about things like remuneration and money too ?"

Yes it is wrong.

"Is it okay for companies to pay people they claim internally have the same pay (for the same work), but pay them differently based on things like location ?"

It is ok to pay different amount of money to workers living in different states (if that is what you mean). Assuming the company did not mislead the worker before accepting the job at lower paid location.

tzs
> 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!

kazinator
Sure, working two part-time jobs whose shifts don't overlap.
rb808
I knew of a guy who worked two jobs on-site - was about 3 months before he was caught. I think he worked as a contractor and billed through two different agencies. Started early on one job, late at the other on a different floor and lots of meetings away from desk inbetween. :)
VLM
"worked two jobs on-site"

I did that twice, once at a dying company when a coworker quit until I lined up a new job in a couple weeks, and another time was a horizontal transfer where two engineering managers were rather vocal about my working solely for them. In both cases I just kinda did what I wanted, knowing there was nothing they could do.

I suspect the question they meant to ask was who was getting paid for two jobs. I have a really boring story about that revolving around a company that paid out severance gradually instead of lump sum, which given the time of year was financially advantageous for me WRT marginal income tax rate.

Dunan
"I have a really boring story about that revolving around a company that paid out severance gradually instead of lump sum"

Here in Japan, where I live, this is one of the reasons that people can't take all their accrued vacation, even when quitting their jobs. When you leave a job, your accrued days are paid out as if you were still working. So if your last day in the office is June 30, but you have 30 days saved, your last day as an employee is ~August 15.

This sometimes means you can't start your new job until after that, and because employers typically want people to start ASAP, people end up forfeiting the vacation time they never got to take while working. The new employer wants them on July 7, so they take just the one week and then start at the new place.

And given how hard it is to take time off, the typical employee has lots and lots of unused PTO. My workplace has a cap of 40 and I am always at the cap.

jldugger
Isn't the point of being a contractor that you can take on other clients simultaneously?
omgthowaway
Remote full-time employee here for a SF-based company.

I occasionally do 1099 work for friends, but always on evening or weekend hours. I always use my own time and computing resources for the work.

snarfy
I've seen it done onsite.

There was a guy who worked an 8-5 job in my building and the building next door simultaneously. He would show up, look busy, then run next door and do the same thing. He did this for about 8 months before one of his managers caught on and told his other manager. He ended up losing both jobs at the same time.

LambdaComplex
I feel like it's kinda impressive that he managed to keep that up for 8 months. What were the two jobs exactly?
snarfy
Software developer!
TeMPOraL
:o. That was... not what I expected. I read your original post and thought that maybe he was a security guard exploiting proximity of the two buildings to do a somewhat ok job on both simultaneously, or something.
pkaye
There was an engineering director at one of my previous workplaces that was a little hard to reach. People though he was attending high level meetings including his reports. One of them called him once during work and he answered by the name of another company unintentionally. They spoke with HR and through some investigations found out the guy was coming to work and during the middle of the day going to his other job at a startup where he was the CTO. They fired him of course.
freestockoption
How did he answer the phone? Something like: "This is Mike Smith with Widgets Corporation"

My greeting is usually short: "Hi, this is Mike."

pkaye
I would guess the former since he got caught.
convolvatron
i knew i guy that did this, one remote and one on-site. the remote guy ended up finding out and called the on-site company asking about him.

so he lost both jobs. but oddly, the on-site manager felt guilty mentioning it during reference checks, and he went on to be a fairly well paid manager.

VLM
I've done plenty of volunteer work while working a salaried position over the last couple decades. My day job has nothing to do with swinging a hammer, being a youth group treasurer, serving on a youth group advisory board, grunt work at the food pantry, grunt work on hiking trails, being a member of the Army Reserve (although scheduling was an unholy PITA for that and the pay rounded down to nothing once I got a real job). All of those volunteer jobs are paid by someone, I just wasn't charging. Technically my salaried day job owned all that I produced like a slave (which I was), so I was stealing from the company when I cleared hiking trails with the club on a Saturday afternoon, no different than if I broke into the cash box and helped myself.
excalibur
The fault here lies in their policies, not your actions. You are in fact entitled to a personal life regardless of what they coerce you to sign.
ghshephard
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 were highly automated (including the back end monitoring), and pristine, by the book. I'm pretty sure his other manager knew that he was working two jobs, but because his work here didn't interfere with his job there, everything was kosher.

gaius
Was the other company aware of this arrangement too? Just curious.
untog
> I'm pretty sure his other manager knew that he was working two jobs
cylinder
What happened if you​ did have an issue? Did you mandate service credits into the contract?
ghshephard
In the 2 1/2 years he worked for us, we had a total of two issues. First time it was a storage array went down, and our regular DBAs were having difficulty bringing the dataguard replica back online - Our Senior DBA resolved it within 5 minutes. Second issue was an application corruption that we got stuck into the weeds with until, once again, Our Senior DBA just stepped in, restored a backup and then rolled us forward just before corruption occurred.

And no service credits, he was just an extraordinarily talented DBA - we were happy to have him set our architecture/monitoring/database deployment mechanisms. I'm guessing he worked around 100 hours for that 50K over a year, or about $500/hour, which, if you think about it, for someone at the very, very top of their Oracle (or Cisco, or Java, or Hadoop, etc..) technical game is really quite reasonable - particularly when you are only paying them when they are absolutely needed, and the rest of the time your staff DBAs can handle the day-to-day.

jcadam
I'd like to land one (1) FT remote job, and here we've got folks talking about working two at the same time :)
excalibur
Ditto. I had a remote job once, but the hours I got out of it were so abysmal that I had to leave it for a regular office job after just 2 months.
scalesolved
What problems have you had in trying to land a full time remote job?
jcadam
Things I've heard:

1 - You'd be bored (so?)

2 - We only allow remote work for people who've worked remotely full-time before (always enjoy a good Catch-22).

3 - You haven't actually worked with language X (Clojure in the most recent case) professionally (only on personal projects), so we'd want you in the office (on the other side of the country) so you're closer to help as you learn to code in a new language (a particularly insulting thing to say to a senior software engineer).

4 - Oh, why did you turn down our offer for 40% less than your current pay?

and my personal favorite:

5 - :static: the interviewer just goes dark after I spend an entire Saturday afternoon completing a homework assignment and then go through a 2 hour live coding interview.

Eventually one stops trying. My experience interviewing leads me to believe there is a gross oversupply of good software engineers looking for remote work (If I may be so bold as to call myself a 'good' software engineer).

sheeshkebab
Here's how you do it: 1) find a remote _contracting_ gig, even part time (interview is about 15 - 30 minutes for these, no bull shit white board coding involved)

2) start and learn everything needed in about a week and work fast after that

3) be open to become full time - and you'll likely get an offer 1 to 3 months in, or more like they'll switch you fte.

sheeshkebab
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?

vogt
I think OP is referring exclusively to people working 2 or more salaried full time positions.
logfromblammo
I'd love to have just one full-time remote job. Anyone managing to do two at once more than makes up for any points lost on ethical grounds with the bonus points for technical chops and sheer moxie.

If ever were in such an enviable position, these are the potential pitfalls I might see.

  - The companies schedule mandatory meetings at the same time.
  - The companies schedule on-site days that make travel arrangements impossible.
  - Conflict of interest between companies.
  - The companies don't actually care, but you hide it anyway, and they care about that.
  - The companies do care, but you tell them, and they retaliate for the embarrassment.
  - Tax withholding comes out wrong, and you are fined for it.
  - Someone you met through both companies outs you.
  - One of your companies is acquired by or merged into the other.
  - Your life is converted to an 80s-style sitcom script, and you aren't even credited.
scalesolved
Have you applied to lots of remote jobs? What's been the biggest hurdle for you in getting one?
logfromblammo
A big hurdle has been the part where jobs advertised as remote turn out to be not really remote in the initial phone interview. Having to be on-site for M days per week or N weeks per quarter, or even requiring an initial on-site training period of L weeks, still puts a geographic limit on what I can actually accept. Either a lot of people are lying about remote work, or the companies that are truly remote don't want to interview me--possibly both.

I haven't stopped applying, but my expectations have fallen pretty far since the first one I tried in 2008. That was Universal Mind, and they told me I didn't have enough experience in Adobe Flex to interview with them. I had worked with it for about 8 months at that point, which isn't bad for something released in 2004. So from my perspective, a lot of those companies seem to think that since they can hire from anywhere, they should only hire the top quintile of everyone, and my resume definitely doesn't radiate that rockstar aura.

IanDrake
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 would be double dipping.

lamby
> Double dipping is the wrong phrase here.

Indeed. I initially thought that this was working remotely for a company twice via two personas. As in, appearing as Alice and Bob on the company Slack, etc.

(I'm not sure your example is double-dipping or cheating, but that's another thread...)

HeyLaughingBoy
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.

IanDrake
Agreed. Selling a product vs selling time are two different things.
partisan
Sadly, I suspect I've seen this. The particular developer is a coding monster and I suspect he was just underutilized.
scalesolved
Sounds like he was massively underutilised and underpaid!
jefecoon
Long time ago, in a dot.com startup epoch long ago:

Our Seattle/Bellevue based startup hired VP & Dir of outside sales in Silicon Valley. Expensive hires, big payout to recruiting firm, then these two proved extremely difficult to get on the phone, schedule meetings with, et al.

SVP Sales flew in unexpectedly, called & had them pick him up at San Jose Airport. When he threw his bag into the trunk he noticed they had not only our sales & mktg materials, but SEVEN other companies' materials as well. He grilled them on what work they'd accomplished, clients called / met, et al, then ended up firing them before he flew home.

We passed along info to authorities, who later shared the recruiting firm had been in on it, and they were trying to collect evidence to persecute. Sounded like they were collecting recruiting fees & salaries, then sharing among all 'co-conspirators.' FBI was pulled into it, so I assume it involved fairly substantial cash.

jabv
Crazy story! Just fyi, "et al." is usually used to mean "and other people," and "etc." is usually used to mean "and other such stuff."
vincagi
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.
throwaway46263
Quantity and quality are hard to nail down. What is an 'honest day's work' for a developer?
tracker1
That would be determined in comparison to your peer group for the labelled role..
throwaway46263
As a heads up: We have a remote employee (who is on HN). He's not exceptionally fast, and we suspect he is doing this. We'll fire him if we can prove it. From our stand point, we're paying a full time salary but not getting full time results. Pretty much theft. We think...
tracker1
Had to reread to catch the "not exceptionally fast" ... is s/he fast enough that the work gets done predictably? I find that from a business perspective predictable, and generally accurate time tables are more important than absolute throughput. Now if this person is putting less than half the work than his nearest peer is, then I might have issue.

All said though, if the work is getting done and in a timely manner, then it shouldn't matter. In reading through this thread, I've been thinking, if I could get two mid-level dev positions, I could pretty easily do both at a mid-level quality/pay which combined would be more than my very senior level is currently.

le-mark
> we're paying a full time salary but not getting full time results.

Ha! If this person isn't meeting expectations then fire them! Posting here like this says more about your dysfunctional org and management than anything.

oliwarner
I'm on retainer for a few people. Different situation because they all know my service has a contention, they just care that I'm available when they need it.

Sounds like you're trying to get paid a full time salary for part time work. Unless you're actually going to moonlight, you're depriving one or both companies of the time they're paying for.

It's stuff like this that makes it hard for remote workers. Stop it.

_a1
I've done it for exactly two months, I am a remote contractor and had started a new contract when I already had one running, did not think it was something I could've kept doing for long but I'm happy I tried it.

I was working two full time jobs in two different startups. Scheduling meetings between different parties was not an issue at all, I did scrum meetings in the morning in the first contract which happened every other day on the same hour, and I would make sure to schedule the other meetings in the other contract towards the end of the day. What I did notice is that, although I could pull it off if I really wanted to and needed both jobs, and although I love working, I had to trade off creativity in my work, as in I couldn't pull an all-nighter working on new idea for an aggregation framework or try to get ahead and impress anymore, and only felt like working to get the work done and get through the day. I believe that the quality of my work remained the same, but I lost all the fun in it, and strongly felt that my time wasn't my own anymore. Needless to say, it kills all your time and [depending on the nature of your job] you gravitate towards robot-like behaviour and lifestyle.

Wouldn't do it again, I can afford to make less, but happy I got a glimpse of what was humanly possible for me to do, even if it's only for a span of two months!

marktangotango
Thanks you, this is the only reply with real experience doing this.