The Overemployed Underground: Inside the Secret Community of Tech Workers Holding Down Five Full-Time Jobs

Somewhere in Chicago, a man by the name of Abel sits by himself in a private office that he began renting especially to handle the practical aspects of his professional life. He doesn’t eat breakfast, shows up at 9 a.m., and works nonstop until 2 p.m. After eating, he logs off. It appears to be dedication from the outside. In reality, it’s coordination because Abel isn’t overseeing a single task. He oversees four of them at the same time, earning a total of $680,000 annually from enterprise startups that each think are solely theirs.

Abel is a part of a phenomenon that has been quietly growing since the beginning of remote work during the pandemic and is now hard to ignore. With about 300,000 members spread across Reddit, Discord, and a special website called Overemployed.com, the overemployed underground is a loose, surprisingly organized community of tech workers who covertly hold two, three, or even five full-time jobs at once. They have their own risk management hierarchy, vocabulary, and manners. The first rule is that you don’t discuss it, which you took from Fight Club with complete self-awareness.

Like many odd things, it began with the pandemic. Some employees noticed something they had not previously noticed when offices closed and oversight reduced to a camera icon on a Zoom call: the real, honest work part of their job required four or five hours per day. The remaining time was spent acting busy, going to pointless meetings, and adding to the background noise of a typical workday. That was taken away by working remotely. In the ensuing silence, some people began posing a reasonable query: why stop at one paycheck if the work is finished and no one is observing?

Since starting Overemployed.com in April 2021, the community’s unofficial founder has gone by the alias Isaac. He claims to make over $600,000 annually while working two jobs, and he claims that the practice was already well-known in some areas of the tech sector long before COVID made it widely known. His readers range from twentysomethings who are juggling two internships to sixty-year-olds who are trying to make a final ten years of money from a system that they believe was never very kind to them. He claims that the majority are typically in their mid-to-late thirties, with enough experience to work quickly and enough cynicism to not feel too bad about it.

It has more complex mechanics than you might anticipate. In order to prevent background checks from revealing overlapping positions, dedicated practitioners freeze their employment records with Equifax. They keep distinct calendars for every task and reserve times as soon as a new meeting is scheduled, avoiding conflicts before they arise. The status lights of mouse jigglers remain green. They can operate several laptops from a single keyboard thanks to KVM switches, and their screens can be tiled in private offices or, ironically, turned into tiny corporate campuses for one. When it’s feasible, they stagger jobs according to time zones. In forum posts, they rank their employers according to meeting load and job security, referring to them as J1, J2, and J3. A person’s personal priority queue is silently lowered if they plan too many required standups.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider Bryan Roque’s story, which gained widespread attention after Business Insider covered it. He eventually found a remote job at IBM after being laid off from Amazon early in the pandemic, but his nagging anxiety persisted. Something had settled in him after receiving a layoff slip: he was determined not to be that vulnerable ever again. He didn’t see it as a choice between two jobs when a Meta recruiter called. It was like an insurance policy to him. Meta was taken by him. He retained IBM. Then he accepted a Tinder offer. He was on track to make $820,000 in a single year fifteen months after returning to his childhood bedroom.

The community doesn’t act as though navigating the ethical dilemma is not genuinely difficult. Some disregard the practice as fraud, pointing out that employees are receiving their full salaries while dividing their time between several conflicting responsibilities. Others adopt a more detached stance: what precisely is being stolen if the deliverables are being met and the employer lacks a useful means of measuring anything other than output? There is no definitive solution to that argument, which is continuously debated in the forums. The underlying frustration that is causing it is more difficult to ignore. For years, many of these employees witnessed coworkers being passed over for promotions, companies enforcing return-to-office policies while simultaneously promoting flexibility, and loyalty going unappreciated in both minor and major ways.

Slowly, employers have begun to take notice. A growing number of tech contracts contain exclusivity clauses. Tools for tracking productivity are being added by some businesses. Last year, the case of Soham Parekh, an Indian software engineer who was publicly called out by Silicon Valley founders for allegedly working at four startups at the same time, lit up tech Twitter, raising concerns about how long companies had been hiring people without asking more difficult questions. For those who are overt about it, the days of easy overemployment may be coming to an end.

Watching this whole thing play out gives the impression that it’s more about a system that has been covertly renegotiated—not through contracts or collective bargaining, but through thousands of individual decisions made in spare bedrooms with the camera off—than it is about dishonest employees. It’s another matter entirely whether that negotiation ends amicably.