Coming from the other end of Gen X -- having been a freelancer most of my adult life -- I've got no problem at all with job stackers, and I can tell you why in a single word:
Moonlighting.
Like you, I'm old enough to remember when this was the word that described holding down two full time (or near full-time) jobs to make ends meet. It was looked on with askance back in the 80s and 90s because of an implicit assumption on the part of employers that I regard as one of the most horrific norms in our culture:
That "my employee" is functionally equivalent to "my possession."
An employment contract (to say nothing of at-will employment) is an arrangement where the employer is renting the time, talent, attention, and efforts of an employee and putting them to work to generate capital for his business.
What the employee does on their own time (assuming it does not violate *explicitly delineated contractual terms*) is their own goddamn business, whether that be running their own small business, dancing at a strip club, raising money for charities the employer hates, or running a Wednesday night Bible study.
By the late 1990s, white collar 20th century norms had essentially shaken out to the point where W2 employees were considered (tacitly) as very well-treated slaves. The employee--not salaried employees, mind you, but hourly employees--were expected to have workplace spirit and buy-in, to be "loyal" to employers who weren't at all loyal to them, and to, in some important sense, derive their identity from their employment.
The term "wage slave" is not without merit in such a context.
One of the basic rules of contract law is that a contract is reciprocal, and a good contract should have duties of similar value exchanged between the parties to the contract.
If the employer is not obligated by contract to be loyal to his employees, he has no right (either legal or ethical) to expect that his employees will be loyal to him. With rare exceptions in small startups and team businesses, no employer builds his business plan around any given employee--it is unethical and inappropriate for an employer to, in turn, expect employees to build their business plans around him.
Given the above, it probably doesn't surprise you that I run my own shop ;-)
Anyhow, those are my 2c. Would love to hear your thoughts in response
Interesting thoughts Dan and, indeed, no surprise :) There are parallels with moonlighting, though different norms have evolved with full-time W2 jobs as you point out. There's a good discussion around whether to challenge these norms and how to do so. My view is that we need new models of employment. I still don't like the underlying deception and your point about loyalty goes both ways. Employees can leave at-will jobs just as easily as employers can leave them. I am sympathetic to the idea there are some asymmetries in the relationship, though.
This seems like a much more nuanced and accurate take on the current situation and how we got here.
The development and establishment of asymmetric standards of employment whereby employers expect full employee buy in but no or minimal reciprocation is unrealistic and unsustainable regardless of whether or not it’s lawful.
A further consideration is how those who suffer should respond to the degradation of young male agency by feminism and governments. Job-stacking (my spell checker offers ‘hustling’ for this!) seems to offer the only practical solution here.
The only argument against job-stacking that holds water is legal. What happens if a stacker signs to an employer who expressly requires exclusivity of service, and what happens if there are legal confidentiality problems as a result of one employer’s information being given to another employer in the course of stacking? Presumably there are ways to mitigate these risks, such as not signing up to exclusivity agreements and having different computer systems that cannot talk to one another for different employers. Working in an individualist sympathetic state or a state that has suffered from predatory large companies would help too.
Thank you for the mention, Jeff! This article does a great job contextualizing the issue against broader trends in labor economics.
I think it's important to understand job stacking as arbitraging inefficiencies in the market. These days there are a ton of middle management roles that pay $200k / year but require four or five times the amount of work as a senior IC role one rung below that pays around $150k / year. Corporations aren't really creating an incentive structure that makes it worth it for a talented employee to take the management role over job stacking. They should pay the manager several times more.
Another factor is that valuable labor at any firm tends to be Pareto distributed while salaries will follow a more normal distribution. Most people demand a certain level of egalitarianism that is actually very anti-meritocratic in practice and creates perverse incentives that can be arbitraged by pirates (i.e. us). We've all worked with a lazy person who did almost nothing but got paid almost as much as us. Why is this allowed? Why shouldn't the fabled 10x engineer actually get paid 10x as much? If he's not getting paid 10x as much, why shouldn't he hold 10 jobs?
In terms of job stacking vs 1099 work or consulting--I'd say in tech there is an argument to be made for that, but lots of fields outside tech are very heavily credentialized by gatekeepers and rent seekers. Meanwhile the bosses will only want to hire McKinsey and Deloitte because they want access to their clout and wider resources. Because of factors like this industries like financial services for instance make it much much harder for a talented young guy to build a startup consultancy. But by job stacking you are effectively a one man consultant.
Also re: deception, I would argue that HR basically lies to the employee all the time and job stacking is just a defense against that to level the playing field. To my mind a world of at-will employment basically assumes amoral self-interest anyway, and all of these companies are pricing in employee dishonesty in their risk management framework (I actually worked on this in my consulting days lol).
Anyway, hopefully this gives people some useful info on our perspectives! If any of you would like to learn more about what we're building in Tortuga you can check out the link below:
I decided to write about this after reading about Reid Hoffman's employment predictions. I don't always agree with him politically, but he has a good track record of predicting workforce trends. A few questions for when you have the chance: What do you make of Hoffman's forecast? What types of employment structures could make job-stacking unnecessary? Would you want that or do you like being a pirate? How would you approach these issues and these as an employer?
I think he is basically correct. What he describes is effectively Corporate America adapting to job stacking, other forms of labor market arbitrage, and the general asymmetries of remote work in the same way the entertainment industry adapted to piracy.
I remember I used to pirate video games and movies all the time. I basically stopped after high quality streaming and digital distribution took over the market. It just wasn't worth it to pirate and have to deal with cracking and updating patches etc. when they made it super convenient and safe to get what you wanted. Same thing will happen to job stacking once super talented programmers can make 500k a year picking up big contracts in an ultra decentralized and unstructured marketplace.
But this will require some other changes too--Consulting industry needs to be emasculated and credentialism in general has to be rolled back. But I predict this will happen across all industries over the next few decades, some faster than others. In general it will be great for people like me so I am excited.
The catch is this world will be incredibly asymmetrical. Think about the difference is between a 99th percentile Millennial and a 50th percentile Millennial--it's much larger than it was for Gen X. Well for Zoomers the gap is even bigger, and by the time Gen Alpha is 30yo you'll probably have the top 1% using AI to hyper-optimize everything while the average guy literally can't put their ipad down for 30 seconds.
This will impact society in all kinds of weird ways (incel rate, polygyny, etc.). But in the job market specifically we are prob going to have a much higher ceiling for the average 90th percentile guy and a much lower floor for the 60th percentile. AI is going to start clearing out entire departments and nobody will be guaranteed a cushy six figure sinecure for putting in their time in Corporate America anymore.
Thankfully current job stackers will be at a huge advantage competing in this new market. I aim to ensure that Tortuga Society guys will be on the cutting edge.
> What types of employment structures could make job-stacking unnecessary?
Basically you need to make it viable for any extremely talented 24yo guy to start his own consultancy. That is what would adequately replace it.
As it stands this *kind of* works in tech but you def couldn't pull this off in financial services or any other hyper-credentialized and conservative field. Too many of the brass worship McKinsey and Deloitte and KPMG in these industries and you basically need to be an old man who steals clients from your old employer to compete.
> Would you want that or do you like being a pirate?
My current leadership role in Tortuga is almost perfect for me because it combines my two skillsets:
1) Marketing / Branding / Organization / Strategy from my time as a consultant manager at Deloitte
2) Making edgy propaganda, from my Alt Right days
So personally I would stay a pirate insofar as I think my current role allows me to provide the most value to the world as I can and be as useful as humanly possible.
But if I had to choose between stacking three data analyst roles and running a consultancy obviously the latter any day of the week. But only if I'm not fighting a bunch of credentialism, McKinsey worship, regulatory capture etc.
>How would you approach these issues and these as an employer?
Technically I am right now in running this quasi-startup--my officers Theon and Sesped each have two remote jobs in addition to working for me and Blackbeard has one other and headed for more. It hasn't been an issue so far.
But I know that's kind of a BS answer, so if I were running a normie consultancy I'd probably try to pivot my firm to paying for results-based contract work ASAP. I would game around the expectation that my employees will do the best thing for themselves.
Honestly I wouldn't want the employee who would rather make $150k than $450k just because he likes me or whatever. He is going to be weak and unagentic and will probably let the firm down in a vital moment. I want sharks who can eat what they kill.
Also I believe in incentive alignment and think salaries are just horrible for that in general tbh. It should be project based and aligned entirely with results or amount to equity in some revenue-generating process (how I am currently remunerating my officers in lieu of equity).
If Tortuga doesn't work out, you can always start a "future of work" consultancy! But seriously, interesting insights. The theme of asymmetries is apt and something I am attuned to as well.
This is a very fair minded article. One contention is with this line
"It seems unethical to deceive employers by taking multiple full-time W2 jobs without their knowledge"
What reasoning does this come from? To contrast allow me to post a quote about corporate board governance:
"Shirley Jackson is a case in point. Jackson, an accomplished theoretical physicist, sits on the board of eight major companies, all while tending to her day job as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Vernon Jordan Vernon Jordan manages to sit on six boards (more if you look beyond S&P 500 companies), while holding down the job of senior managing partner of the investment bank Lazard Freres."
So extremely elite people can job stack 9x and no one blinks an eye but when a pleb job stacks 2x Baby Boomers lose their minds. I somehow doubt that Jackson, mentioned above, is more than 4x productive than Walt coupled with the very high compensation from a board seat vs code monkey.
Thus, there are obviously other dynamics in play regarding job stacking and the 'ethics' of having multiples jobs is a smokescreen to wag a moral finger at the pleb in an attempt to distract them from some truer more factual reasoning as to why plebs are shamed for having more than 1x income.
Thanks Dave, appreciate it. I am sympathetic with this argument but disagree. In my eyes, this is about norms around W2 full-time employment. Where you see asymmetry, I see full-time employment as a pretty consistent expectation across roles at all levels of a company. Yes, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have golden parachutes, and there are legitimate inequality issues, but they are still expected to be exclusively work for a single company just like plebes.
Board roles are more analogous to 1099 arrangements, which are non-exclusive. And 1099 contracts are available to plebs, too. It may be the case that not enough jobs are structured as 1099 roles and that 1099 opportunities are less accessible to plebes than W2 roles (which plebes may view as a form of indentured servitude). I am sympathetic to that and it is possible employment norms could shift in that direction.
The ethical reasoning is extremely basic: The fact that you don't like someone is not a moral justification for defrauding them. A job involves signing a contract in which you do a certain amount of work per week in return for a salary. If you don't do that amount of work you're violating your agreement. A board position doesn't involve the same kind of contract and it's not intended to be a full time job.
My biggest complaint about these clowns is their regressive social views. They aren’t doing this because out of sheer greed, they’re doing it because they think the corporatocracy is too woke.
Regardless of what one thinks about wokeness, it’s pretty dramatically hypocritical to commit one of the oldest crimes — fraud — while claiming to defend traditional morality.
There is often (usually) not 40 hours of work to be done for a conscientious and efficient employee. Which is why stacking is a viable course of action in the first place.
I'm selling an employer access to my time in a given window. If they need something done between 9-5 M-F, then I'd better find a way to get it done, job stacking or no. But if (as has been my experience in every remote position I've yet worked) they have a solid 2 hours of work for me to do in a day? Then I am not interested in sitting on my thumbs for their benefit, satisfaction or peace of mind.
...i came here wanting to be a pirate...i leave here thinking job stacking would rule (if possible)...i cry here thinking that some day all of humanity will be gig workers assisting robots to serve the last 1000 rich people on earth in their country mansions (mansions made out of countries)...
I'm in a position where I could easily job stack, and actually work two jobs already. It's not job stacking because it's a formalized arrangement with the contractual approval of both employers, in which specific days of the week are allocated to each company.
It's reasonable to loathe wokeness. Woke people will violate any norm or rule if it advances their ideology even a tiny amount, so I can understand how Bismarck ended up at this point. But the woke are also tactical about it - they don't break laws unless they know the enforcers are also woke and will let them get away with it. Otherwise they stick to tactics that won't haul them into court. Job stacking is bad tactics. Home office slackers are relatively easy to detect and most companies already have systems to detect lazy remote workers. Even if you keep laptops entirely separate you can't literally work on two jobs simultaneously, so the periods where you are doing one or the other will be detectable either by software means or, simply because sometimes you're going to get double booked on meetings.
It's especially stupid that Rajeev Ram is taking part, as he's said before he posts under his real name. Nobody will hire that guy now if they search his name and find out he's involved in this. Not smart.
Even if we ignore that it's fraud (every contract specifies min working hours), it's still not OK in any moral reference frame. Woke people are horrible towards normies because they want conversions, and if it's at the point of a sword then so be it. The key is that the normies know why the woke hate them and what they can do to make the pain end (bend the knee and become an "ally"), but job stacking isn't like that. It assumes the people on the receiving end of the punishment don't find out, so they can't ever change their behavior.
Thus we arrive at the conclusion that job stacking is merely a form of petty theft, justified by feelings of oppression and helplessness. It is in many ways the couch dweller's equivalent to rioting. They aren't smashing in shop windows and stealing TV sets, but it's not much different conceptually - they're enriching themselves by stealing and using anger at the ruling class that hates them as an excuse.
To say this is a slippery slope would be a dramatic understatement. Once you go down that road, very quickly almost any excuse will be seized on to justify the looting. Just like how the woke constantly invent new infractions to justify their sadism, the Tortuga pirates will soon be finding justifications to steal from even companies that aren't particularly woke. And then they will get caught, and fired, and given bad references, and possibly prosecuted by people who know their real identities. I just don't see this being the right set of tactics, even if their anger is understandable.
I'm not even planning on taking multiple jobs, but thanks for the stern warning and public repudiation, I guess? I'll be sure to come back and report to you when the moral slippery slope apparently inevitably consumes me (although apparently I'm already equivalent to impotent couch-dwellers, so maybe it already has?).
It doesn't matter what you personally plan to do. You're assisting those who take multiple jobs, so look at it from a potential employer's perspective: how can they know? Are you likely to be a loyal and trustworthy employee, vs the other candidates available? The balance of probabilities says no. Would you hire yourself, given that information?
We have our own infrastructure and products that we're offering to guys to help them with job stacking. Tortuga is basically a startup at this juncture.
Personally, I disapprove of the practice and agree with your overall view, though you come down harsher than I do. Putting that aside, do you think agree that employment models need to evolve? What do you make of the Reid Hoffman prediction?
I watched the linked video but what Hoffman says is a bit vague, so it's hard to know what to make of it. He's predicting a greater shift towards gig work, but it's not obvious why this should be an effect of AI and the video is clipped so it doesn't address that question directly.
The ability to do gig work for the laptop class has existed for a long time now already. Upwork and friends are there, people use them, I've hired contractors through such platforms. It wasn't a great experience and my other entrepreneur friends report similar experiences (in fact they told me I'd have a bad experience with Upwork, which I did). The quality of work you get out of full timers is just so much higher. There's a reason companies in the market express a strong preference for full timers. I had to negotiate well to get a part time role, and I'm an exception in that company. They definitely don't like it and don't want to see part time work grow, let alone gig work. So whilst I would never disregard or disrepect any opinion about the future Reid Hoffman has, it's pretty hard to see it happening right now. Even the sea change that COVID forced with respect to remote work has been a bitter fight all the way, and that's far less of a change than a shift to gig work would be.
1) What makes you think we're going to get caught? On Telegram I've organized a committee of several cybersecurity experts from the broader group who are reviewing our opsec to prevent leaks, and we're also developing procedures to ensure members can take their security into their own hands.
2) Not all companies have spy infrastructure and the ones that do are easy to cheese with a mouse wiggler or other such solutions.
3) Job stackers talk extensively about how not to get double booked on meetings and handle this when it happens. Gaming around this is a major part of the lifestyle.
4) Rajeev could probably call himself Roger and create a face Facebook page and it would easily get around stupid HR ladies.
5) Companies will be forced to change their behavior and adopt a more meritocratic incentive structure as more people job stack. The change will happen in response to a systemic development, even if individuals do it covertly.
6) Job stacking isn't illegal in any criminal sense and even in the civil sense the courts are moving in our direction on issues like noncompetes.
Would be happy to debate this with you publicly on my podcast.
This is incredibly intersubjective, so wherever you stand on it likely reflects your generational position, class standing, and employment status. I'm very black pilled on employment. It's far from a meritocracy... 80% of positions aren't even advertised, and of course it's not what you know but who you know that gets most people their jobs. A lot of it just comes down to chaotic luck beyond any single person's control. I'm unemployed, so the idea that some people have multiple jobs does bother me on a fairness level. But life isn't fair, and this certainly falls into the hate the game not the player category. If someone is gaming an unfair system to protect their own position, more power to them. For me to hate job stackers would be like someone whose credit score was too low to get a good credit card hating me for getting three dozen of them with their lucrative accompanying sign up bonuses.
It would be a far different situation if, instead of job stacking, people were monetizing the asymmetries inherent to the job vacancy process like a pyramid scheme. I could easily see someone knowing how to game the application process getting, say, over 5 jobs, and then hiring other people to actually do them remotely for a sizable cut. Temp agencies usually take 50%, so there's already a real world version of this for short term work. And then you have municipal government and union jobs where employment can be predicated on kickbacks.
This is conjecture, but I suspect the most successful job-stackers will see the logic of turning their work into formal business consultancies and eventually convert their employers into clients. This would make it easier to hire and farm work to others and would have other benefits too - like creating enterprise value. Good luck in your job search, by the way.
Thank you for this perspective! As fellow GenX, maybe we have some leftover Boomer-inherited ethical standards or something. It’s hard for me to have to ritually sacrifice what’s left of my conscience in order to “live the good life” or what not.
It’s hard when evidence that ethical behavior and hard work pay off seems to be less than it used to. But I’m not sure of anything anymore. Maybe the world-stories I was raised with were never what I believed they were. And yet that is what I built my personality around, and this runs deep.
Yeah, technically wrong, and I wouldn't do it myself because it's not worth the trouble if caught, amongst other reasons (I too haven't worked as a W-2 employee for awhile).
But I come from a place of such extremely low opinion of most (all?) large, global employers where job stackers can hide, that I can't fully condemn the practice either. If it's a small business, or work based on personal relationships, yeah I can condemn that. That seems more like lying or theft.
I definitely would never advocate that someone job stack at small businesses.
Just from a purely amoral perspective it would be a huge pain in the ass! The key is almost always to get lost in the crowd at a giant corp and keep your head down.
Job stacking is usually DevOps, where the value of labor is almost entirely domain knowledge, but it also gives the dev access to everything so I get the concern about outsourcing it to contractors. I still do though, because I trust that I can evaluate what they’re doing.
Hey thanks for commenting. I don't understand DevOps but it's interesting that employers feel more secure with FTEs than 1099s. Is there a difference in an employer's ability to codify or enforce IP protection and confidentiality in W2 vs 1099?
I suppose the health insurance from an employer begets some additional loyalty but I think the real difference is that people who become employees are typically less mercenary.
The difference has been degrading for a long time though.
Hi Jeff--
Coming from the other end of Gen X -- having been a freelancer most of my adult life -- I've got no problem at all with job stackers, and I can tell you why in a single word:
Moonlighting.
Like you, I'm old enough to remember when this was the word that described holding down two full time (or near full-time) jobs to make ends meet. It was looked on with askance back in the 80s and 90s because of an implicit assumption on the part of employers that I regard as one of the most horrific norms in our culture:
That "my employee" is functionally equivalent to "my possession."
An employment contract (to say nothing of at-will employment) is an arrangement where the employer is renting the time, talent, attention, and efforts of an employee and putting them to work to generate capital for his business.
What the employee does on their own time (assuming it does not violate *explicitly delineated contractual terms*) is their own goddamn business, whether that be running their own small business, dancing at a strip club, raising money for charities the employer hates, or running a Wednesday night Bible study.
By the late 1990s, white collar 20th century norms had essentially shaken out to the point where W2 employees were considered (tacitly) as very well-treated slaves. The employee--not salaried employees, mind you, but hourly employees--were expected to have workplace spirit and buy-in, to be "loyal" to employers who weren't at all loyal to them, and to, in some important sense, derive their identity from their employment.
The term "wage slave" is not without merit in such a context.
One of the basic rules of contract law is that a contract is reciprocal, and a good contract should have duties of similar value exchanged between the parties to the contract.
If the employer is not obligated by contract to be loyal to his employees, he has no right (either legal or ethical) to expect that his employees will be loyal to him. With rare exceptions in small startups and team businesses, no employer builds his business plan around any given employee--it is unethical and inappropriate for an employer to, in turn, expect employees to build their business plans around him.
Given the above, it probably doesn't surprise you that I run my own shop ;-)
Anyhow, those are my 2c. Would love to hear your thoughts in response
-Dan
Interesting thoughts Dan and, indeed, no surprise :) There are parallels with moonlighting, though different norms have evolved with full-time W2 jobs as you point out. There's a good discussion around whether to challenge these norms and how to do so. My view is that we need new models of employment. I still don't like the underlying deception and your point about loyalty goes both ways. Employees can leave at-will jobs just as easily as employers can leave them. I am sympathetic to the idea there are some asymmetries in the relationship, though.
This seems like a much more nuanced and accurate take on the current situation and how we got here.
The development and establishment of asymmetric standards of employment whereby employers expect full employee buy in but no or minimal reciprocation is unrealistic and unsustainable regardless of whether or not it’s lawful.
A further consideration is how those who suffer should respond to the degradation of young male agency by feminism and governments. Job-stacking (my spell checker offers ‘hustling’ for this!) seems to offer the only practical solution here.
The only argument against job-stacking that holds water is legal. What happens if a stacker signs to an employer who expressly requires exclusivity of service, and what happens if there are legal confidentiality problems as a result of one employer’s information being given to another employer in the course of stacking? Presumably there are ways to mitigate these risks, such as not signing up to exclusivity agreements and having different computer systems that cannot talk to one another for different employers. Working in an individualist sympathetic state or a state that has suffered from predatory large companies would help too.
Thank you for the mention, Jeff! This article does a great job contextualizing the issue against broader trends in labor economics.
I think it's important to understand job stacking as arbitraging inefficiencies in the market. These days there are a ton of middle management roles that pay $200k / year but require four or five times the amount of work as a senior IC role one rung below that pays around $150k / year. Corporations aren't really creating an incentive structure that makes it worth it for a talented employee to take the management role over job stacking. They should pay the manager several times more.
Another factor is that valuable labor at any firm tends to be Pareto distributed while salaries will follow a more normal distribution. Most people demand a certain level of egalitarianism that is actually very anti-meritocratic in practice and creates perverse incentives that can be arbitraged by pirates (i.e. us). We've all worked with a lazy person who did almost nothing but got paid almost as much as us. Why is this allowed? Why shouldn't the fabled 10x engineer actually get paid 10x as much? If he's not getting paid 10x as much, why shouldn't he hold 10 jobs?
In terms of job stacking vs 1099 work or consulting--I'd say in tech there is an argument to be made for that, but lots of fields outside tech are very heavily credentialized by gatekeepers and rent seekers. Meanwhile the bosses will only want to hire McKinsey and Deloitte because they want access to their clout and wider resources. Because of factors like this industries like financial services for instance make it much much harder for a talented young guy to build a startup consultancy. But by job stacking you are effectively a one man consultant.
Also re: deception, I would argue that HR basically lies to the employee all the time and job stacking is just a defense against that to level the playing field. To my mind a world of at-will employment basically assumes amoral self-interest anyway, and all of these companies are pricing in employee dishonesty in their risk management framework (I actually worked on this in my consulting days lol).
Anyway, hopefully this gives people some useful info on our perspectives! If any of you would like to learn more about what we're building in Tortuga you can check out the link below:
https://www.tortugasociety.org/p/were-making-white-guys-rich
Smooth sailing! ;)
I decided to write about this after reading about Reid Hoffman's employment predictions. I don't always agree with him politically, but he has a good track record of predicting workforce trends. A few questions for when you have the chance: What do you make of Hoffman's forecast? What types of employment structures could make job-stacking unnecessary? Would you want that or do you like being a pirate? How would you approach these issues and these as an employer?
>What do you make of Hoffman's forecast?
I think he is basically correct. What he describes is effectively Corporate America adapting to job stacking, other forms of labor market arbitrage, and the general asymmetries of remote work in the same way the entertainment industry adapted to piracy.
I remember I used to pirate video games and movies all the time. I basically stopped after high quality streaming and digital distribution took over the market. It just wasn't worth it to pirate and have to deal with cracking and updating patches etc. when they made it super convenient and safe to get what you wanted. Same thing will happen to job stacking once super talented programmers can make 500k a year picking up big contracts in an ultra decentralized and unstructured marketplace.
But this will require some other changes too--Consulting industry needs to be emasculated and credentialism in general has to be rolled back. But I predict this will happen across all industries over the next few decades, some faster than others. In general it will be great for people like me so I am excited.
The catch is this world will be incredibly asymmetrical. Think about the difference is between a 99th percentile Millennial and a 50th percentile Millennial--it's much larger than it was for Gen X. Well for Zoomers the gap is even bigger, and by the time Gen Alpha is 30yo you'll probably have the top 1% using AI to hyper-optimize everything while the average guy literally can't put their ipad down for 30 seconds.
This will impact society in all kinds of weird ways (incel rate, polygyny, etc.). But in the job market specifically we are prob going to have a much higher ceiling for the average 90th percentile guy and a much lower floor for the 60th percentile. AI is going to start clearing out entire departments and nobody will be guaranteed a cushy six figure sinecure for putting in their time in Corporate America anymore.
Thankfully current job stackers will be at a huge advantage competing in this new market. I aim to ensure that Tortuga Society guys will be on the cutting edge.
> What types of employment structures could make job-stacking unnecessary?
Basically you need to make it viable for any extremely talented 24yo guy to start his own consultancy. That is what would adequately replace it.
As it stands this *kind of* works in tech but you def couldn't pull this off in financial services or any other hyper-credentialized and conservative field. Too many of the brass worship McKinsey and Deloitte and KPMG in these industries and you basically need to be an old man who steals clients from your old employer to compete.
> Would you want that or do you like being a pirate?
My current leadership role in Tortuga is almost perfect for me because it combines my two skillsets:
1) Marketing / Branding / Organization / Strategy from my time as a consultant manager at Deloitte
2) Making edgy propaganda, from my Alt Right days
So personally I would stay a pirate insofar as I think my current role allows me to provide the most value to the world as I can and be as useful as humanly possible.
But if I had to choose between stacking three data analyst roles and running a consultancy obviously the latter any day of the week. But only if I'm not fighting a bunch of credentialism, McKinsey worship, regulatory capture etc.
>How would you approach these issues and these as an employer?
Technically I am right now in running this quasi-startup--my officers Theon and Sesped each have two remote jobs in addition to working for me and Blackbeard has one other and headed for more. It hasn't been an issue so far.
But I know that's kind of a BS answer, so if I were running a normie consultancy I'd probably try to pivot my firm to paying for results-based contract work ASAP. I would game around the expectation that my employees will do the best thing for themselves.
Honestly I wouldn't want the employee who would rather make $150k than $450k just because he likes me or whatever. He is going to be weak and unagentic and will probably let the firm down in a vital moment. I want sharks who can eat what they kill.
Also I believe in incentive alignment and think salaries are just horrible for that in general tbh. It should be project based and aligned entirely with results or amount to equity in some revenue-generating process (how I am currently remunerating my officers in lieu of equity).
Fun questions, thanks for asking!
If Tortuga doesn't work out, you can always start a "future of work" consultancy! But seriously, interesting insights. The theme of asymmetries is apt and something I am attuned to as well.
Out of curiosity, what other predictions had Hoffman made that were on-point?
• He foresaw social networks changing the world (LinkedIn sold for $26B)
• He anticipated the rise of the sharing economy (Early Airbnb investor)
• He predicted the AI revolution years ahead of ChatGPT
source here: https://www.threads.net/@its_jasonai/post/C92T_bqvJnw?xmt=AQGzEkfY9wabKSUL5iDHID52p_z9SDJ_pUi82PQlqODMzQ
This is a very fair minded article. One contention is with this line
"It seems unethical to deceive employers by taking multiple full-time W2 jobs without their knowledge"
What reasoning does this come from? To contrast allow me to post a quote about corporate board governance:
"Shirley Jackson is a case in point. Jackson, an accomplished theoretical physicist, sits on the board of eight major companies, all while tending to her day job as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Vernon Jordan Vernon Jordan manages to sit on six boards (more if you look beyond S&P 500 companies), while holding down the job of senior managing partner of the investment bank Lazard Freres."
So extremely elite people can job stack 9x and no one blinks an eye but when a pleb job stacks 2x Baby Boomers lose their minds. I somehow doubt that Jackson, mentioned above, is more than 4x productive than Walt coupled with the very high compensation from a board seat vs code monkey.
Thus, there are obviously other dynamics in play regarding job stacking and the 'ethics' of having multiples jobs is a smokescreen to wag a moral finger at the pleb in an attempt to distract them from some truer more factual reasoning as to why plebs are shamed for having more than 1x income.
Thanks Dave, appreciate it. I am sympathetic with this argument but disagree. In my eyes, this is about norms around W2 full-time employment. Where you see asymmetry, I see full-time employment as a pretty consistent expectation across roles at all levels of a company. Yes, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have golden parachutes, and there are legitimate inequality issues, but they are still expected to be exclusively work for a single company just like plebes.
Board roles are more analogous to 1099 arrangements, which are non-exclusive. And 1099 contracts are available to plebs, too. It may be the case that not enough jobs are structured as 1099 roles and that 1099 opportunities are less accessible to plebes than W2 roles (which plebes may view as a form of indentured servitude). I am sympathetic to that and it is possible employment norms could shift in that direction.
The ethical reasoning is extremely basic: The fact that you don't like someone is not a moral justification for defrauding them. A job involves signing a contract in which you do a certain amount of work per week in return for a salary. If you don't do that amount of work you're violating your agreement. A board position doesn't involve the same kind of contract and it's not intended to be a full time job.
My biggest complaint about these clowns is their regressive social views. They aren’t doing this because out of sheer greed, they’re doing it because they think the corporatocracy is too woke.
Regardless of what one thinks about wokeness, it’s pretty dramatically hypocritical to commit one of the oldest crimes — fraud — while claiming to defend traditional morality.
There is often (usually) not 40 hours of work to be done for a conscientious and efficient employee. Which is why stacking is a viable course of action in the first place.
I'm selling an employer access to my time in a given window. If they need something done between 9-5 M-F, then I'd better find a way to get it done, job stacking or no. But if (as has been my experience in every remote position I've yet worked) they have a solid 2 hours of work for me to do in a day? Then I am not interested in sitting on my thumbs for their benefit, satisfaction or peace of mind.
...i came here wanting to be a pirate...i leave here thinking job stacking would rule (if possible)...i cry here thinking that some day all of humanity will be gig workers assisting robots to serve the last 1000 rich people on earth in their country mansions (mansions made out of countries)...
I'm in a position where I could easily job stack, and actually work two jobs already. It's not job stacking because it's a formalized arrangement with the contractual approval of both employers, in which specific days of the week are allocated to each company.
It's reasonable to loathe wokeness. Woke people will violate any norm or rule if it advances their ideology even a tiny amount, so I can understand how Bismarck ended up at this point. But the woke are also tactical about it - they don't break laws unless they know the enforcers are also woke and will let them get away with it. Otherwise they stick to tactics that won't haul them into court. Job stacking is bad tactics. Home office slackers are relatively easy to detect and most companies already have systems to detect lazy remote workers. Even if you keep laptops entirely separate you can't literally work on two jobs simultaneously, so the periods where you are doing one or the other will be detectable either by software means or, simply because sometimes you're going to get double booked on meetings.
It's especially stupid that Rajeev Ram is taking part, as he's said before he posts under his real name. Nobody will hire that guy now if they search his name and find out he's involved in this. Not smart.
Even if we ignore that it's fraud (every contract specifies min working hours), it's still not OK in any moral reference frame. Woke people are horrible towards normies because they want conversions, and if it's at the point of a sword then so be it. The key is that the normies know why the woke hate them and what they can do to make the pain end (bend the knee and become an "ally"), but job stacking isn't like that. It assumes the people on the receiving end of the punishment don't find out, so they can't ever change their behavior.
Thus we arrive at the conclusion that job stacking is merely a form of petty theft, justified by feelings of oppression and helplessness. It is in many ways the couch dweller's equivalent to rioting. They aren't smashing in shop windows and stealing TV sets, but it's not much different conceptually - they're enriching themselves by stealing and using anger at the ruling class that hates them as an excuse.
To say this is a slippery slope would be a dramatic understatement. Once you go down that road, very quickly almost any excuse will be seized on to justify the looting. Just like how the woke constantly invent new infractions to justify their sadism, the Tortuga pirates will soon be finding justifications to steal from even companies that aren't particularly woke. And then they will get caught, and fired, and given bad references, and possibly prosecuted by people who know their real identities. I just don't see this being the right set of tactics, even if their anger is understandable.
I'm not even planning on taking multiple jobs, but thanks for the stern warning and public repudiation, I guess? I'll be sure to come back and report to you when the moral slippery slope apparently inevitably consumes me (although apparently I'm already equivalent to impotent couch-dwellers, so maybe it already has?).
It doesn't matter what you personally plan to do. You're assisting those who take multiple jobs, so look at it from a potential employer's perspective: how can they know? Are you likely to be a loyal and trustworthy employee, vs the other candidates available? The balance of probabilities says no. Would you hire yourself, given that information?
Alistair, I respect your opinions but request you leave Rajeev out of this. Doesn't seem fair to name drop him in this context.
OK, that's fine. I mention him only because he is advertised prominently in Bismarck's posts.
Rajeev has been a world-class project manager and community lead for our organization and I can't think of anyone more honorable and trustworthy.
I'm going to make sure he earns a lot more through Tortuga than he ever would in Corporate America.
But I thought your goal is to get jobs IN corporate America? Where are all these six figure data analyst jobs, if not in corporations?
We have our own infrastructure and products that we're offering to guys to help them with job stacking. Tortuga is basically a startup at this juncture.
Personally, I disapprove of the practice and agree with your overall view, though you come down harsher than I do. Putting that aside, do you think agree that employment models need to evolve? What do you make of the Reid Hoffman prediction?
I watched the linked video but what Hoffman says is a bit vague, so it's hard to know what to make of it. He's predicting a greater shift towards gig work, but it's not obvious why this should be an effect of AI and the video is clipped so it doesn't address that question directly.
The ability to do gig work for the laptop class has existed for a long time now already. Upwork and friends are there, people use them, I've hired contractors through such platforms. It wasn't a great experience and my other entrepreneur friends report similar experiences (in fact they told me I'd have a bad experience with Upwork, which I did). The quality of work you get out of full timers is just so much higher. There's a reason companies in the market express a strong preference for full timers. I had to negotiate well to get a part time role, and I'm an exception in that company. They definitely don't like it and don't want to see part time work grow, let alone gig work. So whilst I would never disregard or disrepect any opinion about the future Reid Hoffman has, it's pretty hard to see it happening right now. Even the sea change that COVID forced with respect to remote work has been a bitter fight all the way, and that's far less of a change than a shift to gig work would be.
1) What makes you think we're going to get caught? On Telegram I've organized a committee of several cybersecurity experts from the broader group who are reviewing our opsec to prevent leaks, and we're also developing procedures to ensure members can take their security into their own hands.
2) Not all companies have spy infrastructure and the ones that do are easy to cheese with a mouse wiggler or other such solutions.
3) Job stackers talk extensively about how not to get double booked on meetings and handle this when it happens. Gaming around this is a major part of the lifestyle.
4) Rajeev could probably call himself Roger and create a face Facebook page and it would easily get around stupid HR ladies.
5) Companies will be forced to change their behavior and adopt a more meritocratic incentive structure as more people job stack. The change will happen in response to a systemic development, even if individuals do it covertly.
6) Job stacking isn't illegal in any criminal sense and even in the civil sense the courts are moving in our direction on issues like noncompetes.
Would be happy to debate this with you publicly on my podcast.
As Jerry Seinfeld once said... "but I don't want to be a pirate!"
Ha. I don't want to be one either.
This is incredibly intersubjective, so wherever you stand on it likely reflects your generational position, class standing, and employment status. I'm very black pilled on employment. It's far from a meritocracy... 80% of positions aren't even advertised, and of course it's not what you know but who you know that gets most people their jobs. A lot of it just comes down to chaotic luck beyond any single person's control. I'm unemployed, so the idea that some people have multiple jobs does bother me on a fairness level. But life isn't fair, and this certainly falls into the hate the game not the player category. If someone is gaming an unfair system to protect their own position, more power to them. For me to hate job stackers would be like someone whose credit score was too low to get a good credit card hating me for getting three dozen of them with their lucrative accompanying sign up bonuses.
It would be a far different situation if, instead of job stacking, people were monetizing the asymmetries inherent to the job vacancy process like a pyramid scheme. I could easily see someone knowing how to game the application process getting, say, over 5 jobs, and then hiring other people to actually do them remotely for a sizable cut. Temp agencies usually take 50%, so there's already a real world version of this for short term work. And then you have municipal government and union jobs where employment can be predicated on kickbacks.
This is conjecture, but I suspect the most successful job-stackers will see the logic of turning their work into formal business consultancies and eventually convert their employers into clients. This would make it easier to hire and farm work to others and would have other benefits too - like creating enterprise value. Good luck in your job search, by the way.
Thanks!
Thank you for this perspective! As fellow GenX, maybe we have some leftover Boomer-inherited ethical standards or something. It’s hard for me to have to ritually sacrifice what’s left of my conscience in order to “live the good life” or what not.
It’s hard when evidence that ethical behavior and hard work pay off seems to be less than it used to. But I’m not sure of anything anymore. Maybe the world-stories I was raised with were never what I believed they were. And yet that is what I built my personality around, and this runs deep.
I'm sure piracy works right until several employers need rush jobs done at the same time.
Yeah, technically wrong, and I wouldn't do it myself because it's not worth the trouble if caught, amongst other reasons (I too haven't worked as a W-2 employee for awhile).
But I come from a place of such extremely low opinion of most (all?) large, global employers where job stackers can hide, that I can't fully condemn the practice either. If it's a small business, or work based on personal relationships, yeah I can condemn that. That seems more like lying or theft.
I definitely would never advocate that someone job stack at small businesses.
Just from a purely amoral perspective it would be a huge pain in the ass! The key is almost always to get lost in the crowd at a giant corp and keep your head down.
Job stacking is usually DevOps, where the value of labor is almost entirely domain knowledge, but it also gives the dev access to everything so I get the concern about outsourcing it to contractors. I still do though, because I trust that I can evaluate what they’re doing.
Hey thanks for commenting. I don't understand DevOps but it's interesting that employers feel more secure with FTEs than 1099s. Is there a difference in an employer's ability to codify or enforce IP protection and confidentiality in W2 vs 1099?
As far as I know the only difference is vibes.
I suppose the health insurance from an employer begets some additional loyalty but I think the real difference is that people who become employees are typically less mercenary.
The difference has been degrading for a long time though.