Juggling Act

Working from home makes it easier to secretly take on multiple full-time tech jobs. The extra cash is nice-but overlapping Zooms can be tricky.

- By Megan Carnegie

EVERY WEEKDAY at 9 am, Abel clocks in from an office he recently started renting in Chicago. He skips breakfast and works until 2 pm, when he logs off and finally eats a meal. Nice short day for a tech job. But Abel isn't working just one job-he's holding down four full-time gigs in secret, all for enterprise startups. His combined annual salary is $680,000.

Abel started juggling jobs on the sly a year ago, when he realized he was doing higher-quality work faster than his colleagues. "I found myself with a lot of free time," says the 35-year-old. "With rising inflation, I figured taking a second job was a way to get ahead of the curve. My wife and I have three kids, and we're trying to save to buy a house."

He's been doing the first job (which he calls "J1") for just over four years, and he started J2 and J3 in 2021 before taking on J4 last summer. Ideally, he wants to keep them all for the next year, which he thinks is sustainable, especially since he now has a dedicated space for his arsenal of laptops and other electronics.

"One point of stress is the sheer amount of meetings, many of which could be written up or dealt with in Slack," Abel says. (Like the other tech workers WIRED spoke to for this story, he asked that we not use his real name.) If two meetings clash on his calendar, Abel uses two sets of headphones-one meeting in each ear. "It takes some practice, but now I can pay loose attention to both streams of information," he says. Abel will tune in if he hears his name, blaming a bad connection if there's a delay. Three-meeting overlaps can get "crazy," he says.