Key takeaways
- AI facilitates moonlighting, allowing software engineers to juggle multiple jobs effectively.
- Growing communities online share tips on managing overemployment without detection.
- Concerns arise as employers remain unaware of employees handling multiple positions simultaneously.
- Debate continues over the ethics of moonlighting in the context of AI's job impact.
- The trend of overemployment has surged since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Moonlighting is not new; in fact many people admire those who manage to juggle multiple jobs. Although popular opinion often deems it completely unethical, others argue that the same criticism applies to AI.
And it turns out that AI is actually helping people tackle different jobs at the same time and call themselves over-employed software engineers. Indians are also increasingly getting interested in this.
The interesting part is, they seem to be getting away with it. One could say, as long as they perform their tasks well, why shouldn't they be ‘getting away with it’?
The trend of overemployment started last year, which was a continuation from the COVID times. ChatGPT has enabled it for a lot more people and the concerning part is that their employers have no idea!
Debarghya Das from Menlo Ventures posted that there is a rise in the number of overemployed software engineers, working multiple jobs at the same time. He pointed out that communities on Reddit are even advising people on how to do it without getting caught.
Stealing Jobs?
An important thing to note is that there are people occupying multiple job roles at a time when there aren’t many, and people are scared of AI taking over jobs. Also, data suggests that there are only about 2000 senior AI engineers in India, so what would happen if the top skilled engineers occupied most of the existing jobs, leaving next to nothing for others joining the field?
Last year, one of the users said, “ChatGPT does 80% of my job,” which allows him to apply for multiple positions, and finish the work in half the time. Moreover, there is a complete Reddit thread where “overemployed” people talk about how they are landing different jobs, working on more than two jobs at the same time, and looking for even more opportunities.
Roles that would have been filled by another person are now getting filled by a single person, thanks to ChatGPT and similar AI products. It’s almost as if Richard Baldwin’s quote from the 2023 World Economic Forum, “AI won’t take your job, it’s somebody using AI that will take your job”, is coming true.
Coding too is slowly facing the brunt of its own development, with a lot of auto code generators shrinking from a 10-people job to just one human and AI partnership.
Allie K Miller posted on LinkedIn a list of jobs that are paying big bucks to people working with AI. She said that AI will not replace jobs but actually enable employees. One of the startups she invested in told her: “We’d rather hire one software engineer who knows how to use AI than five who don’t, even if it’s the same cost.”
Not a ‘Job Well Done’
Another thing to note is that Indian engineers are very well versed in moonlighting. A user pointed out on a Hacker News discussion that he used to work with some Indians in senior positions, but the output with these overemployed people was “junior level at best”.
“They either needed constant hand-holding or disappeared for weeks, then reappeared with half-baked solutions right before deadlines. Obviously overemployed. Eventually, I left the team because I was tired of doing their work,” explained the users.
A reason for a lot of people working multiple jobs is because of lower salary packages in their primary job. This is not to endorse multiple jobs, but the situation for software engineers is dire in India, unless they are not working with AI.
A user on the Reddit community said that it is important to complete the work of both jobs while only working 40 hours, and not doubling the amount of working time, to get double pay for the same amount of time. This definitely points out that people are not dedicating full attention to both the jobs, just getting it done to reel in the money.
Even though moonlighting sounds unethical, people with the help of AI are easily able to do 8 hours of work in 2 hours, and give time for the other jobs, which might not sound like a bad deal for the person doing it given the double pay.
The discussion forums are full of people speaking out about their choice of working double jobs and stealing the jobs of others, but in the end, the community convinces them it's for their own good and that it’s fine as long as they are doing justice to both the jobs.
Before diving into overemployed forums, it's useful to understand some of the terminology. Those who identify as OE (overemployed) assign a priority to each of their jobs. J1 is their top priority, the job they focus on first; J2 is secondary; J3 is tertiary; and so on. The goal is to maximise their total compensation (TC) while minimising the hours worked per week (HPW) on each job.
