r/overemployed • u/SecretRecipe • Aug 21 '26
The original OE open unmoderated discord turned into an unusable mess with all the spam and bots. To prevent this from happening to our new discord and keep the tourists and your HR department away so it is a safer place to discuss strategies and methods we're removing the link from reddit and requesting anyone who wants access to request it through the mods first. Please have some sort of post / comment history in the sub first.
r/overemployed • u/SecretRecipe • Feb 12 '25
I wanted to create a running FAQ to help cut down on the number of times we have to discuss the same topics and make sure people are getting the proper answers / advice. I will edit this post with additional questions and answers as they come up.
People can and do OE in any Job where you can work remote or hybrid is a potential target. The ideal job is one that isn't meeting heavy or one where you can control the meetings. Being senior enough to delegate out some of the busy work is also helpful. You generally want to make sure you are good enough at your first job that you can meet/exceed expectations on less than 15 hours per week of actual real work. It's also better to OE on a large team / large company. When there is a busy season or a large project the increase in work is more evenly spread across a large number of people so you're less likely to have to deal with large peaks and valleys in level of effort.
Anything requiring any sort of clearance from the government or other regulatory body. Don't OE a federal clearance job or anything requiring a FINRA clearance. Good Rule is "If any part of your paycheck comes from public funds don't OE that job". Public sector work pays shit anyway and you're better than that. Go find a solid private sector role and reduce the risk.
A lot of people prefer the stability of having at least one W2 for the benefits but I (secretrecipe) personally prefer to go all contract (on Corp to Corp or C2C) terms. You make significantly more money and get far better tax treatment and the increase in net income more than makes up for having to cover your own benefits. There's more detail here if you are interested.
No. At least not for the foreseeable future. Every CEO and HR department already knows about OE and has for well over a decade. This isn't a new thing. It's all the quiet quitters out there who slack off and deliver nothing of value while working remote that are causing problems. Not the folks who are delivering as expected at multiple jobs.
OE in the office isn't terribly difficult if you go in prepared. Have a mobile hotspot for your J2+. keep J2+ zoom or teams active on your phone so you can reply to IMs quickly. Find some nice quiet disused conference room or other space in the office you can utilize for meetings or work that pops up. Don't be afraid to take a call from the lobby or parking lot. People take personal calls all the time. If you don't act nervous then you won't look suspicious. Try and control your meetings towards the beginning or end of the day so you can minimize the amount of running back and forth you need to do.
There are a number of ways to handle this.
Obfuscation - Create multiple accounts with your name and various details. Don't upload a photo etc.. Create noise around the search and any time someone asks you about LI just mention that you don't use it.
Abandonment - Remove any recent work history and make it look like you just haven't done anything to update your profile. If anyone asks or pushes the issue tell them that you used an old work email to register the account and you have no access to it anymore so you just don't use LI any longer.
Restructure - (this is what I personally do) Nothing says your LI profile needs to be your online resume. Remove any work history or affiliation with any company and restructure the profile to discuss your talents, your aspirations and career goals.
If you work at a place or in a role that demands you have a Linkedin profile with them then go ahead and opt for the first option. Use a shortened name or a nickname and leave it as sparse as possible.
This isnt a job hunting sub. that is a skill that you need to figure out as a prerequisite to being OE. Knowing how to fairly easily land remote / hybrid jobs is something most of the true OE community has become quite good at and tends to gatekeep for obvious reasons.
Unless you have an incredibly simple return, no kids, no property, no real assets, just a couple W2s and that's it I would recommend getting an accountant. A few thoughts beyond that. On withholdings, underwitholding penalties. They're small. You'll get a much larger return on your money over the span of a year even if you just park it in a HYSA than the underpayment penalty will cost. You can go to a simple calculator input your info and get a directionally correct estimate of how much you'll owe and adjust your withholdings accordingly.
On Security, the IRS / your accountant don't give a shit if you have more than one W2. Nobody is going to tell on you. No need to be paranoid about this.
On tax strategy. Advice on this is best asked to your CPA. Everyones situation is different so any advice given here may be awesome for some people and not work at all for others. I personally only work on C2C terms and have a moderately aggressive tax strategy and get my effective tax down to about 15% each year which is less than half of what I would end up paying were I working fully on W2 terms.
If you're particularly concerned about stability then keeping one W2 job is great, gives you better protections, better benefits etc.. I'm of the opinion that J2+ is better on contract than W2. Lower risk, higher pay, less background scrutiny, no need for the additional benefits etc... I personally work all my jobs on contract (C2C) and here's my rationale. Quick disclaimer your personal situation may be unique. This is a one size fits most approach.
Don't start new jobs close to one another.
Keeping some distance between your J1 and J2+ isn't just a bit of good advice geographically but is also good advice on start dates. You never want to find yourself starting two jobs on the same day, week, month if you can avoid it. You need to figure out the lay of the land and your capacity for addtional work before you commit to additional jobs. Onboarding two jobs at once is a recipe for disaster.
Is there anyone OE in _________.
Yes, if it's a white collar field that has the opportunity for remote or hybrid work there someone OEing it. If you want to find those people join the discord and ask around.
OE is difficult to pull off and even more difficult to manage long term. It isn't for people just starting out, people looking for a career change, people who aren't already at the top of their game or people that have to ask really simple questions that they could figure out with a google search. If you're not skilled enough to pull this off you could end up screwing up your career. Don't try this before you're ready. If you have to ask questions like "How do I find a second job?" or "how do I get a remote job" you're not ready.
These are all subjective questions that no internet stranger can answer for you. Everyone has a different skill set, different set of innate talents, different set of goals and different risk tolerance. If you were directed here after asking a question like this then it's because only you can answer this for yourself.
No. The only scenario where this may be a problem is if they're using the same PEO like Insperity because they aren't just a payroll provider, they're an outsourced HR / Risk management team as well who has a remit to protect the business from liability.
No.
I'll dig around our past posts for some other frequently asked questions and keep adding here. If you have any you recommend be added please comment below.
There is a lot of good general information in this sub but we tend to gatekeep more advanced sources and methods and save those for the discord or mastermind sessions so they can still remain somewhat akin to OE trade secrets.
r/overemployed • u/Upset_Strength2183 • 12h ago
Job 1: March 2022-December 2025
Job 2: March 2024-current
Job 3: April 2024- current
Job 1 ended up changing management and I literally had no choice but to quit. The job came from being an OE dream to insane micromanagement. Well now I struggle with navigating my resume because if I omit Job 1 it will look like I have an insane gap on my resume. Advice?
r/overemployed • u/MixPast2052 • 11h ago
I've been lurking here for a while, and I'm genuinely impressed by people managing multiple remote positions.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to land one solid remote job.
A little background:
MBA and master's in project management.
Approximately six years of combined experience in reporting, analytics, and business operations at large organizations, including healthcare and telecommunications.
Experience with Excel, SQL, reporting systems, and dashboards.
Currently refreshing and expanding my skills in Power BI, Tableau, Python, and statistics.
Interested in data analytics, business analytics, healthcare operations, and process improvement.
I'm targeting positions in the $75K–$100K range, preferably fully remote.
I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have successfully landed multiple remote positions.
A few questions:
Which job titles or specialties have produced the best results for you?
Are you finding jobs primarily through LinkedIn, recruiters, referrals, or direct company applications?
What separates candidates who consistently get interviews from those who struggle?
Are there particular industries or types of employers you'd recommend?
What would you prioritize if you were searching for your first remote position today?
I'm not looking to juggle five jobs. I'd just like to land one good position where I can contribute and continue developing professionally.
I figured a community full of people who seem to collect remote jobs like Pokémon might have some useful insights.
Appreciate any constructive advice.
r/overemployed • u/bufflurk • 15h ago
I completed a year of OE with J1 fully onsite and j2 fully remote. J2 work is max 2 hours a day unless some prod pipeline breaks. J1 is too busy and takes more than 8 hours a day sometimes (big tech) even with AI and stuff I’m always busy.
The problem is I haven’t taken a single day off other than holidays and now I’m kind of getting tired. Just need some motivation to keep going.
TC: $215k J1 + 105k J2
r/overemployed • u/OEnerdo • 1d ago
Like the flight tickets are $700, the hotel for the week is $2500. Not to mention the food, ubers, etc for another $1000 or so. The company is spending like $5k just for me to come to the office for a week and really for what?
My new manager works remote. My team is global. Idk why the fuck I’m supposed to go in for an in-person orientation.
Now I have to take a week-long fuckall PTO from all my other Js on short notice. Ffs.
Has anyone tried to NOT take a PTO from other jobs and ride it out with a new job orientation onsite?
r/overemployed • u/Working_Fly5744 • 13h ago
Well after I got laid off I just got offered a new J2 just when the severance pay ended.
The pay is almost 50% less than my last J2 but I just negotiated a little bit higher than what was offered and I figured it was worth it to take it while I look for a higher paying J2. This time around I plan to do things little different. I lived a little lavish for a bit but now it is time to save and plan.
God speed 🫡
r/overemployed • u/Brilliant-War-5745 • 12h ago
I saw these two questions on separate applications. IMO asking this during the application is wildly invasive and frankly irrelevant. What do you all think?
r/overemployed • u/WCPitt • 4h ago
Fellow larpers,
I am looking for some advice on how you'd personally format your Resume based on the below. I'm probably overthinking it but that is one of my many talents.
Context: I've been running 2-3 MC servers since approx. ~8 months after graduating with an MS in CS back in 2022. The job I took upon graduation was SWE at a well-known bank (think Charlotte). They put me on an entirely offshore team who refused to KT me AND they expected me in office, which obviously conflicted with the offshore schedule. This led to me basically showing up to coffee swipe and go home. Extremely easy stories and very little work.
After 6 months of this, I assumed my time was dwindling, so I started applying... and I got an offer pretty quickly for what turned out to be a really easy remote contract, systems engineering. [This is when I realized OE was a thing]. Fastforward another bit of time, I was doing maybe 2 hours of work a day for both jobs... As you'd predict, I ended up with a third position, sysadmin for a medium-sized company in a niche industry.
I fell in love with the sysadmin job and it near-immediately became my J1. I quickly climbed the ladder here and ultimately ended up directing the IT dept and being a jack of all trades, touching everything... networking, security, data/reporting, BA work, product ownership, overseeing SD/application support, and even managing a 10 person team. They respected me enough to give me respective promotions/pay adjustments alongside my increased responsibilities and I would've retired here if I could've.
The 'downfall': J2 contract wasn't renewed at the one year mark, I quit the SWE gig to buy a house back in my home state, and I picked up another sysadmin position as a new J2. Most unfortunate, my "new J1" company abruptly shut down operations overnight recently.
To Summarize: I already know I can mess around with bulletpoints under any of the jobs while tailoring my Resume(s), I am just trying to figure out what order or combination would be most "impressive" looking, title/timeline wise.
I did recently accept an offer for a new J2, but the pay is abysmally low, sadly. With that said, I am now becoming very driven towards mastering the art of applying/increasing my response rate, which all begins with the Resume.
This brings me to the y'all, the true experts. I'm creating semi-tailored Resumes for all different sorts of IT positions, but I think I need to pick and stick with one set of job history. A single source of truth, if you will.
Right now, using the above bulletpoints as references, my Resume looks like:
Would it be more impressive to, say, list J1 until its true end date and use that end date for J3's start date? Similarly, is having that contract position on my Resume a red flag due to the crossover? Should I keep my J3 title as senior systems admin (title before managerial promotion), as I still don't truly feel that I've had enough time/experience with direct reports?
Any and all advice is greatly appreciated... and I apologize for the length of this post.
Thanks,
r/overemployed • u/kilolazy • 7h ago
So I have an offer for J2 but found out through my own research that that use TWN and froze it. However, I realized then that my current J1 has been reporting to TWN. I have two questions:
r/overemployed • u/glSwadow • 19h ago
Hey folks,
After a streak of bad luck, I managed to land two decent jobs around the same time and decided to give OE a shot. One is in sales and the other in marketing. Both companies are fairly new, and their processes are all over the place, so it's worked out decently enough. I have some leeway to manage both roles.
When I started, I decided to stop using LinkedIn altogether. My assumption was that having an outdated profile is common enough that neither company would bother checking.
Today, however, my manager at J2 reached out and asked me to update my LinkedIn to reflect my employment and link the company page.
I complied, but now I'm exposed to someone at J1 checking my profile and discovering J2. Contractually, I'm not breaking any rules, but we all know how companies can feel about OE.
I've already disabled profile update notifications and removed the company from the top of my profile. I'm trying to minimize visibility without doing anything unusual that could raise suspicion.
I don't particularly expect anyone at J1 to check my LinkedIn again, but you never know. And if I had to choose between the two jobs, I'd keep J1 in a heartbeat.
In hindsight, I probably should've handled LinkedIn differently from the beginning, but here we are.
Has anyone dealt with a manager explicitly requesting a LinkedIn update while OE? Is there anything else I can realistically do to minimize exposure without making things more suspicious?
Appreciate any advice!
r/overemployed • u/behi66 • 1d ago
I recently got a new remote j2 in US after losing a previous j2, and I'm dealing with a weird kind of stress. Couple months into the job, I am nothing but a messenger between ai and my manager. For all I know I could be replaced with one of them speech-to-text tools, and frankly I don't even know why they hire people anymore. Funny part is the manager and rest of the team are ai-savvy people, not some of those "ai is useless because it got strawberry spelt wrong" type of people.
Anybody has dealt with something like that recently? Mind sharing how did you navigate it?
r/overemployed • u/SnooDoughnuts2335 • 9h ago
I started J1 in beginning of Oct. and it's flexible 40 hrs including weekends. Use workday for clocking in.
J2 interview is coming up and also offers flexible 40 hrs with weekends. Should J1 be mentioned during the interview? Both not gov jobs only contract. J1 is short term couple months.
r/overemployed • u/certified_source • 1d ago
Every single time I think I need to drop down to 1 job, universe tells me otherwise. I was starting to think that having J2 as hybrid was way too much, and that I should focus on J1 especially since I really did love the product and company. I had great reviews from J1, worked with great customers, and out of nowhere I got the classic random meeting invite.
Its just so crazy because I was actually shocked, but not really. I truly thought I could ride this one out for a few years. Luckily I was already interviewing for a remote J3 to replace J2, and now J2 is my main.
Its just not safe at all to be going all in with 1 job right now. Trust that gut feeling and take that 2nd or 3rd.
r/overemployed • u/Working_Fly5744 • 10h ago
I just received an offer letter for a new J2 and I have a few questions about how to navigate a new J2.
I will obviously need to undergo a background check, I obviously won’t be unfreezing my TWN but when needing to verify employment history do you provide paystubs for both Js? Won’t they know that you’re working multiple Js when you provide both paystubs?
r/overemployed • u/jonasp4 • 8h ago
pessoal, estou com 2 jobs, tem dias que é tranquilo, outros eu passo a noite toda e vou dormir só 12 AM pra conseguir entregar tudo dos jobs, recebi uma proposta de j3 hoje, vou chegar a um patamar de salario que nunca havia chegado, mas tenho medo dos problemas que posso desenvolver, tenho ansiedade e ja tive TEPT que venho tratando e to muito melhor, venho de uma família pobre de classe baixa entao a oferta de chegar a esse patamar financeiro é algo incrivel, mas tenho medo de prejudicar minha saúde a longo prazo, o que vocês acham? Será que o dinheiro a mais compensa o estresse? Vou poder comprar bastante coisa e não me preocupar com a fatura do cartão ao final do mês mas ao mesmo tempo terei que reduzir academia, esportes e lazer…
r/overemployed • u/ResumeRory • 1d ago
A new set of laws bans employers from using AI tools to track bathroom time, read emotional state, or pull neural data from employees! Also now requires a real human to sign off before an automated system can be the reason someone gets fired... no more fully automated terminations.
It's the implication that bothered me... These bans exist because the tools already existed somewhere. Whatever's floating around in the monitoring software market got specific enough that lawmakers felt they had to draw a line at bathroom timers and emotion detection...
Doesn't change much for the standard idle-timer and activity-logger stuff most of us are already managing around. But worth knowing the ceiling on what's technically out there is higher than I assumed, and this is only banned in one state so far!
Anyone run into monitoring software on a second job that felt like it was built for catching exactly this kind of thing, versus just generic productivity theater?
r/overemployed • u/DaftPaul_ • 11h ago
Generally curious if an EE can be OE. I usually have to work in office to do my job, but jealous of more remote roles and I would totally try this.
r/overemployed • u/computerjunkie7410 • 1d ago
This update is a a lot later than normal because I did my taxes late this year.
Highlights:
Notes:
I quit one job (which I am normally totally against) and was downsized from another. The job I quit was because I needed to leave on good terms. Manager was a friend and it's a company I have been back to multiple times. They love me there but I just couldn't bring myself to do all the AI-heavy work. It wasn't interesting for me and took too much mental energy out of me to do the simplest things.
Downsizing happens especially in today's tech market so I'm fine with it. I haven't bothered to look for new jobs yet.
Going forward:
I might start looking again for more jobs in a month or so and into next year. For now, I'm enjoying the ease of 2Js and both current jobs look strong for at least the next year. I'm so close to retirement I can taste it and it's messing with my discipline to get the work done that's necessary.
Previous updates:
r/overemployed • u/Bulky-Ambassador • 12h ago
Interested in remote nursing but the pay is so low I’d have to work 2 or 3 to make it.
r/overemployed • u/SuccessfulScene6174 • 18h ago
I’ve been following this subreddit for a while now and been wondering how do you guys at LATAM manage to get remote interviews without LinkedIn
I update my CV and LinkedIn to get AI scrappers attention and have been applying a lot but all my interviews have been through recruiters reaching out at LinkedIn.
I’m considering deactivating my LinkedIn to avoid OE suspicions in case I do land 2 jobs
How do you do it?
r/overemployed • u/adea03 • 6h ago
Don’t get me wrong, I am not here to preach any course or something like that.
I just don’t understand why you guys don’t try building and scaling your own business. Most of you are highly qualified professionals and perfectly capable of building a money generating system. Instead, you spend months for finding other jobs and keep switching between their schedules. Isn’t it stressful? Is life all about working and working?
Before anyone asks, I do ecommerce; so yeah, I am not employed in the traditional sense.
r/overemployed • u/Beautiful_Number_572 • 1d ago
So I've been tagged in a lot of comments about whether using KVM switch's for multiple J's is a bad idea -- while not fully definitive on everyone's situation I wanted to share an update on mine.
My KVM has 3 ports / I run 3 laptops to it.
Today I was trying to finalize my 3rd J laptop set up (was waiting on final cable -- my new J laptops ports are such that I needed a USB A (blue) to HDMI to make the system work... BUT the cable was missing a driver and I needed Admin override to install it (obnoxious).
I was on the phone with IT showing pictures of my ports, blah blah, to justify why I needed the driver. He even asked why I wasn't using the standard port the company uses and I said it was more convenient to use mine I already had in place.
Finally after a lot of pictures and digging around he relented, and I'm set - I'd think that if they were going to discover or be able to dig into my KVM it would've been there.
Blessing or luck, regardless - nice now having some peace of mind and having the final piece of my set-up complete.
r/overemployed • u/VegetableTry • 12h ago
Hello everyone.
So my wife is getting laid off and is interviewing with another company. Current company is set on her last day and the new company won’t budge on their start date. She is expected to receive a severance from her current company which she would lose if she left early. The current job doesn’t keep her very busy. This is in pharma, do you think she would get caught working two jobs for two weeks? Do they check those kinds of things?
Thank you in advance.
