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The old formula was simple: find a good job, work hard, and move up. But as living costs climb and wages stall, a growing number of workers are quietly rewriting the rules — holding down multiple full-time positions simultaneously, without any of their employers knowing.
Called "overemployment," the practice thrived in the remote-work era and has taken especially deep root in tech and IT. Today, roughly 5.2% of American workers hold multiple jobs, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 72% report some form of side income, according to MyPerfectResume. A Reddit community dedicated to the lifestyle has swelled past 430,000 members.
The trend broke into public consciousness when Suhail Doshi, founder of Mixpanel and Playground, called out an engineer named Soham Parekh on X for secretly working at three or four startups at once. "He's been preying on YC companies," Doshi wrote, noting he'd fired the man within his first week. The post went viral — but Parekh, it turned out, was hardly alone.
So what's driving it? Tech pundit Joe Procopio thinks money is only part of the story. The deeper motivation, he argues, may be something closer to retaliation. "Employers throttled loyalty to near zero," he wrote on LinkedIn, "meaning pretty much all jobs can be considered contract jobs now." Workers, in other words, are simply returning the favor.
Consider "Damien," an IT professional, Business Insider followed as he juggled five full-time remote jobs and pulled in $746,000 a year. Five years ago, he was making $90,000. When a better offer came in at $110,000, he didn't quit — he stacked. Job after job followed, each adding to an income that now funds his family, a new car, and savings against a future he sees growing less certain. He drew the line at a sixth position, mindful of colleagues losing jobs in a shrinking industry.
The overemployment trend, whatever one thinks of its ethics, raises a question worth sitting with: how exposed are you to a single income stream? Layoffs arrive without warning. Industries shift. The workers quietly holding three or four jobs aren't just being greedy — many are hedging against a labor market that has already shown it won't protect them.
Whether the strategy is sustainable is another matter. "How long can someone keep up the ruse?" Procopio asks. "Television has taught us that this scheme always ends in sadness for everyone involved." For now, though, thousands are betting the math works out — and so far, for some, it has.