Since the COVID-19 pandemic sent much of the American work force out of their physical offices to work from home, people have had fewer obstacles to becoming overemployed. The definition of overemployed is not entirely settled, with some defining it as anyone holding a full-time job while simultaneously putting in additional hours for another employer. In this article, overemployed refers to anyone working more than one full-time job at the same time, usually without disclosing their additional job to each employer.
According to Business Insider, the typical overemployed person is male, works in tech or IT, and earns well over six figures annually. A primary motive for employees who seek out overemployment is the boost in compensation, in some cases doubling or tripling their salaries by signing up to work for multiple companies. In addition, being overemployed provides extra job security for employees in an age when many companies are slimming down their rosters. If an employee gets cut from one company, they have their other job(s) to fall back on without completely losing their income.
Of course, being overemployed has its own challenges for employees, as well. How does one manage attending two meetings at once without revealing their secret job to each employer? If each job truly demands 40 hours per week to perform, how does one find time to sleep, shower, or prepare a meal for themselves?
There is an entire subreddit dedicated to “r/overemployed” that has 402,000 members as of the date of this article. And many of the threads are dedicated to answering these questions for newly overemployed people. In response to one post from January 2025 entitled, “It’s my first time being OE and it’s slowly killing me,” the top-voted comment advised:
Stop attending the meetings where you’re not getting any value or adding any value. Work on second job while you’re in meeting with first job and vice versa. And keep your mouth shut during meetings. . . .Don’t EVER volunteer for additional work/projects. Randomly block focus time on your calendars. Delay replying to Team/Slack messages. That give[s] people impression you’re busy.
Another commenter wrote, “You’ll have to slowly reduce your bar and your output. . . . The hardest part, though, is accepting that your goal is not to excel, do great, impress, overdeliver, etc. You should focus on doing the essential and not getting fired, period. That’s it.”
One post entitled, “How to manage an OE life,” and posted in late February 2025 explained that the poster’s ability to maintain overemployment resulted from their installing software allowing them to be efficient without bragging to anyone, causing them to work only 3-6 hours per week.
In January 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated approximately 416,000 people in the U.S. held two full-time jobs simultaneously, but the statistic did not estimate how many of those were blue-collar workers. While the overemployed don’t make up a large chunk of the American work force, they can still create problems for employers. The New York Times column, The Ethicist, recently wrestled with the ethics behind overemployment. It pointed out that overemployment can reduce productivity for employees, cause employers to provide duplicative benefits like subsidized healthcare, and, in cases where employees may be working for two competitors, provide employees access to information each employer might not want a member of its competition to know.
Despite the increasing numbers of overemployed people, recent shifts to in-person office work may signal an impending end to the trend. LinkedIn’s fully remote job postings declined from 20% of all postings in April 2022 to 8% of all postings in May 2024. Hybrid work makes overemployment more doable than fully in-person work, and many workplaces plan to maintain hybrid schedules. Even two days in an office for one job can pose problems for an overemployed employee’s second job, however. We’ll see if the trend comes to an end or whether technology continues to allow “double dipping,” as many have come to refer to overemployment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/1iviltp/how_to_manage_an_oe_life/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/magazine/remote-work-second-jobs-ethics.html