Jul 272025
 

If you see tech updates on Twitter (never X), you may have heard of the strange tale of 1 Soham Parekh. Apparently the young man has taken the trend of overemployment to a level that can be best described as caricature. For a recap on what’s happened and the initial fallout, as well as Parekh trying to defend himself, here’s a video covering the incident. While it’s easy to grab a snack and enjoy the drama, this Parekh character seems emblematic of a lot of issues going on right now, and it’s worth talking about.

The first thing we need to understand is the trend of overemployment, an idea that has seized enough of the popular culture that it has a dedicated subreddit. The idea is this – the people who say they only do a few hours of “real work” per day or week went out and got themselves 2 – 3 full-time jobs at the same time. After all, if they’re only going “work” a fraction of a workweek, why not double-book that time and make some extra money? Now, to steelman the argument, overemployed people are doing the work required of them incredibly efficiently, and taking advantage of their (vastly superior) productivity to financially gain…a lot. Effectively, overemployment is like an incredibly lucrative side hustle.

I’m sympathetic to the theory that overemployment is a viable option, at least recently. When Covid sent everyone working from home, tech companies looked especially well-suited for this brave new world of easier ability to concentrate, focus, and generally work online. So they hired…a lot, all in anticipation of having future work (allegedly also to prevent competitors from having access to that talent, if you’re cynical). If you’re hired in hopes of having future work, and that work doesn’t come in, then you’re spending a lot of effort trying to find something to do. When you’re at home, and there’s nothing to do, it’s real easy to just work on something else completely unrelated without it being obvious you have nothing to do. If there are multiple companies hiring people for work they don’t have, it’s entirely believable that someone could snatch up more than 1 of these jobs and make nice money from the process.

Naturally, this is a problem we can blame on these companies. They’re the ones paying people to not do work because they didn’t have anything for these employees to do. They’re also the ones who are so incapable of supervising employees that they didn’t realize they had people who didn’t actually have work. If they only had a few hours per week of work, that someone is doing successfully, and paying like it’s an all day, every day level of work then it’s hard to feel bad for the money that got wasted.

This whole line of reasoning is based on the idea that what little work these employees actually had was getting completed, on time, and done well. Again, at the peak of overhiring, this was entirely possible. But I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, a lot of companies seem to be shedding employees lately. There’s just increasingly less people doing the same amount (if not more) work than before. Put simply, the conditions that enabled overemployment are rapidly deteriorating, if they even still exist.

For the record, I’m also sympathetic to a lot of these companies too. Even ignoring the mismanagement involved, if you hire someone for a full-time job, the expectation is that they’re at least available for a normal amount full-time work, even if you don’t have it at the moment. The whole “benefit” of salaries is that you get the full pay even if the work doesn’t take the full amount of time. There’s no reason for people getting paid for a 40-hour workweek to only be available 10-20 hours a week, even if that’s the only amount of “real” work they actually have.

Part of the problem with the whole concept of “overemployment” is the assumption that it’s possible to do a full-time job in a fraction of a week. While there are days where I’m sympathetic to only having a few hours of a day where I can sit down and focus, in 17 years of working professionally, I’ve never had a full-time job where I’m spending half or more of my time with nothing to do which means I’ve never had the time to overemploy. While I’m sure that may be a skill issue, I think the biggest contributing factor to this phenomena was ridiculous hiring bubble during Covid. Put simply, I don’t think nearly as many of the overemployed are actually doing satisfactory work like they say. I’m guessing they’re more likely to be somewhere between flakes who do nothing and are unreachable to low-performing team members who are just good enough to avoid being fired.

There’s probably a lot to unpack about how this turned into a thing beyond just the logistics of making it work. People have been (and still are) losing jobs left and right, so it behooves everyone to start looking for side income, especially after the last decade or 2 of predominantly crap economics for people. And my doubts about the overemployed’s ability to do multiple jobs satisfactorily aside, I doubt I’d say no to a setup that involved part-time effort (or less) for full-time salary. And before anyone jumps in to whine about company loyalty – no. Too many people have been laid off in favor of outsourcing, H1-Bs, or AI for that to even be part of this conversation, and the one’s that have remained haven’t had their wages keep up with inflation. Loyalty just isn’t a real thing in employment anymore.

The problem is as people are laid off and the work gets spread out to the employees left behind, overemployment is far less tenable. Say what you will about only doing “a few hours worth of work in a day,” that doesn’t actually create hours and hours of time to be doing another job. Yes, your presence isn’t actually needed in some meetings, but you’re told to attend so you sit through them. Yes, there may be a delay in getting a PR reviewed, an answer to a question, or waiting on a follow-up. You likely have more than 1 thing on your to-do list, so surely there’s something else you can work on while you wait. Right now there’s a lot of people who think they’re more clever than they actually are, ruining remote work for the rest of us.

At this point I’m certain a lot of organizations are well aware that as many employees as possible are working as many hustles as they can. Some are at least limiting themselves to “side” hustles outside of their day job hours (the professionals are at least). But the Soham Parekh case shows us all that there are people who are openly drawing a paycheck without doing work. Given the current labor market, companies can, and are, cracking down. My guess is this is the reason behind the current return to office trend. It’s not the first time companies have tried this – shutting down people getting a paycheck while spending all their time working another job was speculated to be the reason Yahoo ended remote work years ago.

At the moment, I see the overemployed facing 1 of 2 possible endings as a result of the general tech slowdown. Some people will see the writing on the wall, pick a “main” job and work it, and limit themselves to a relative few hours of freelancing on top of it. The rest will cling to the belief that nothing has actually changed, and likely lose all their jobs (which should free up openings for multiple developers). It was a wild trend, but I don’t see it being sustainable. What I’m worried is that it’s not going to self-correct before those of us who aren’t overemployed but are actually working from home get stuck back in offices because managers can’t identify people who aren’t working and just deal with the problems directly.

 Posted by at 7:41 pm

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