I'm sorry but I still don't get it. I've never had a job where being very good at it left a lot of free time during which to be very good at another job. It just left free time to move more things along more quickly or improving things. Like, I think mechanically I understand what you're saying; I think you're saying that each week or couple weeks or month or whatever, you commit to projects sized to fill about 50% of your time, and then you finish those commitments. But if I were your manager or tech lead or teammate and I knew you were employed full time at the company, I would instead want you to commit more than 50% of your time, like improving things or doing more projects or and same projects faster or helping other people with their projects or any number of other things, but not just, "welp, I got my tickets done, that's it for me!". So I still don't really get it, are you working part time at these companies, or are your managers happy to pay you for a full time job despite you working half time, or do they think you're actually filling all your time?

Without getting too specific - company A pays me to fulfill contracts we bid on within government entities. There's a ridiculously ludicrous amount of red-tape that translates into down-time for someone like me. I do one of three things: software dev, data engineering, or ML modelling. Only one of those three domains because the way this company works, everything is compartmentalized so there are specific folks for specific tasks. I'm a senior/lead so I do my part and pass it to the next fella. Company B is more end-to-end full stack dev work. I just happen to know this domain very very well, along with the libraries, tech stack, and business goals involved in it which translates into rapid development on my part supported by mid and junior level engineers.

Also, having been burned by companies in the past, I no longer make it a priority to "go the extra mile", I do exactly what is expected of me to do and generally no more or less. Although, I am a stickler for documentation so I do write up a lot of our code-base, architecture, and other things.

The last couple of companies I worked for were fairly bad in terms of quality of life so I've moved around a bit until I found jobs that were a good fit for me. The last two years especially have been somewhat of a blessing because engineers are in high demand and I played it to my advantage.

I'm employed full-time at both companies, both know that I am doubly employed and have no issue with it as they are more concerned about project/task completion rate rather than hours on the clock. Which I would argue is how it should be at most companies. Additionally, I work from home.

The reason I keep having this discussion with you is that it's interesting!

I agree that work being accomplished is what matters, not hours. But you are clearly not working full time, you could clearly accomplish more for each of the companies within the boundaries of a single full time workload, hours aside, because you do indeed accomplish more than what you're accomplishing at each company individually.

But from your description here, based on the expectation situations with the companies, what you're describing here is just two part-time jobs that are well-paid, and I certainly don't begrudge you that!

I mean if you can negotiate well (& are absolutely amazing at your job), you might be able to convince them that they either pay you full time even though you only work part time, or they pay you more than full time (i.e. give you a big raise) if they want you to work longer, which would result in >100% output for the current position... which they might not need. The guy sounds like a f'ing machine (in a good way), so probably he has big leverage in his negotiations...

Yeah that's basically where I landed on this discussion. There isn't really a "pay you full time" vs. "pay you part time" - there is just what you're being paid and the kind of work you're putting in. It's totally plausible to me to work part time for the same amount of pay as your peers make working full time, which I think is exactly what the OP is doing. But what was confusing to me is calling that "full time work" because it really isn't; it's just well-paid part time work.

Pretend he’s an offsite consultant. Now does it make sense? His employers are aware he’s making them substantial money and it’s likely they’re aware he left his last, much more demanding job, for being too stressful. So they know if they put more pressure on him than he feels like dealing with he’ll leave. Whether he’s deceiving the two proper jobs he has as an employee or not is a separate matter but they have no leverage over him either way.

I understand it for contract work, yes, but full-time salaried work is different, for exactly this reason; the expectation implicit in the relationship is that you are working full time, not just on a contracted project basis.

He negotiated different expectations. He was explicit about wanting a job with different expectations than the usually implicit ones and if at any point any of the parties find it no longer to their liking they can just end it.

If you don’t like the usual game you can make your own new game with your own rules if you can find someone else to play with you.

Yeah like I said in another comment after getting more info, these are just well paid part time jobs, which is fair enough.

How so hard to understand? There’s an acceptable level of work at a company and this guy is meeting it without having to use 40 hours a week.

I kinda get where they’re coming from. Those kinds of companies are really rare. Generally management wants to squeeze as much out of labor as humanly possible, to the point where they demand exclusive access to one’s entire labor availability.

The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.

The rarity of these companies varies widely on sector. I agree that it will be difficult to find typical tech startups that wont try to squeeze the maximum amount of time out of you.

If you want high chance of relaxed workloads, look for large corporations that exclusively contract with government out of a large budget. For example, the defense industry (e.g., the few companies designing and manufacturing planes, radars, avionics, communication equipment, guidance systems) is the biggest supplier of these type of roles that I know of. The pay in these roles is usually market competitive or better. At least from my experience, only about 20% of time or less is actually spent "working on something", much of which is sitting in irrelevant meetings. I would only recommend it if you are purely looking to collect an easy paycheck and you have a high tolerance for boredom, bureaucracy, internal politics and incompetence at all levels.

Post-covid remote work that much of government and contractors have moved to (permanently?) has likely also made it significantly easier to have multiple "full time" jobs. Management does not care about anything in this sector except that hard deadlines are met (the real deadlines, very rarely even gets close), soft deadlines are missed (used to justify "needing" more money), and nothing is completed too quickly (they want to give the illusion that hard work is being done).

> The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.

There’s an entire internet subculture of people devoted to doing this. Check out r/overemployed. And there are far, far more people who do similar things entirely above board as consultants and contractors.

Working by project with set deliverables as a consultant/contractor makes perfect sense to me. What makes less sense is doing so as a full time employee.

Basically, this is just not what salaried full-time positions are. Hourly positions pay you for your hours worked, part time positions pay you for part of your productive working time, but full time positions pay you to work full time, not part time. But I think I get it now from OP's further explanations, these are just part time positions that are in the books as full time.

A salaried role is paid the same regardless of how long one works. A rationally run business should care about what's produced, not the amount of labor-hours it takes to produce it. Developer productivity varies wildly, so in a fair labor market, time worked and compensation should vary with developer productivity (sometimes compensation is correlated with time worked, but generally at diminishing marginal returns).

Of course there is a dynamic between the business and the employee when it comes to their expectations of each other. All else being equal, a business would like to get more output per dollar spent, and an employee would like to get paid more in total and work fewer hours. Nowhere in the goals of this dynamic does hours worked come into the picture. What does happen is that businesses believe they would get more output per dollar spent if they can get a salaried employee to work more hours, so they pressure employees into doing so. People generally like to be in charge of others, so un-enlightened managers force employees to be at the office because they like seeing them there.

Enlightened managers care first about cultivating great relationships, secondly about the total output of an employee, and therefore not at all about hours worked. Marginal productivity per hours worked eventually goes negative as hours worked increase, and in my opinion the point at which it becomes negative is a lot lower than most people believe (probably ~20-30 hrs/week over the long term).

Besides, highly productive developers are in very high demand. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't give them a fair deal, because they'll go somewhere else, unless they're on a work visa in which case they'll remember if you don't treat them well.

Please do note that this argument applies mostly to salaried employees in knowledge-work.

> Besides, highly productive developers are in very high demand. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't give them a fair deal, because they'll go somewhere else

Ok, but "we expect you to work full time when we hire you for a full time job" is a fair deal. It is not "unfair" to hire people full time rather than part time.