Comment by dazzeloid

That’s pretty faint praise.

If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.

Yes. He could do solid work when you narrowly define it but he probably sank the productivity and morale of people he was working with.

Individual performance doesn’t matter. Team performance does. All of this work to find 10x engineers is meaningless if they can’t raise the output of the team itself. People can make their teams better (sometimes with elite communication skills instead of technical), but we should be focusing more on building 10x teams, not trying to find unicorns.

People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.

I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.

It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.

It’s called team building. You can believe in it or not. You can join a company that values that, or not.

I worked with a guy who wasn't even "over employed" but was working on some big side project at home.

He would blow off any meeting before noon. Just wouldn't show up.

His work was usually late and rushed/poor quality. Lots of corners cut. Oftentimes he didn't even get something right the first time because he didn't have the full context because he missed discussion that happened in the meetings he didn't show up to.

He was full of shit. Every day he was having some personal tragedy. Excuse after excuse.

He started trouble with teammates in a way I've just never seen before.

He was just all around a net negative even though he occasionally did decent work. Everyone was happy to see him go.

This is my experience for the past 10 years I've been working in the industry. As soon as someone finds out I am more capable at something than the rest of the colleagues on the team I get to do all the work in that area yet receive nothing in return. Every time I tried to bring something up as an example of doing something more my achievements were downplayed as part of the regular duties or my mistakes were put on the pedestal instead. There were also calls to do more, even though I already was doing more than the average programmer on the project. Nothing was ever enough.

In my current job I aimed to be painfully average at everything I do and so far I haven't seen any difference. I still get the same reviews I was getting all these years and the salary increases are still as mediocre as the ones I was getting when I was trying my best. My only fear is that this strategy might lead to complete stagnation. I am already bored out of my mind and I would switch jobs in a heartbeat, but I can't currently do that due to variety of reasons.