- A Gen Xer aims to earn about $800,000 this year secretly juggling six full-time remote jobs.
- He pays other people to do most of his work across multiple jobs. In 2023, he made a $320,000 profit.
- Secretly working multiple remote jobs has helped some people increase their incomes and job security.
For Harrison, juggling six remote jobs means occasionally being double-booked for a meeting. His solution? Pay someone to pretend to be him.
“My person knows the updates and kinda sounds like me,” said Harrison, adding that his meetings typically don’t require him to be on camera. Harrison’s identity was verified by Business Insider but he asked to use a pseudonym, citing a fear of professional repercussions.
Harrison, who is a quality assurance professional in the IT sector, has built a team of seven workers who are helping him secretly hold multiple full-time jobs simultaneously. If his employment situation stays the same, he expects to earn $800,000 this year and pay his team about $250,000 — his rate is around $25 to $30 an hour.
This will be Harrison’s fifth year using this model to maximize his income. In 2023, he had six US-based, full-time remote jobs — three as a W-2 employee and three as a consultant — and earned roughly $470,000, according to earnings documents. After paying his workers, he estimated he profited about $320,000. In 2024, he said he held as many as nine jobs simultaneously and estimated he earned more than $500,000 after paying his workers — he’ll know more definitively once his taxes are completed.
“I used to be nervous about the boss, losing in the stock market, bills, kids’ tuition,” he told BI. “The big difference of having more jobs is I’m less nervous — because if something doesn’t go well, it’s not going to kill me.”
Over the past three years, BI has interviewed more than two dozen “overemployed” workers who have secretly held multiple jobs to boost their incomes and job security. However, Harrison is among an even smaller group of job jugglers who have hired people to do some or most of their work, a trend facilitated by the remote work revolution, globalized social networks, and growing access to software tools that make outsourcing one’s jobs possible, BI previously reported.
To be sure, holding multiple jobs without employer approval could have professional repercussions and lead to burnout. Additionally, return-to-office mandates and a hiring slowdown in white-collar industries have made it harder to land remote roles.
2 employees for work tasks, 2 more for finding new jobs
Around 2018, Harrison began working two remote jobs. When the pandemic hit and remote roles became abundant, he started secretly juggling a third and fourth.
The workload soon became unmanageable, so he used the freelance platform Upwork to find qualified people he could trust to take on his work tasks. After interviewing many candidates, Harrison gradually built a team — the members of which he calls employees — and took on more jobs. His workers are based in the US, Canada, India, and Pakistan.
Upwork told BI that violating an employer agreement is against the company’s policy and that it would take action if a violation is explicitly stated in a platform job posting.
Harrison spends most of his days attending work meetings and reviewing his team’s work, which he said adds up to around 40 hours a week. Four of his employees complete his work duties while another, his brother-in-law, helps manage the operation and is his stand-in for meetings.
“He’s out of work, so I’m able to help him out,” Harrison, who’s in his 50s, said of employing his brother-in-law. “Probably the best thing I’ve ever done.”
He said he occasionally gets laid off from a job or a consulting gig contract isn’t extended, so to sustain and grow his operation, two separate employees apply for jobs on his behalf — he handles the interviews. But in recent months, it’s become harder for Harrison to land new remote jobs.
The technicalities of overemployment
Harrison is a US citizen but lives abroad most of the year and uses a VPN with a US location. His outsourcing operation is possible because software tools like Zoom, TeamViewer, and UltraViewer give his team remote access to his work computers. He said he tries to pair employees with a single job but that some work on two simultaneously. As far as Harrison knows, none of his employers have suspected his job juggling.
He’ll occasionally be asked a question about an employee’s work and will not have the answer, but he can stall until that person updates him.
Looking ahead, Harrison plans to keep up his job juggling for the foreseeable future because he doesn’t think he has enough savings to retire. He said having about six jobs seems to be the “sweet spot” because he can significantly boost his earnings and job security without working too many hours. And if things become too overwhelming, he can always drop a job.
“When you’re unemployed, the first job that comes around, you’ve got to take,” he said. “I kind of have the ability to choose what I get into.”
Do you have a story to share about secretly working multiple jobs or discovering an employee is doing so? Contact this reporter at jzinkula@businessinsider.com or Signal at jzinkula.29.
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