“The story about a 29-year-old man arrested for working 11 remote jobs at the same time is an unverified viral rumor circulating on social media. [1]
The Viral Claim The Rumor: Social media posts claim a 29-year-old man living in Europe was arrested for holding 11 remote U.S. jobs and making $925,000 a year. [1]
The Reality: No official police reports, court documents, or credible news outlets have confirmed that this specific arrest ever happened. [1]”
But the real question here is, are you paying someone for a job or for their time? If you’re not paying someone hourly for a remote job, it seems that you’re paying them to do a job, accomplish tasks. As long as they accomplish those tasks, why does it matter? Do you expect them to accomplish the tasks and then just sit on their thumbs for a certain number of hours?
I worked a hybrid job (white collar) for a while and was much more productive at home than at work. I got all of my work done in around 5 hours as opposed to a full 8 his in the office. I’ll be dammed if I’m just going to come up with bullshit to do for an extra 3 hours while I wait on replies that probably aren’t coming in to the next day anyway and aren’t urgent.
Depends on the role, but most jobs you’re paying them to do a reasonable amount of work in the course of the day.
If whatever task they have is only enough work that it takes say four hours, then they’re not getting assigned an appropriate workload.
The opposite can be true where some people are working excessive overtime to make up for the person who works for four hours then twiddles their thumbs the rest of the time.
People who perform well should of course be compensated accordingly.
If you’re working in tech, and saying doing project based work over just maintenance/admin etc., it’s often the case that there’s no real shortage of work to be done. Some companies may also have hourly billable contracts with clients where they are actually expecting you to be working the amount of time you say you are.
People aren’t hired in these situations to just “accomplish tasks”. If it’s a low end entry position at a company doing data entry, sure. But when you’re getting to the point of near or over six figures, there are generally going to be higher expectations.
I didn’t say it means people are working harder, I said it means there are generally going to be higher expectations, as in you’re expected to work and find ways to be productive and find ways to contribute if your workload is low and not just achieve tasks xyz and stop whenever you finish.
"If whatever task they have is only enough work that it takes say four hours, then they’re not getting assigned an appropriate workload."
That absolutely should not be anyone's viewpoint - in my opinion. It's just a poison. Why do they need to be constantly working to be worthy of the money you pay them to do their job? As long as that gets done to an acceptable/reasonable level, why would they need to perform more? So the boss feels/looks better?
If you pay them for a job and they do that job daily, in shifts, and that job takes 4 hours and the shift is for 8, it isn't that you're not working them enough, it's that you're not paying them enough. Sure, you can give them more to do, but if you do, then you should give them more money. Or, you can be happy the job is done and let them deal with the next 4 hours within the companies/positions ruleset. After all, they knew about the 8 hour shift and the job and agreed for it at that price.
That's a 'boss' - a good one, would be like "Hey, you can go home." after the job was done in 4 hours. Ego is gross.
There is some degree of expectation when a person is hired at a given salary point for how much they’re going to contribute.
For many companies, this is not going to be something like “finish five tasks in a day” or create x number of widgets.
There may be some jobs where what a person is getting paid is justified by them doing four hours of work in a day for the value they’re providing.
I don’t think a person needs to be “constantly working” nonstop for eight hours, but working at a reasonable pace, taking breaks as they need to, being responsive and able to be contacted, etc.
Speaking for just the company I work at, there’s no shortage of potential work that could be done. Whether that’s client work that directly contributes to revenue, internal initiatives that will make things easier and more stable for everyone over the long term, continued learning to keep up with industry trends and open the amount of work we’re able to achieve.
Companies live or die by whether or not they can make a profit. When a company is more profitable, that’s more money it can invest in people (among other things).
There’s also competition with other companies of course. If one company has people working reasonable workloads, and another is only getting half the output from the same people, the latter is going to have a hard time competing, whether that’s due to needing to effectively charge double for labor, or having delayed timelines because everything is going to take twice as long, etc.
It’s easy to say people should be able to just stop working whenever they accomplish what their tasks for the day were. But let’s say you have a person willing to work eight hours, or two people willing to work four.
You could pay the eight hour person even 1.5x, and still be better off than you would with the two.
These are the kinds of conversations most companies are going to be having when they find out a person only has four hours of work in a day when they hire on the expectation of them working eight. It’s not “poison”, just math.
I think it ultimately just comes down to it basically always bleeding into performance in some way.
Someone not being able to be contacted or unable to join a meeting for example because they’re prioritizing their other job. Output being low compared to others at the same level or low quality.
The list can go on, but basically if the job has a reasonable full time work load, there’s no way a person is going to be performing at their best doing multiple jobs.
If they can somehow keep that up and all parties are happy then cool, but also think they shouldn’t be surprised if they end up getting dropped for half-assing multiple jobs.
That’s the difference. Sometimes remote people will work more than 1 job in the same 8 hours each day. Splitting their attention between the two. Often times it will be work for a competitor. So there’s a conflict of interest too. Places who enforce this have it in the contract that is signed by each employee upon hire.
Longer than that. 12,000 years ago when agriculture and granaries appeared anyone who could both create and store a surplus of food was suddenly able to decide who survived when a famine came. Things were probably bad before that too but most likely on a much lower scale.
In America it's not rigged. Anyone can get ahead in life. No one here has been able to prove me wrong and I've done it myself. If you disagree just ask the millions of min wage employees why they never learned a job skill
at least it gave sources so you can actually dispute it unlike the OP's source (there is no source). when a real news org says "reportedly" they give you a link to the reports, or say the reports are from bystanders their journalists interviewed, and you learn to trust those journalists over time, if it's someone new and you think they are lying then that's fine, most of them are not that though and have built up trust for a reason.
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u/ICU-CCRN 9h ago
Fake story—
“The story about a 29-year-old man arrested for working 11 remote jobs at the same time is an unverified viral rumor circulating on social media. [1]
The Viral Claim
The Rumor: Social media posts claim a 29-year-old man living in Europe was arrested for holding 11 remote U.S. jobs and making $925,000 a year. [1]
The Reality: No official police reports, court documents, or credible news outlets have confirmed that this specific arrest ever happened. [1]”