united-states employment
Is it legal to work two full-time, salaried, software engineering jobs at the same time?
<p>I have two offers from two companies, both for salaried, 9-5, remote, full-time, software engineering jobs. I am skilled at my trade and can easily handle the expected work load of both jobs at once. My questions are:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>If I can get both companies to forego any kind of &quot;you can't work for anyone else&quot; clause in our employment contract, can I work both jobs with telling either company about the other?</p>
</li>
<li><p>If I'm on salary (not hourly), i.e. I'm presumably being paid for my output, not my time, is it illegal to effectively share the same time slot (9am-5pm) between the two jobs?</p>
</li>
<li><p>Assuming all of this goes well, is this illegal from the government's perspective? When I file taxes, will the IRS ask, &quot;what's going on here?&quot; and get someone to arrest me?</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Needless to say, I would do each job's work on the company-provided laptop, and not share any information between the two companies.</p>

<p>The IRS does not care, the only people who will care are your employers. If they find out, they may fire you. Whether or not this rises to the level of fraud whereby they could sue you depends on what false thing you said to get the job offer. You might get a good idea by reading the employment contract to see what makes you think this is a &quot;9-to-5&quot; job, and exactly what you are supposed to do. For example if both contracts say that you will work exclusively on the assignments by company A / B between 9 and 5 EST, M-F, and you agree to this, then you have materially misrepresented what you will do, which is fraud. But if the contract simply says that you will get the job done and will &quot;make yourself available&quot; for some of those hours, then it's not obviously fraud. Still, they can fire you if they don't like what you're doing. An alternative is that you could ask if they would allow you to burn the candle at both ends, which avoids any issue of fraud. If you're that good, you can offer one or both of them a week of trial dual-employment for a reduced rate, to persuade them.</p>

<h3>This is legal, but probably not practical</h3>
<p>The biggest problem is that you're going to have a hard time finding two employers where you wouldn't be violating either employment agreement.  Let's assume they don't prohibit you from having another full-time job (many do).</p>
<p>You'd also need to make sure that you aren't obligated to assign the intellectual property rights of any work you do while employed there.  Some states, like California, limit the scope of these requirements, most relevantly to work related to the company's current or future businesses, which would help.</p>
<p>You'd also need to avoid violating your NDA.  This could create a conflict of interest if the businesses are in related industries and you have confidential information from one business that could affect decisions made by the other.</p>
<p>Finally, they could just fire you if they found out...or even if they don't.  Software engineering requires a lot of mental energy, and it's unlikely that someone could be a high performer at two jobs for a long period of time.</p>
<p>Your taxes will be more complicated due to withholding, possibly overlapping contributions to your 401(k), etc.  But it's not illegal to have two jobs, so as long as you do your taxes properly, you're okay from the IRS's perspective.</p>
