Fundamentally speaking, tech has three factors in its favor for working two jobs – equity compensation, remote jobs, and areas for specialization.
Friendly Equity Compensation Policies
Tech is one of the few industries, if not the only, that pay with equity even to its lowest ranking employees. This means as a worker, you get to reap the financial benefits of an owner when the business does well or is simply loved by investors. As a result, equity compensation plays a huge role in attracting talent – it’s the ultimate Ponzi scheme that isn’t outright called a Ponzi scheme, yet. Nonetheless, I digress.
Just to hit home the point, equity compensation means you make money while you sleep, or milling about and twiddling your thumbs. When your equity vests, you get your shares in one lump sum quarterly or annually, depending on the company’s equity structure. In short, in terms of comp and return on investment, or ROI, tech has the highest pay off from working two jobs.
Ease Of Finding Remote Jobs
Tech has many remote job postings, especially in light of the pandemic. However, do note your area of expertise may or may not be remote-friendly. For instance, I’ve got a friend who is one of the few mid-level private equity bankers who could work remotely, pre-COVID. But he’s an outlier. Even then, his specialization is so demanding and deal teams are so lean that he couldn’t possibly pull off the two-job hustle. Hence again, why tech is the ideal industry to pull it off.
It Pays To Have Special Skills
Tech is changing fast, so you’ll have to specialize at some point, or else you’ll be that fifty-year-old lifelong object-oriented programmer trying to learn functional programming. Forced change can be painful. All that is to say, it pays to specialize in technology or functional area that provides long-term business value and prolongs your equity-earning career. What all this translates to the two-job world is that as a specialist you can actually be more efficient with your time and even share some knowledge synergy between the two jobs – a nice, unintended side effect.
Key Takeaways
A confluence of good and bad factors is creating a new normal in tech – seasonal layoffs. No golden parachutes for us little people other than maybe a small severance, if you’re lucky. So, it behooves you to stay ahead of the job offshoring and costs cutting by leveraging a combination of equity compensation, remote jobs, and liberal HR policies to work two jobs when the layoff Grinch shows up.