The rise of the corporate mercenary

Throughout history, mercenaries have been soldiers who follow paycheques, not leaders. Unmoved by the vision and endgame, mercenaries developed their killing prowess and sold their skills to the highest bidder. Mercenaries lacked true loyalty, but their employers didn’t care, provided they got the job done — fair wages for fair work.

Lately, I’ve been hanging around r/Overemployed, the home of an entirely different type of mercenary — the corporate mercenary. These MBAs, engineers, and other professionals with opaque job titles juggle multiple (typically remote) jobs to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible.

Their surplus capital is funneled into other assets such as stocks, ETFs, and real estate. In many cases, their overarching goal is early retirement – quitting the corporate rat race for good. It’s not uncommon to read stories from people boasting annual income in the range of $200-$500,000 USD. Some of the overemployed like to post pictures of all their different laptops, each representing a different remote job.

Corporate mercenaries exploit a loophole that many corporate workers are aware of: it doesn’t take 8 hours to complete most tasks asked of a corporate employee. Of course, there are exceptions. Many corporate jobs require more than 8 hours of intense engagement every day, but most do not.

One of the most interesting things about reading the stories on r/Overemployed is how scared most of these people are of getting caught working several jobs simultaneously. r/Overemployed is filled with entertaining stories about workers being caught red-handed by their bosses and fired; other people describe how their families chastise them for working several jobs, calling them greedy workaholics who only care about turning a buck. There’s something so grubby about wanting to get ahead, right? — only certain types, er…classes, of people are allowed to level up in our society.

There are ethical and legal considerations concerning working several jobs at once. Conflicts of interest, access to proprietary information and processes, and the dissemination of corporate assets are real risks for employers. And there is no good defense for breaking the law in these areas — the companies building useful products and services deserve protection. However, the overemployed argue they can work for more than one employer and still abide by the terms of their employment contracts. This may be true in some cases, but I suspect it is not in many others.

While these corporate mercenaries live in fear every day of being found out, I wonder if the corporate executives they work under share the same fears. We commonly see cases of conflict of interest and flat-out illegal activity by senior employees and executives ignored by boards, media, and governments. Executives frequently engage in undisclosed conflicts of interest ranging from insider trading to self-dealing, misreporting financials, and using company resources for personal gain. I’d cite specific examples, but they hardly seem necessary to prove the point. This asymmetry is partly cultural, corporate governance structures often hold staff to strict employment standards while applying looser ones to leadership under the justification that their discretion is essential for strategic decision-making.

Trawling the posts on r/Overemployed has made me think about our beliefs about work and who controls our economic autonomy and daily schedules. If a professional can juggle two or three jobs at once effectively, why shouldn’t they be allowed to market themselves to any person or corporation who demands their skillset? Critics say these professionals are taking jobs from other hardworking, deserving people, and there’s an argument to be made in that regard — they’re job takers, not creators, like traditional capitalists starting businesses from the ground up. However, we live and work within a system where we all must compete with our peers for jobs and corporate mercenaries often want that paycheque a bit more than the next Joe.

Some critics argue the overemployed can’t possibly deliver good work for multiple employers; but from what I’ve read on the forum, most of these folks get decent to strong performance reviews. And many of them appear to want to do a good job while at work, but they stop short of going above and beyond on the job. You know, doing the good Christian thing, putting in long hours, hoping that they’ll be noticed by their superiors, and eventually move up into the senior ranks. The overemployed have studied the corporate game closely and know this is a farce. They don’t care about recognition or corporate titles, they want to be rewarded with something measurable — cash. There are exceptions, of course, some of the overemployed are out to do as little as possible.

If you’re an employer, there’s no need to worry about this trend — the average person isn’t going to choose overemployment any time soon. Trust me. From what I read, it requires a lot of skill and a whole lot of drive. However, loyalty to one’s employer appears to have finally died, and maybe that’s why employers continue to push the back to work trend: an attempt to cling to what’s left of this outdated notion — an effort to hang onto the last of their power.