Adding J4 and time to lock in.
J1 general engineering(ish). Younger guy always jumps at the opportunity for travel to the customer and does the boring time consuming stuff. Manager always sicks me on the "hard stuff" which is easy for me and then even easier with AI now.
J2 SWE as contractor (intentionally not FTE) except I have a decade of experience in the target market, this probably consumes the most of my time, not that the job is hard but the tickets are always super badly scoped/specified. I've recently been pushing back one sentence tickets that really should be an epic of their own. Mgmt actually siding with me there bc it creates so much extra work that never delivers.
J3 I fly planes, like 3-4 days/mo max, its a job based on seniority and late career is great pay and would make a fun "retirement job" so I'm keeping my foot in the door. If I leave I'll never come back to that industry. I sit right seat which pays way less but my seniority in that seat is top 10% so my schedule is always prime and junior guys jump to pick up parts of my schedule consistently.
J4 The new one, oncall, same industry technically as J2 but completely different target customers. It's a role that covers later hours and weekends, at the last company I did this at was crazy easy. Downside is now I have 0 days off a month.
What I do well about OE:
- home office setup worthy of r/battlestations double 48" ultrawides, Everything on its own hardwired VLAN
- Excellent time management
- Frozen TWN
- Hibernated Linkedin
- Most jobs have very few meetings for them to overlap and in different time zones
What I don't do so well with OE:
- J2 knows about J1 and J3. It's technically full time in office on paper but I go in maybe 1-2x a week for half a day when I need to. The Director who hired me on the spot literally said "Yeah we need you here, I just have to get the signatures, I'll see you on Monday" during the one interview I had. This was after I told him "The work sounds fun but it's unfair for you to ask me to leave my real job if you're going to hire me on a 3mo contract" They've since asked me to go FTE and leave J1 multiple times so they can "have all of me" because "we need more people like you around here" LOL I just keep saying no. The work always gets delivered past their expectations so he just doesn't care.
- J4 manager knows about J3 I was doing it back when I worked for him in the past, but he told the CEO about it, who said something like "So you're going to be replacing J1 with this job right?" during the call and I just said yes.
J2 knows about J1 and J3 but doesn't care I deliver something for them that the rest of the company just doesn't. The project I've been working on is the first one actually generating revenue.
J1 handbook has no stipulation against OE as long as it doesn't provide a "conflict of interest" but J4 is all after hours/weekends, all the other J are completely different industries and job titles from itself.
Obviously there is the risk of J4 reaching out to J1 finding out I still work there months in and I get fired from both. I mean whatever there's still 2 others.