The Morality of Job Stacking
The Morality of Job Stacking
Gather round the watercooler, mateys
Recently, a new venture from Walt Bismarck caught my attention. A man known for his hilarious Disney covers in the mid 2010’s reappeared into the public discourse with his then Walt Right substack, now called Tortuga, in January 2024. Among other pursuits and podcasts, he proposed everyone join him on the privateering sector with Job Stacking.
Every modern man must be tempted at times to spit on his keyboard, hoist the black resume, and start stacking jobs. Ever since Covid normalized the concept of remote work and showcased how many jobs can be adequately done without full 40-hour schedules in the comfort of your own home, the idea of taking on more than one position at a time to great personal profit must have crossed many minds.
Bismark’s band of business buccaneers hopped aboard the Bisbuc job stacking group chat and are setting sail for the promise of corporate booty. Bismarck, having found success in the practice himself, is looking to scale up with his own scalawags for mutual referencing, tool-sharing, and coordinated support in his Tortuga chat. You can read his article for yourself where he lays out his plans.
It didn’t surprise me much that entire groups existed promoting job stacking, but it did surprise me that apparently there is some moral objection to it. Economy-damaging, ethics-shattering, soul-rending moral hazard of tip-tapping on more than one work computer at a time. A real civilizational and spiritual threat, so I’m told!
This perplexed me. Aside from the inherent risk of pissing off a taskmaster who demands every ounce of time on the clock be served up to his corporate master, these moral objections are cited by almost everyone warning against the practice.
Captain Bismarck scoffs at these moral objections, arguing that corporations are rascals themselves deserving of pilfering, and that the pursuit of wealth is justifying in itself. The Romantic overtures certainly appeal to plenty of downtrodden wageslaves, but like the pirate aesthetic he drapes over the Bisbuc, he skirts around the shoals of moral objection and sets sail without plowing through.
I, unsatisfied with a wall that hasn’t borne the brunt of my head beating into it, will politely decline the sensible back-alley and instead opt to run headfirst into those objections instead. Lets get stuck in.
Unit vs Time Valuation
For all the humane worker treatment that the 40-hour workweek provided after the horrendous exploitation of the Gilded Age, it also split the conception of work compensation into two major camps: Unit vs Time.
Those of the Unit Valuation view argue that you are paid for what value you produce. Imagine being a craftsman making doohickeys. You put in the labor to make 100 doohickeys? You get 100 doohickeys worth of revenue. Make 1,000? Make 1,000 worth. In this simple one-man occupation there is a linear relationship between the amount of units of value you produce and the compensation you receive, a self-reinforcing incentive structure that should be able to be replicated at greater scale too.
Hiring workers to help you make doohickeys can follow this Unit Value view too. If you have Worker A who produced 100 doohickeys in 2 hours, and Worker B who produced 100 doohickeys in 8 hours, the Unit Value perspective would compensate them the same because they both produced the same amount of value. Time within the deadline is irrelevant in this value calculation. The more-efficient Worker A could possibly provide more units if allowed to work longer, but it is his productivity, not his time, that drives his compensation.
This Unit Value view works well for enterprises producing discrete and obvious units of value. Everyone knows and loves a doohickey. But it becomes much more difficult to implement when you are not making simple doohickeys but instead providing relational interfacing between managerial initiative and labor productivity for reducing stochastic shrinkage while implementing a praxis of cultural wellbeing… That is to say, vague jobs with indirect value contributions. These kinds of positions, from CEO’s down even to variable-task workers, are nightmarish to account for accurately, let alone fairly.
This is actually where Communists lose the plot. Everyone understands doohickey-making and how more productivity helps both business and worker. But what really is the worth of a manager? A CEO? An owner? Why, they didn’t make a single doohickey last quarter, yet they get paid more!? Time to rouse the rabble and seize the means of production! Oh what’s that? The workers are becoming uncoordinated? The product quality has gone down the drain? There’s a new competitor and we are losing market share? What are “logistics” anyway? And all the guys who used to steer the ship are now hanging from the mast. Whoops! I guess they did provide some value after all… Thanks Communism.
Therefore, the easier-to-implement Time Value came into vogue. In this view, a worker is paid for his time, not necessarily his productivity. Essentially your enterprise rents you out for eight hours a day, five days a week, in order to command productivity out of you during that time. You are then compensated per hour that you were rented, regardless of the value you provided those particular hours.
This is a simpler system to account for on all sides, as each job position will be measured in an hourly rate that remains predictable and comparable to other positions. This makes sense for jobs that need someone around for some reason, whether to man the counter or just be on retainer for a happening. This also pleases the bureaucrats greatly as it removes those pesky “human” elements from their precious spreadsheets, making their jobs much easier.
But there is a catch. Work hard or hardly work, there is no immediate compensatory reason to be more productive. Suddenly the inefficient Worker B gets paid more than the highly-efficient Worker A just because he worked longer. Mediocrity, real or imposed, becomes the unspoken law around the watercooler under the Time Value model. Sure, feel free to break your back gifting your company with 80-hour workweeks, but it will be the schmoozer at the company cookout who gets the choicest promotions.
Plenty of professions are not simple doohickey factories where every minute spent at a task is a minute more value gained. In farming there are planting and harvesting periods requiring intense work well over 40 hours a week, as well as entire seasons where there is virtually no work to be done. A 40-hour workweek imposed on farming would be ridiculous – imagine the farmer being harangued over not tending his crops in wintertime, or a worker leaving the fields half-harvested because he’s not authorized for overtime.
The 40-hour workweek began as a protection against exploitation, but has since become a contrivance of convenience to deal with the complex question of value-compensation management. It is not supposed to be a value proposition itself, just an easy-to-calculate proxy for it. But, that hasn’t stopped managers from seeing it as the value they are seeking when it suits them.
Now, here is the real rub. You see, our middle-manager is rewarded best by encouraging productivity in his underlings without increasing compensation. The more value he can get without the company paying for it, the bigger the managerial bonus and promotion prospects. This means he is heavily encouraged to use the worst-paying valuation justification for your compensation, and will happily swap between views to suit his personal bottom-line.
Corporate managers will happily accept you working that extra 10 hours, granted you are donating it. Hell, they might even promise you that coveted vague reward of promotion or a raise at some undisclosed future date. “You’ll be noticed,” he’ll tell you with a casting-couch wink. Don’t ask about the overtime though. Why should you feel entitled to rob the company for your lack of time-management skills? No, any time you work over the clock is done out of the goodness of your heart, because we’re a family at this company!
But oh, if you ARE more efficient and finish your 40-hour job in only 10-hours, why are you robbing the company of your time!? It’s only fair that our manager’s most-efficient human resource be burdened with far more work to do. Don’t you dare ask for direct compensation for that extra value though – remember, you agreed to work on the clock, and the clock doesn’t recognize your productivity. Your reward will be in heaven, or a gift card at the company store, while your manager collects tens of thousands in bonus pay for your added productivity!
In the same way Procrustes would change his bed’s shape to stretch or cut his victim to only his advantage, so too does the corporate manager shift valuation from Unit to Time and back again to suit his personal whims. The incentives are misaligned, making less a crew working towards common purpose and more a taskmaster farming his colleagues for personal and corporate gain.
Are you beginning to see where this “moral sin” of Job Stacking arises? Lets pry deeper...
Consider the Unreliable Source
In Hyde Wars Episode 20, Sam Hyde gave the sagely advice to keep in mind who is giving you advice to understand the inherent bias behind it. Whether or not you should actually take that advice seriously depends greatly on understanding this and objectively comparing that request with your interests.
If your dear, loving mother tearfully begged you to please just promise her you would go to Hell, would that be something you would do? It is a request given by someone undoubtedly loving towards you, yet the request is so senselessly hysterical and wouldn’t be in your best interests at all. Just because someone is honestly well-disposed towards you, even loving, doesn’t guarantee that their requests are either good for you or even morally permissible.
Now lets apply this to our middle manager. Your average taskmaster at WalCorp Inc is tasked with returning maximal value with the labor he oversees. His concern for you is a concern for the productivity you deliver to the bottom-line, as that pads his own bottom line. You are a spreadsheet entry, variable only insofar as he can convince or force you to produce. Great managers will inspire and lead their crew to ensure they all share in the resulting prosperity. Unfortunately your average corporate manager just sees disposable human resources that require manipulation to achieve optimal returns.
This is the man and mentality from which the admonition about Job Stacking often comes from. You wouldn’t want to betray your fellow coworkers like that, would you? Did you know it is potentially punishable if you get caught? You won’t be able to devote all of your attention to this job, which means you will not deliver maximal productivity. And, and… well, it’s just wrong for you to do! Just sit for your designated 40 hours in front of our idle screen, and if you need more work to entertain you during that time, your manager will graciously grant you more busywork.
Is your saintly middle manager asking you to just stay in your wagecage out of the goodness of his heart? Is he even on the same level as your loving mother? And even if so, is that request even ethically relevant to your best interests?
I say no on all counts. The only valid point raised is the potential of not delivering the value that you contractually promised to deliver. You do have a moral obligation to stand by a fair contract you willingly make with another, and you should never compromise on that necessary quality.
Outside of this however, if you can satisfy your clients with sufficient value efficiently enough to facilitate holding another concurrent occupation, then you can reject the pseudo-moral babble saying it is somehow wrong to use that time for other purposes of your choosing.
In Feudal times, a peasant would be required to deliver a certain amount of production to his Lord in exchange for the right to live and work on the Lord’s land, after which the excess of time and production was the peasant’s to spend to his heart’s desire. In modern times our corporate overlords so often demand all from you, and dare call you immoral for withholding any time or productivity from them. To think we talk of peasants being oppressed!
There have been plenty of studies indicating that with focused work habits and efficiency techniques, productivity can actually increase with less work hours spent in an occupation. If someone gets so good at these techniques that their job requires a fraction of their allocated time to deliver the same value, then Job Stacking can rightly make the best use of otherwise idle time that most people would spend poking their phones or chattering around the water cooler instead.
The middle manager imagines however that if you have extra time, he can convert that into more value. This is often not the case. There are only so many tickets to be run, only so many orders to process, only so many emails to answer. Devoting more time to polishing the silver does not necessarily make it gleam brighter, and can even demoralize the polisher or damage the silverware when overdone.
Of course it is preferable to not lie or break any agreements in your contracts. Avoid it when you can. But agreements to devote arbitrary amounts of time to tasks that can be completed to the total satisfaction of all involved with less time spent are, frankly, just hedges on mediocrity. They are the bumper-noodles in the bowling alley gutters for those who can’t send a ball down the lane. The goal is to knock down the pins, not squishing the noodles. If you can deliver the agreed-upon value without needing those safeguards, then abiding by those safeguards is superfluous to the true spirit of your contract.
As for the claim that your coworkers care about you stacking jobs? Pfft! They’ll only care if their own job is badly impacted by your split attention. A middle manager would only ever tell you to “think of the coworkers!” to manipulate you emotionally, something many of them are not opposed to doing should it prove effective at getting compliance and free productivity from you.
But what of punishment? Punishment is undesirable, but ultimately an amoral circumstance that bears in itself no moral weight. Tyrants are notorious for their punishments, yet no one would argue the Tyrant’s will is somehow moral just because you get punished for defying his edicts. Often morality demands one risk or endure such punishments in order to do the right or permissible thing. If anything, preventing an individual capable of delivering greater value in exchange for greater compensation based on unnecessary safeguards is detrimental both for the individual and society at large.
These punishments are largely built out of fear of incompetence from mediocre people biting off more than they can chew. Understandable, but delivering greater-than-mediocre skill and discipline to your stacked occupations is justification enough to bend these specific kinds of regulations. If you wish to Job Stack and avoid punishment, delivering good work discretely is the best defense.
This advice doesn’t preclude the strategy of climbing a corporate ladder either. It can work too. Just be wary that gifts given to corporations will be happily taken, but not necessarily reciprocated. Many people have devoted years of working 80+ hour workweeks to be passed over for promotion in favor of the drinking buddy of some already-ensconced bossling. You’ll have better luck advancing by good work in enterprises that see you as a unique person, not as an expendable human resource.
Like the Hydian mother before, the moral-flavored platitudes of the middle-manager type are not compelling so long as you do the value-delivering work. Don’t go to corporate Hell just because a self-serving managerial type begs you to increase his paycheck.
Conclusion
The morality of Job Stacking is simple: If you do the work within the expected deadline and quality, then have as many jobs as you wish. If you begin to underperform however, then you are obliged to change something to bring your work back up to your contracted standard.
If you follow this simple metric with tact and discretion, everyone will be satisfied even if you do stack jobs. You will be satisfied with delivering what you promised and being compensated for your efficiency. Your companies will be satisfied that the job is done to their specifications. Even your middle manager will be happy because you will be reliable within your scope. Whatever precautions you have to take to prevent people from spoiling their own satisfaction with this, like not disclosing other jobs, is irrelevant morally. These are jobs, not marriages.
The case against Job Stacking as some kind of moral hazard in itself is ridiculous, the sort of emotional manipulation one would normally expect from a middle manager trying to milk you for all your worth with as little compensation as possible. One likewise doesn’t need to assume that these corporations are nasty and unfair in order to justify preserving your own time away from the every-hungering hands of corporate managers.
Despite Bismarck’s Buccaneers reveling in “pillaging corporate America” by way of Job Stacking like the glorious Crimson Permanent Assurance you saw above, it really isn’t a criminal or even immoral act in its most ideal and sustainable form. Perilous perhaps, in a very mild sort of wrist-slapping, resume-tarnishing, sleep-depriving kind of way. But the potential rewards of several years worth of pay all at once that can fuel more productive and interesting enterprises may be interesting enough to warrant further conscience-clear investigation.
Anyone interested in the art and science of Job Stacking should explore it practically and not let pseudo-moralizing dissuade from a profitable course in today’s increasingly unfair job market. Check out Bismarck’s Job Stacking proposals yourself on his Substack, and look into the free resources online – Yes, even the Reddit - before making a decision about the strategy.