How a Gen Xer clawed his way back to a $900K income working 5 remote jobs after layoffs demolished his overemployment strategy

Business Insider

17 hours ago

Back in March, Harrison was riding high.
He was on track to earn roughly $800,000 this year thanks to a carefully engineered strategy of secretly juggling six remote IT jobs — and hiring a team of global freelancers to help him manage the load.
But then, over the course of several weeks, his operation collapsed. Harrison lost four of his six jobs, slashing his annualized income to about $200,000. The sudden drop forced him to delay buying a car, consider skipping a family wedding, and rethink how much he could support his children financially.
"Three-quarters of my income was gone — it really shook me," said Harrison. Business Insider verified his identity but agreed to use a pseudonym. He lives abroad most of the year but uses a VPN to work his US-based jobs. "You question yourself, you question God, you question the world."
Over the past two months, Harrison has made a comeback. He's now on track to earn $900,000 annually across five jobs — a mix of W2 and contract roles related to quality assurance — and says a sixth in the works could push that figure above $1 million.
Roughly one-third of his income goes toward paying the four employees who help him complete his work tasks, but he estimated he's on pace to profit more than $500,000 annually.
He plans to keep the applications flowing to hedge against future layoffs.
"I don't want to be there again," he said of his time with two jobs. "If I can handle it and make it work, I'm going to keep looking."
Over the past three years, Business Insider has interviewed 30 "overemployed" workers who have secretly held multiple remote jobs to boost their incomes. Harrison is among an even smaller group of job jugglers who have hired people to do some of their work, a trend enabled by the remote work revolution, globalized social networks, and growing access to software tools that make outsourcing possible.
Despite the tech advancements that make it easier,holding multiple jobs without employer approval could have professional repercussions and lead to burnout. Additionally, return-to-office mandates, a hiring slowdown, and tech layoffs have made it harder to sustain job juggling.
Despite those headwinds, Harrison managed to rebuild his operation by leaning on automation, scaled-back staffing, and a bit of luck.
Cutbacks and automation: His response to losing 4 jobs
Before the layoffs began, Harrison spent most of his days attending work meetings and reviewing the output of his employees, who were based in the US, Canada, India, and Pakistan. His outsourcing operation was made possible by software tools like Zoom, TeamViewer, and UltraViewer, which allowed his team to remotely access his work computers.
But once the job cuts started, Harrison said he began to question how sustainable his operation really was.
Harrison doesn't know why some of his jobs were cut, but he suspects two were tied to government budget constraints related to the Department of Government Efficiency — or DOGE. He said one contract role on a government project ended without notice, while another was ultimately scrapped due to approval delays at a government office that had recently undergone major staffing cuts.
A third job was cut when the company decided to hand over his contract duties to full-time employees, while a fourth — a full-time gig he thought was particularly secure — was eliminated during a company reorganization. The swift series of job losses caught Harrison off guard.
"I thought I was good at sensing the room temperature and feeling how things are going," he said. "But I think nowadays with all these other factors going around, there's no way to know."
In addition to government budget cuts, Harrison pointed to organizational restructuring, economic uncertainty, and the rise of AI as reasons it's become harder to predict the hiring landscape.
When Harrison started looking for new jobs, it was a struggle early on.
"I was sending 100, 150 résumés a day, literally getting almost nowhere," he said.
So, like many businesses experiencing a sudden downturn, Harrison looked for ways to cut costs. In addition to pausing payments to his contract employees who had supported his previous roles, he parted ways with the two workers he'd been paying to apply for jobs on his behalf.
Harrison turned to AI tools to replace that lost labor. He relied on the automated application platform LazyApply to send out hundreds of applications a day and experimented with the job-search tool Simplify to help tailor his résumé for specific roles.
Back to 6 jobs, but not back to normal
After a couple of weeks without much traction, Harrison did something that would have been almost unthinkable a few months earlier. He accepted a role that required occasional in-person work.
Around the same time, other doors started to open, and he landed two more jobs over the course of a few weeks. Roughly a month after losing four roles, he'd secured three new ones — and more recently, he said he landed a sixth through a personal connection. Two of the roles are W-2 positions, while the rest are contract jobs, all but one of them billed as full-time. Harrison said he's not sure why his luck changed, but he'll take it.
Landing new jobs meant bringing employees back on board, but Harrison's operations didn't go entirely back to normal. For one, working part-time from the office has been a major adjustment, making it harder for him to keep tabs on his other jobs. This change has forced him to rely more on his employees.
"Ideally, I can keep my head on a swivel and look at four screens at once, but on-site, I can have one or two computers up — I can't have four," he said.
Now that he's back to six jobs, Harrison said he's thought about quitting the in-office role. But after losing so many positions so quickly, he's hesitant to make any sudden moves.
Looking ahead, Harrison said he's trying to focus on roles where his skillset is particularly valued — the idea being these roles will be more secure. While he was admittedly a bit "cocky" before the job cuts began, he said he's learned his lesson. His operation is more fragile than he thought it was, and he'll likely have to work harder to sustain it.
"Even if you have two or three jobs, they could be gone tomorrow before your coffee's cold," he said.