Today, my team fired an engineer who was obviously OE.

Though I am ambivalent about OE, I think it is instructive to examine the practice from various points of view. Here is a retelling of this engineer’s tenure on my team. I hope you take away from this piece some insights to guide your OE practice, but also consider the pitfalls and potential ill-will that it garners.

Background

I work for a mid-sized tech company in the Midwest that promotes a flexible “work from anywhere” policy. The engineer—let’s call him Alan—started in mid-November 2023 as a fully-remote, Senior Software Engineer based out of San Francisco.

Alan’s behavior was suspicious from the start. He immediately took 3 days of sick leave. He did not show up for meetings, and when he did, he was typically late. His camera was almost always off. Alan would drop randomly from calls only to rejoin several minutes later. Alan also suffered from a bevy of unusual networking issues (misconfigured DNS, connection issues requiring restart). Alan compounded suspicion with strangely specific requests, such as “moving standup back 15 minutes?”.

Above all, Alan was terrible at his job. It took him weeks to do the most trivial tasks. His work was rushed and sloppy, showing little regard for quality or, frankly, if it even worked.

Alan was finally terminated 100 days after his initial start date.

Insights

1. Successful OE is predicated on the naïveté and/or incompetence of your team and manager.

At my company, Alan could have easily coasted, making $175,000, doing zero work, and constantly befuddling his manager and coworkers with an endless stream of blockers and excuses. Unfortunately for him, he was placed on a team with a lot of attentive and productive engineers. If you find yourself in such a situation, it will probably be a struggle. Consider re-rolling.

2. Maximize your TC by claiming to live in a high-cost-of-living area.

This can be a little difficult to swing, but if you can arrange to claim that you live in, say, Seattle or San Francisco as opposed to Akron, Ohio, you stand to gain a significantly larger base salary. Just remember to set the timezone manually on your computer, or Slack will betray your location. Oops.

3. Communicate constantly.

You will not be fired from a mid-sized company if it appears you are trying really hard. At most companies, management is not highly technical, and therefore, the less progress you make, the more you bring up issues, the more befuddled they become. Alan made laughably little effort to communicate with the team (probably less than 10 Slack messages in his 3-month tenure). If you at least pretend to be engaged, it is hard to put together a case for your termination.

4. Realize your limitations.

You know the OG OEer who worked for Facebook and Google at the same time? Well, he is probably extremely smart. If you do not have the ability to be an outperformer at one company on 20 hours a week, you will fail to find stasis working two or more jobs. For Alan, he was neither smart nor highly technical and therefore couldn’t even effectively bullshit his way through standup or any technical conversation for that matter. A man’s gotta know his limitations.

Conclusion

I honestly believe that a subset of the other engineers on my team were oblivious to the fact that Alan was OE. Being acquainted with the practice, his behavior was instantly apparent to me. In the end, my frustration with the situation stemmed from the fact that this individual lied incessantly under the assumption that everyone was too dumb to figure him out. He now—and perhaps previously—has amassed a group of former coworkers who have the ability to torpedo his career. I don’t wish this on anyone, as the stress alone is bad enough.

Advice

I am convinced that OE will do nothing more than add a few dollars to your bank account. If done poorly, it will sabotage your career and tarnish your reputation. At the very least, those who do not see you as a fraud will deem you highly incompetent. Finally, and I believe most importantly, OE will never let you enjoy your work. You will not have time to learn a subject deeply, take pride in your impact, or build trust with your colleagues. You will be stuck in a constant, churning whirlwind of meetings and admin, sloppy output, poor performance, and the looming dread of your termination.

Last November, I was considering taking a second job, phoning it in to both companies, and raking in that highly-vaunted 500k TC. After seeing the slow-motion train wreck that was Alan’s tenure on my team, I’ve fully reconsidered this venture. Honestly, wouldn’t it be better to be making okay money working one job you love instead of a ton of money at two you couldn’t care less about? For me, the choice is clear.