EVERY WEEKDAY at 9 am, Abel clocks in from an office he recently started renting in Chicago. He skips breakfast and works until 2 pm, when he logs off and finally eats a meal. Nice short day for a tech job. But Abel isn't working just one job-he's holding down four full-time gigs in secret, all for enterprise startups. His combined annual salary is $680,000.
Abel started juggling jobs on the sly a year ago, when he realized he was doing higher-quality work faster than his colleagues. "I found myself with a lot of free time," says the 35-year-old. "With rising inflation, I figured taking a second job was a way to get ahead of the curve. My wife and I have three kids, and we're trying to save to buy a house."
He's been doing the first job (which he calls "J1") for just over four years, and he started J2 and J3 in 2021 before taking on J4 last summer. Ideally, he wants to keep them all for the next year, which he thinks is sustainable, especially since he now has a dedicated space for his arsenal of laptops and other electronics.
"One point of stress is the sheer amount of meetings, many of which could be written up or dealt with in Slack," Abel says. (Like the other tech workers WIRED spoke to for this story, he asked that we not use his real name.) If two meetings clash on his calendar, Abel uses two sets of headphones-one meeting in each ear. "It takes some practice, but now I can pay loose attention to both streams of information," he says. Abel will tune in if he hears his name, blaming a bad connection if there's a delay. Three-meeting overlaps can get "crazy," he says.
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Denne historien er fra December 2022 - January 2023-utgaven av WIRED.
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Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.
Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.
Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.
AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.
COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.
