Cheat on Your Job

The Manifesto

Here’s one thing I wish I did when I just started working: I wished I had started cheating on it earlier.

Corporate loyalty is a one-way contract, and my present self is paying the price.

The employment contract makes it sound like a marriage. It isn’t. Companies aren’t committing to you for life. They’re hedging across a harem. When the profit numbers dip, they’ll cut loose whoever doesn’t fit the model.

The employment world has fell on its wayside many times before, but the most recent wave of it happened in this new artificial intelligence era in 2025. “Efficiencies” being the jargon du jour. Case in point: Shopify’s CEO has told its employees that it will not backfill positions and instead asked teams to fill the role using AI first instead. Meta’s efforts to lay off many teams resulted in increased profit.

The Loyalty Lie

My dad learnt this the hard way. In 2015, he was part of the team that brought a new telephone network, Hutchison, to Indonesia. He put his eldest — me — through higher education. He supported my grandparents through Alzheimer’s care. He did everything right: sharp on tech, solid manager, loyal team player.

And yet, one day, the company didn’t want him anymore.

His financial foundation crumbled. He tried to rebuild through solo businesses, but the stable salary never returned. Now this is the advice he gives me ad nauseam:

Start your own thing. Don’t wait. Loyalty won’t save you.

Corporate was Comfortable

I ignored him. I was 22, just hired as a banking reporter at S&P, the company that runs the world’s most popular stock index. My contract had exclusivity clauses and income disclosure terms. The message was clear: We own your time, attention, and skills. Who am I to defy an American corporate?

I also didn’t think I needed to build anything. My salary felt life-changing. I didn’t need any more money. Besides, I figured I should invest that energy in the new job: sharpen my finance skills, get faster at writing, maybe study for the CFA.

Then the layoffs hit.

Team by team, people vanished. Some of the smartest folks I knew were let go without cause. There was no pattern. No warning. Just “efficiencies.”

The Quiet Side Hustle Buildout

That’s when I understood it. My dad wasn’t being paranoid. He was just early.

I started looking beyond the skills my job rewarded (financial writing, analysis) and leaned into what I was naturally drawn to: speaking, storytelling, creativity. I knew I had a knack for speaking in front of an audience, be it in person or in front of a camera. I decided to double-down on it and start a YouTube channel.

It was tricky to learn how to speak in front of a camera. There is no feedback loop after all, just me cringing at myself while I was editing my own footage on iMovie. But I wanted to give this a try, anyway. Worst case scenario, nobody will find my video. And it’ll just exist in oblivion.

I hesitated before hitting “publish”. It feels like cheating. I had signed exclusivity to my company. Surely I wasn’t going to defy that so strongly?I hesitated for weeks before hitting publish. Would HR find me? Would I get fired?

I came up with the most genius workaround: I didn’t use my full name. “Rebecca Isjwara” was on my contract. My channel would be “Becky Isjwara” instead.

I uploaded every week for a year and a half. 153 videos. My reward was one single AdSense cheque for $100. If my company had found out, probably even till now, they can still do something about it because I breached my contract. But realistically, the cost of the legal battle would not be worth it.

I knew that. But I wish I had understood that sooner.

Most friends around me weren’t building anything on the side. I wonder if the reason is similar to mine - that it feels like cheating. I get it.

But that’s the trap. I thought the only path was to monetise my exact skillset for one employer. So I boxed myself in: If I write for S&P, I can’t write for anyone else.

What I didn’t see was I could’ve done copywriting. Ghostwrote for tech founders. Built digital courses. Start an art YouTube channel.

Your Call to Cheat

Even when S&P told me I was a “prized employee,” their offer to keep me implied something different: a one-off 20% retention bonus, rescinded if I left within a year. I still wasn’t promised a raise or a promotion.

So I left.

After that, I didn’t think twice about cheating. I became an editor an online writing school. I kept making videos. I helped friends write case studies. I worked early mornings, late nights, and weekends. Oddly enough, my job felt lighter. I just saw it as one source of income, and I was trying to actively build another.

I don’t think everyone needs to build a side business. But everyone should have something that’s theirs, a pursuit untouched by performance reviews, KPIs, or org charts that ideally could also bring in some extra coin.

So if you’re looking for a sign, here it is:

Cheat on your job. I promise I won’t tell 😉

In the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing more essays around the same theme. If there’s anything you’d like to read on the topic, lemme know in the comments down below.

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Update log:

• 🤖 Made chrome extension that could copy all body text on a webpage. Currently waiting for Chrome to approve it to go live on the extension store. (Demo of the old version here)

• 📖 Reading Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman

• ❇️ Have been thinking a lot about what skills to pick up in this AI world. My colleague

  Ines Lee
  makes a compelling case for being a T-Shaped Professional

• 📕 Read Hell Yeah or No by Derek Sivers

• 🤒 Having back pain from idk a combo of 1) working out too much and 2) age ???? I’ve been saying “I can’t wait for my 30s” but now imma take it back

• 🖼️ Learning that there’s a LOT you can do with Canva. I’m having a good time.

Book a call: Have a bite-sized creative project? Let’s give you a starting line boost a la Mario Kart - https://calendly.com/beckyisj/

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