There was a stretch of about forty minutes yesterday afternoon, between twenty past three and four, when I watched a colleague at the desk diagonal to mine quietly run two economies on two monitors. The left screen had the company Slack open on a thread about sprint planning. The right screen had a Next.js dashboard, half finished, for a Dhanmondi furniture brand who had been emailing him since Sunday about a demo scheduled for Saturday night. He answered a Slack message about acceptance criteria, pushed a commit that wired up the checkout flow on the agency build, turned back to Slack to say noted, will refactor, then replied on WhatsApp to the furniture brand's founder about a tweak to the hover state on a product card. He did this for forty minutes without once losing the thread on either screen.
If you have worked in any Banani or Gulshan office in the last five years, you have watched some version of this. Two monitors, sometimes a phone propped between them. The polite fiction of the working day is that the salaried role on the left monitor is the centre of the colleague's economic life. The honest reading is that the salaried role is a visa stamp. It keeps the lights on, the BRTA registration intact, the EPF contribution ticking along. The actual centre of gravity has shifted to whatever is running on the right monitor.
The shift did not begin in the month the AI tools landed. It began some time around 2018, when the contract of disciplined labour an older generation had inherited stopped paying out the way it had for their fathers. Real salaries in the urban IT sector are roughly flat in nominal taka since then. The dollar has appreciated by around 35 percent over the same window, and urban rent on the World Bank's series on household budgets is up close to half. The salary of an engineer in the middle of his career, one that comfortably carried a Dhanmondi three bedroom apartment in 2019, now carries a Mohammadpur two bedroom apartment in 2026, with a lift that works on alternate Tuesdays and a landlord who has started asking for the six month deposit in cash, on the verandah.
What that gap produces, on a city of twenty million people most of whom have a smartphone and a bKash account, is a quiet, vast, parallel economy. The label most of my colleagues use for it, in the American borrowing of hustle culture that Chris Guillebeau's 2017 book did so much to popularise here, is the side hustle. Guillebeau meant the phrase aspirationally, with none of the weight the Bangladeshi usage has loaded onto it, which is simply how the rent gets paid in May when the school fee for the kids at Sunnydale is also due on the fifteenth.
The salary covers the rent. Everything else is the gigs.
Watch enough of these for long enough and the side hustles in Dhaka sort into five rough kinds. Skill arbitrage is the first and most obvious one, where a designer being paid in taka still priced like 2019 by a domestic agency takes a weekend Upwork brief from a Dutch client paying in euros. Sitting next to it on the spectrum is inventory arbitrage, the marketing lead I went to school with who brings two suitcases of Korean cosmetics back from a Bangkok trip and clears them through a Daraz storefront her sister-in-law runs out of Mirpur DOHS. Audience arbitrage is the slower one, the food vlog Instagram with eighty thousand followers run by an analytics manager who never quite tells her line manager that the followers exist. Time arbitrage shows up as the weekend agency build for a friend's furniture brand that adds 25 thousand taka to a Saturday spent at the desk instead of out at Cox's Bazar. And capital arbitrage, which Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir's Scarcity would call a rational response to a thinning margin, in 2026 mostly means a crypto position checked between sprint standups.
Each of the five sits on a different risk profile. Skill arbitrage feels safe and is mostly safe, until the agency client notices the freelance portfolio site is the same designer who is supposed to be billing them forty hours a week. The inventory route produces real cash but eats real evenings, and the moment a customs officer at Shahjalal decides the cosmetics suitcase is a commercial consignment, the whole margin disappears in an afternoon. Audiences compound slowly across years, then flip into a real second income inside one quarter if the algorithm tilts the right way at a wedding season post. Of the five, time arbitrage is the most exhausting, because the colleague who is up until two in the morning on a Saturday pushing the agency build to staging is the colleague in the nine o'clock retro on Monday with that tiredness around the eyes the older partners tactfully decide not to ask about. Capital, in its bad weeks, is the one that takes the down payment for the Bashundhara flat with it.
Tim Harford's Adapt, which I read in a Dhanmondi cha-er-dokan in late 2019, argues that shadow economies are almost always more rational than the formal economy gives them credit for being. People run them because the formal arrangement has thinned to the point where the shadow one prices in a truth the formal one is still pretending about. Pranab Bardhan, an economist with roots in both India and Bangladesh, has spent forty years saying a version of the same thing about the South Asian informal sector, which by his measurements does roughly three quarters of the actual employment in the region while the salaried sector takes most of the press. The Dhaka office in 2026 is the formal sector quietly catching up to the village rule, where everyone has always had a small second arrangement on the side because no single arrangement has ever quite been enough.
The bit that made me start writing this down on the back of a meeting agenda yesterday is that the same shape is now showing up one floor up, on the desks of the senior product managers and staff engineers, the people who on paper are the well paid ones. The cause that pushed them there reads differently in the HR slide deck, but the underlying mechanism running on the laptop after 9pm is the same as the one running on the junior engineer's right monitor. AI tools across 2024 and 2025 have turned one senior engineer into something close to ten engineers' worth of shipped output, by a rough internal estimate several teams I've worked with would back. The corresponding line in the salary spreadsheet has stayed almost exactly where it was, with a four to six percent annual revision that does not begin to keep up with what the dollar has done to a Gulshan rent. The senior IC's response, as I argued last month about hiring, has been to grow a second income the salary line does not see. That second income usually arrives as some combination of consulting on the side, an angel cheque written into a friend's seed round, and a small AI tool sold to three other PMs at four other companies for ninety dollars a month each. It is roughly the same five categories from the floor below, rebadged in the language of senior IC work.
It is the same engine. The engineer in the middle of his career, running an agency build on the weekend, and the staff engineer with three angel cheques are running the same calculation. The formal contract no longer covers what life now costs, the formal contract refuses to renegotiate at the rate that would actually close the gap, and the worker grows a small, quiet, additional arrangement that does. Whether we call it gig work, side hustle, freelance, consulting, advisory, or angel track investing turns out to matter less than I once thought, because the shape, the rationale, and increasingly the share of the worker's actual attention all sit on the same side of the ledger. There is a piece I wrote a while back about how code grammar is not code thinking, and the throughline is the same. The visible artifact, on the day job side, is no longer where the real work is happening.
What this means for the firms doing the hiring is that almost every assumption baked into a performance management system built for 2018 has quietly stopped being true. The salary you offer is no longer the price the candidate is being paid for their time, because the throughput of the day job you measure is no longer where their attention is sharpest, and the LinkedIn profile you screen against is a careful curation of the visible economy that conceals the one running off payroll underneath. The most useful single question I have started asking is what do you do on Saturdays? You almost never get a story about rest. What you get instead is a story about a second client, a small store, a YouTube channel, a Substack the candidate sells for twenty dollars a month to fourteen subscribers in three cities. That answer is almost always the more interesting half of the candidate's life. As the career advice itself keeps doing, the target keeps moving, and a firm that does not know how to ask the question is hiring half the person.
At six o'clock yesterday my colleague closed the Slack window on the left monitor and kept the agency repo open on the right. I asked him on the way out how the evening was looking. He said he had two more PRs to land before the Saturday demo, a call scheduled with the founder of the furniture brand at nine, and a fourth ticket from a second client he was hoping to push to next weekend if Saturday went well. He said it the way an older relative might have mentioned a small jewellery order to drop off on the way home, or a tuition class for the neighbour's daughter. The vocabulary is new and imported and English. The arrangement is not, and I have no idea what I am supposed to do with that in his next performance review.