THE software engineer, who worked for Apple Inc. and is now at Google, juggled two identities: self-described computer nerd as well as a rapper in videos featuring plenty of booze and bikinis. Mr. Tory opted to keep those sides separate and secret, worried that people in each world wouldn’t take him seriously if they knew his full story.
But driving 10 hours round-trip every weekend from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., to Los Angeles, where he could throw parties to promote his songs, became exhausting. Early this year, Mr. Tory came clean to his boss and premiered a video in which he croons, codes and ultimately dons a jacket with the Apple logo.
“I felt this weight lift off me,” he said. “It felt so liberating.”
A lot of people are pursuing creative side gigs while they hold down big office jobs. It used to be that many had to choose between their creative aspirations and their commitment to a corporate career, but in the era of the side hustle some manage to do both.
Mr. Tory, who holds a patent in firmware design, is happy to juggle rapping and coding. In July he switched jobs to take an engineering role with Alphabet Inc.’s Google in Los Angeles, where he can work full time and be close to his studio and producers.
“There have been massive changes in people’s expectation about what work offers us and what we demand in it,” said Kathryn Minshew, chief executive of the Muse, a careers website geared toward millennials. “No job is going to be everything that a person wants.”
Doing both comes with trade-offs and tensions. Unlike the aspiring actor waiting tables to pay the bills, true dual professionals have to balance the demands of both their aspirations, and often face a moment of reckoning where they are forced to sacrifice a step forward in one career path for job stability and financial security in the other.
The two worlds of Theresa Vu—also known as the rapper tvu—often collide. As senior vice president of engineering at New York software firm AppNexus, Ms. Vu runs a team of coders who work on a digital advertising platform. As a vocalist with the band Magnetic North, she rhymes and drops beats, and helped propel the band’s “Home: Word” album to No. 2 on the Japanese hip-hop chart.
When Magnetic North’s album took off a few years ago, Ms. Vu’s label asked the group to tour in Asia. Her bandmates were all for it, but she was terrified she would lose her job if she took the time off, so she opted out. That meant nobody got to go.
“I felt massively guilty,” she said, adding that giving up the chance to tour “felt almost like giving up on a music career.”
It isn’t easy to break through to celebrity status while climbing the corporate ladder. The long hours at consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP started wearing down 28-year-old Karlo Siriban, a tech consultant and aspiring singer and actor.
“I’d be wracking my brain. What the hell should I do here? Should I stay here?” he asked himself. “I’m not happy. It’s a really hard decision to make. Also just being a performer, everything becomes a little bit more dramatic.”
He opted to cram his busy work schedule into four-and-a-half days a week and carve out time for open casting calls on Friday afternoons. Mr. Siriban said he made it through 11 rounds of auditions for the hit musical “Hamilton,” practicing by rapping along to the soundtrack while driving to client meetings in Philadelphia every week until he got put on projects in Florida and California.
“I couldn’t really rap on the plane,” he said, adding that he tried to rap more at home, but lost out on his 12th audition for the show’s executive producers.
After that blow, Mr. Siriban backed off music for a year to focus on landing a promotion at PwC. He scored the bigger job and a raise in July and is now doubling down on his Broadway dream by attending auditions again.
“It’s like a sickness where I just want to prove to everyone I can do it,” he said. “I’m going to show you I can be number one at both. Watch me.”
For Ms. Vu, who is currently developing a solo project in addition to her work with Magnetic North, her dueling corporate and creative careers are no longer at war. She says she has come a long way since her father tossed out her microphone when she was a teen, and later warned her that employers would consider her a flight risk if they knew about her musical aspirations. The turning point, she said, came when her boss showed up at a concert and remarked how confident she was onstage. He urged Ms. Vu to be her “music self” all the time.
“It really helped me,” she said. “It made life significantly more happy, not having to always have this filter on.” - WSJ
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