[HN Gopher] Why not hire part-time developers?
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Why not hire part-time developers?
Author : prohobo
Score : 146 points
Date : 2022-02-27 17:40 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| scrapcode wrote:
| I have been looking for something like this recently in order to
| get a feel of what it is like to work as a developer on a team. I
| am knee deep in a stable yet unexciting career in software
| acquisition, but can't help to wonder daily if I should pivot for
| more esteem and self-actualization reasons. I have been
| developing personal tools/apps/as a 'hobby' for most of my life,
| and also have an undergrad degree in CS with a focus on
| development, but we all know how these things can differ when it
| becomes a job. I could love it, I could hate it.
|
| It would be great to have access to part-time work, or even non-
| traditional internship type roles for little money, to not only
| get an idea of if the industry-as-a-job is for me, but for me and
| some team to get a better idea of whether or not we'd work well
| together. I'm stuck in the middle of making enough in my current
| field to make taking on a junior dev role a large risk for my
| family, but don't feel like I have the professional experience to
| be what anyone is looking for in periodic freelance work. I have
| even started responding to some recruiters trying to portray
| this, in case something comes up, but I don't think that is much
| in their wheelhouse. I'm open to suggestions if anyone has come
| across something like this.
| moffkalast wrote:
| The company I work at is basically all part-time devs,
| including myself. There are upsides and downsides with it
| however. I absolutely love the freedom it offers, since as long
| as projects have good progress you can work any time, anywhere,
| take any amount of days off or work any amount of hours you
| want without having to tell anyone anything.
|
| On the other hand there's no paid time off or vacation bonus,
| your credit rating is non-existent and no bank will lend you
| anything, it doesn't count towards the pension period, you need
| to file taxes manually every month, etc. This is in Europe so
| as you might imagine most of the government systems in place
| are rigidly designed for the standard full time job which is
| rather infuriating in most aspects.
| throwaway98727 wrote:
| For less than 40 hours a week, start with:
|
| - 5 day a week schedule
|
| - 2 hour turnaround time for questions during core business hours
| prohobo wrote:
| Yeah, that seems fair to me.
| [deleted]
| nullandvoid wrote:
| I've just gone down to 4 days pro-rata, and have enjoyed the
| additional time to work on my own projects, and get on top of any
| chores (and honestly sometimes just re-charge).
|
| From this point forward I'm attempting to optimize for personal
| development and fulfillment through building more things that
| tickle my own intellectual itches, rather than a bigger job
| title.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| We have a guy on a 10-hour weekly contract and his output nearly
| matches his full-time peers.
| addsubtract wrote:
| I'm a SWE who has a long term goal/dream of working for myself.
| I'm sure lots of readers here have this exact same dream.
|
| It is hard to pull yourself away from the nice salary and
| benefits of the corporate job. The opportunity cost of working
| for myself and failing for a year or two is very high when
| salaries are 250k+ for senior devs.
|
| It would be great to reduce the risk with part-time work. I hope
| it becomes more normalized. The problem I see is the ramp time
| for new workers to get productive. If the workers are part-time
| it is longer.
|
| For those who are concerned with "hours worked", that's just bad
| management. Set concrete goals and then evaluate worker output.
| Hours is irrelevant.
|
| I hope I find the courage to try breaking out "on my own" before
| it is too late. The one thing we all cannot buy is more time.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> with over-fitted teams (do you really need 40 engineers to
| build this?)_
|
| I've encountered teams that use patterns like MVVM and VIPER,
| simply because they are designed to break projects into discrete
| components, so larger teams can work on them.
|
| I have also been told that we shouldn't use advanced development
| techniques, because other developers can't understand the tech.
|
| The project that I'm working on, has a scope that usually is
| implemented by a team of 10 or more engineers. That's _nuts_. It
| 's a fairly ambitious app, but it's just an iOS app. I've done a
| ton of these, alone. I also wrote the backend; which is not my
| forte, but I don't like the selection for backends, out there.
|
| I have control issues, I guess...
|
| _> I'm essentially an advocate for hiring fewer people and with
| more precision._
|
| So am I, but that does not seem to be how the industry works.
|
| I remember talking with a startup manager, several years ago, and
| they told me that the entire industry is based around engineers
| never staying at a company more than two years; with 18 months
| being the norm. I know that they had a heavy turnover, during the
| two years we worked with them.
|
| That has many, _many_ downsides. Of course, you have the issue of
| "too many cooks spoil the soup," but you also have people writing
| code that they have no intention of maintaining, so why bother
| doing a good job?
|
| I have always been of the opinion that we keep teams together for
| years. It helps them to become "unified," and "move as one." That
| pays off, big time.
|
| But it also requires a _completely_ different management style
| from what seems to be the norm, these days, and that, apparently,
| is too big an ask.
|
| FWIW, I would have been happy with part-time gig work. No one
| wants to work with us "olds," though, so I have found people that
| want the work I do, and it is far more than full-time.
|
| No money, but I don't really care.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I've encountered teams that use patterns like MVVM and VIPER,
| simply because they are designed to break projects into
| discrete components, so larger teams can work on them.
|
| Yes, I've seen this kind of thing happen, too. Project
| complexity grows to justify the size of the team, not the other
| way around. A project that should take two good developers
| three months, gets assigned to a team of 40. That team has eng
| managers and eng manager managers and has to deal with all that
| communication and organizational bandwidth. We have all these
| people, so some of them must do core business logic, some of
| them will integrate 3rd party frameworks, some will do
| frontend/ui. And we need to take design time to draw the lines
| between these modules so nobody is stepping on anyone else's
| work. And we have to have stable APIs between all these, so we
| need an API design. Also, we need robust continuous integration
| and test frameworks because there are so many people
| committing, so we'll need to designate at least one, maybe
| multiple build engineers. And thanks to the tech lead /
| architect, we have many layers of abstraction, so the project
| can be mentally understood by 40 people. We also need to
| serialize and deserialize JSON between each layer, so that each
| could in theory be reused in a different project. Oh, and
| because of this complexity it's going to take the team ten
| months. A year and a half later, this massive CRUD app is
| released!
|
| Meanwhile, two skilled engineers could have just sat together
| and developed that same CRUD app without all the complexity and
| layers of abstraction.
| qrohlf wrote:
| I experienced this in the extreme recently. I'm a very
| experienced dev in a very in-demand field. Money is not a huge
| priority for me in my career. Flexibility is. I have a proven
| track record of success in part-time roles after converting to
| part time at my previous company (after 2 years of full-time, of
| course). I spent 3+ months trying to get part-time engagements,
| and was willing to consider both consulting and W-2 arrangements.
| I got interviewed and then ghosted by two companies, was offered
| a laughably low rate by a third, and a fourth showed interest but
| then basically told me that I'd need to work a 40-hour week. I
| know that a vocal minority has success in part-time consulting,
| but it's quite difficult to accomplish if you live outside of a
| tech hub (I'm based in Central Oregon) and don't have SV
| connections.
|
| Contrast that with when I gave up and decided to make myself
| available for full-time (remote) work. In the span of about 5
| weeks, I got over 200 recruiter emails, interviewed at 10
| companies, and received 10 offers, mostly in the upper end of the
| $200k-400k range.
|
| I firmly believe that this is a cultural block, rather than one
| that's rooted in rational/pragmatic concerns. Tech companies want
| to feel like they're getting your full intellectual output, even
| if that's demonstrably false in the status quo. There's also this
| issue that gets brought up of "if Bob is gone half the time,
| isn't that going to breed resentment with his full-time
| coworkers?" (answer: only if you have a shitty "butts in seats"
| management culture).
|
| I honestly don't think we're going to see meaningful change in
| this area for a while. The 40-hour work week is something that's
| heavily ingrained in tech culture, to the point where certain
| companies' "perks" are heavily tuned towards incentivizing you to
| stay at the office longer and frequently turn that 40 hours into
| 60. I think it will take an external disruptive event on the
| scale of COVID-19 in order to change this aspect of tech culture.
| [deleted]
| yibg wrote:
| We've tried part time developers, but so far haven't been able
| to do it successfully. The problem usually comes down to 2
| things:
|
| 1) there is a constant amount of overhead that is always needed
| regardless of how long you work for in a week. Meetings and
| collaboration to figure out what to build, discuss issues etc.
| if these take up 10 hours a week a full time dev has 30 hours
| to do other things where as a half time dev only has 10 hours.
| So 2 half time dev just doesn't get as much done as 1 full
| time. I guess this is also why 2 engineers don't get twice as
| much done as 1, all things being equal.
|
| 2) Most part time dev candidates I've seen aren't doing just a
| single part time job, they are doing either multiple part time
| jobs or a full time job + part time job. Either way the mental
| energy is already gone.
|
| Maybe there is a way to make part time work, I just haven't
| figured it out yet.
| ozim wrote:
| Yeah that 2nd point is that quite often people need "full
| time salary" so it is not that management somehow has
| backwards thinking.
|
| I have a friend that can really work 4 hours a day, but he is
| a special case where he does not have a family to upkeep and
| no mortgage. He is also a bit hard on the frugality.
|
| But finding such person is basically 1 in a million. If I
| post a job with 4h a day which amounts to 1/2 of a normal
| salary I will probably never get a candidate. If I post a job
| with normal salary and then start explaining that it is 1/2
| hours and accordingly paid, some people will get angry.
| mberger wrote:
| I'm in the same situation as your friend and I know of at
| least 3 others in my friend circle. I don't think part time
| availability is as low as you think.
| yibg wrote:
| The other problem is with overhead 2 half time employees !=
| 1 full time employee. There is the extra equipment cost,
| benefits (perhaps), management overhead etc. e.g. If I
| replace a team of 7 full time engineers with 14 half time
| engineers, do I keep 1 manager? That seems like a very
| large team for 1 person to handle, so now maybe I need
| another manager too. From a purely economic perspective
| hiring half time engineers at half the comp just doesn't
| seem to make sense.
|
| You can argue that half time engineers are more than half
| as productive as a full time engineer because as others
| have said full time engineers don't work a full 8 hours
| anyways. While theoretically that's true, as I originally
| posted, that's not what I've seen. Based on my anecdotal
| experience, half time engineers are less than half as
| productive as a full time engineer.
|
| So from both a productivity and economic perspective, it
| hasn't made sense.
| jpindar wrote:
| I can live quite comfortably on half a typical salary, and
| I'm available.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I experienced the same. I asked an acquaintance who runs a
| 1000+ dev company, why is it so difficult for devs to find
| part-time jobs. He replied that he had thought only admin staff
| could do that, he found the concept weird. Very much in line
| with "this is how it works" as the article mentioned.
| tomrod wrote:
| Taking it to first principles, I don't see part time as
| feasible until documentation has negligible marginal cost. It
| takes time to get people up to speed.
|
| Another blocker is the inane requirement in employment
| agreements by many large corps in the US that they own your IP
| while you work for them, regardless how it was developed or
| what the topic is (one place I worked at owned children's books
| if you published them, despite being a software developer).
| Until that is unacceptable, either legally or culturally,
| working part-time presents a conflict of interest. Rather than
| valuing the breadth a part-timer might bring, it's viewed as a
| liability.
| learc83 wrote:
| I've always been able to successfully negotiate those IP
| ownership clauses. Usually without any hassle at all.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| US person detected. Good luck negotiating any terms in
| Europe. Not happening.
| [deleted]
| msh wrote:
| Europa is a big place and how things like this work
| varies a lot.
| 6345dhjdsf wrote:
| Brit here. Garbage. I have simply told the mixed US/UK
| company I worked for that they had no rights over a
| personal project of mine and they were cool with that. By
| your dismissive, failure-assured attitude I can guess
| that you've never tried.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I think it has to do more with the size of the company.
|
| Good luck negotiating that with a FANG, smaller companies
| won't give a damn (unless they have a dumb HR department
| who doesn't understand how hard hiring devs is)
| iarenaza wrote:
| Spaniard here. Definitely negotiated IP terms for my
| current contract :-)
| aerosmile wrote:
| There are a lot of things in this world that are not rooted in
| rational/pragmatic concerns. For example, in the automotive
| industry, a lot of the margin comes from upper-end variants of
| any given model, which are perhaps 10% more capable as the base
| model but cost disproportionally more and are a lot more
| desirable. Why do people go for that? Emotional reasons. Are
| the $2,000 vintage Nikes worth that much, especially if you end
| up actually wearing them? Depends on if you're deciding on a
| rational or emotional basis.
|
| A lot of this translates to the work environment. Someone
| making $300k might feel exceptionally rewarded for their work,
| until they find out that their peer makes $320k. Suddenly that
| $300k no longer looks that desirable anymore. Call it an innate
| quest for justice, call it culture shock, call it whatever you
| want - if you cannot see why your individual arrangement might
| produce a net negative result for the rest of the company, then
| you're ignoring the reality.
|
| You just have to implement certain rules and treat everyone the
| same. You're either a full-time company, or you're a part-time
| company. You're either an on-site company, or you're a remote
| company. If you allow hybrid, you have to allow it for
| everyone. And if one person gets to work 20 hours a week, then
| it needs to be a 0-friction process for everyone else to
| transition to the same arrangement if they so desire. From a
| staffing point of view, that last part is an absolute
| managerial nightmare ("sorry, the project will be pushed back
| by 12 months because all of our engineers decided to move to
| part-time, and we cannot hire new engineers, because the
| existing staff may also move back to full-time at any given
| point").
|
| There is, however, a solution for you - just work for extremely
| well-funded early-stage startups, because their CEOs will be
| more than glad to rock the boat internally in exchange for your
| skills and experience that they would be otherwise struggling
| to find in a full-time hire. By the time that startup scales
| and their CEO starts thinking about culture and retention,
| you'll be off to the next boat that you can rock as hard you'd
| like.
| kuboble wrote:
| In Switzerland it is extremely popular to work part-time in
| IT. To the point that most men I know have reduced to 4/5
| when they became parents and most women to 3/5.
|
| The deal in companies is that it's relatively easy to reduce
| your work % but it's a one way street. To get back your
| manager needs to find a budget the same way as if they were
| hiring (but I don't know anyone who did want to increase it
| back).
|
| Seems to work well.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Are these figures x/5 weekdays, a range of daily hours, or
| something else?
| makapuf wrote:
| I (a man) was 4/5 when my kids were small but I'm
| currently 9/10. Contractually it's yearly, but it ends up
| weekly. 9/10 tends to be difficult to distinguish from
| full time, since you get more focused after this mid week
| break.
| exdsq wrote:
| I think if I was to go for 9/10 I'd argue for 10/10
| salaries because as you mention it's practically
| indistinguishable
| hocuspocus wrote:
| It depends on your job and responsibilities.
|
| I've had managers/POs/PMs/... work 90% and simply take
| every Friday afternoon off.
|
| But if you're a dev then yes, taking half a day off is
| pretty meaningless. I see it as a way to force yourself
| to take 22-23 additional days of vacation, and at least
| two of these every month.
| PythagoRascal wrote:
| In Switzerland jobs are usually advertised in %, where
| 40h-45h/week is 100%. From that it is also usual to talk
| about 80% or 4/5days/week (and so on for other
| percentages).
| the-alchemist wrote:
| Fascinating! I heard the Netherlands has a strong part-
| time job culture too.
| kuboble wrote:
| Depends on the company but I've seen all possible deals.
| - 4x8h a week - 5x6h a week - fully flexible 50% to reach
| each quarter
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I believe a large part is also due to the incentives of
| recruiters and how they is structured. Most recruiters take a
| fee that depends on the hours put in or a percentage of the
| total contract, or a mix. Surely some exceptions exist but I
| believe most are incentivised to only go for atleast 32 hours
| to make it worth the effort, and thus don't bother eating a
| potential 40 hour contract on a smaller 16 hour one. I see the
| flawed logic but I've asked around a ton already and it's
| always no while I know the market is there when I'm already
| inside. I just haven't met the right clients I guess.
| ghaff wrote:
| I do think a lot of it is "tradition" for lack of a better
| word. That aside--and knowing some part-time contractors (not
| in technical roles)--a few things.
|
| 1.) A significant percentage of cost per employee to a company
| is benefits. So work half-time and the breakeven to the company
| is probably something like 1/3 pay if you get full-time
| benefits.
|
| 2.) The above doesn't even count that there are a lot of other
| overheads (management, coordination/meetings/collaboration) to
| having more people doing the same work.
|
| 3.) It depends what part-time means. Many of us might be OK
| with 4-day workweeks or shorter days--though to some degree
| those may be possible in practice today with the appropriate
| workload and degree of synchronicity. However, if your
| preference is to take month+ blocks of time off on a regular
| basis, that's much more difficult to accommodate. (And, if you
| unplug during those times you lose a lot of context. Earlier in
| my career, I did take month long vacations now and then but
| it's hard to norm as a regular thing for lots of good practical
| reasons.)
| hash872 wrote:
| As someone who's hired part-time developers off and on for
| years.... the issue is that they typically start out working
| the agreed-upon number of hours, then begin to work less & less
| over time. There's no feasible way to _make_ someone work more
| hours remotely, and they 're usually sharp enough to get
| partway into a project before flaking out so that it's
| difficult to just replace them- you'd have to hire an entirely
| new developer to understand what they've done to date. From the
| developers' point of view I think they're just constantly
| looking for new work, better-paying work, or at least lining up
| a project for the future- then they get overloaded and choose
| to flake out on the client.
|
| In theory hiring freelancers part-time should be a great
| solution for everyone involved, in practice the issue is
| flakiness
| throwaway98727 wrote:
| More money per hour is a buffer for finding work after your
| project ends.
| prohobo wrote:
| I agree this is a real problem for freelancers, but for part-
| time employees? It might be that someone needs to make a
| better system for remote work that gives some options for
| enforcement.
| carlsborg wrote:
| The other issue is flow. Flow is vital for execution, and
| distributing your attention amongst multiple projects means
| your flow breaks. Also part time devs might not commit to
| daily meetings, or being on call for downtime incidents.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| This seems like a non issue and "Flow" is hard to quantify.
| Devs shouldn't have many daily meetings period.
| mooreds wrote:
| How is this different than a full time employee who starts to
| slack off?
|
| Or is your point that part time employees are more likely to
| slack off because they are looking for other work/have other
| responsibilities that take precedence?
|
| Because I've definitely seen my share of fulltime employees
| who slacked pretty darn hard.
| kradeelav wrote:
| Not OP, but there's more tools managers have to guide
| slacking IC's back in line when they're full time. Loyalty
| to coworkers/"company culture", easier to discipline if it
| goes on the official performance review, more of an
| "official" paper trail available versus contractors and
| part time who may be hired even by a third party agency.
| Part time / contractors are sometimes, not always, but
| sometimes in general lower quality as far as work ethic
| goes.
| ars wrote:
| Are you hiring them per/hour? Why not do a part time salary
| position? They are expected to spend an agreed number of
| hours per week (or maybe do it by the day) and the salary is
| proportional to that.
|
| If they want to change the hours then renegotiate time and
| salary.
| hash872 wrote:
| I think the pool of developers who are not freelancers, are
| OK with part-time work, don't need _more_ salary than you
| 're paying them for part-time work (like they have a cheap
| lifestyle or are already well-off?), and won't continuously
| keep looking for more work is in practice just a very small
| number of people. Sure, there's some people that meet that
| description, but just not very many. There's a reason the
| labor market has evolved to the binary of either being a
| full-time employee or a freelancer on project-based
| assignments
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| This seems like an assumption. We have people secretly
| working two jobs, and openly in cases like Microsoft's
| company policy. Even companies that have 20% of time for
| other work in the company like Google. A part timed
| salaried position should be fine. Their are European and
| Scandinavian countries that half it established.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Most of my consulting has been full-time but I have had a few
| part time - generally these are in:
|
| 1. not in demand fields but fields that for some reason are
| momentarily needed by the company.
|
| 2. fields the company hopes to teach someone else to handle.
|
| 3. using technology that the company wants to move off of
| because they don't have anyone that knows it anymore.
|
| Those fields - Accessibility (achieving WCAG 1.0 conformance),
| XSL-T - had an xml + xsl-t generating website, team is
| rebuilding to React and know nothing about the old tech, DSSL
| stylesheets that needed to be moved to XSL-FO. I also nearly
| had a part time JQuery maintenance 2 month project about a year
| and a half ago.
|
| My suspicion, if it's an in-demand field people want you full
| time, that stuff is IN DEMAND after all.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| > Contrast that with when I gave up and decided to make myself
| available for full-time (remote) work. In the span of about 5
| weeks, I got over 200 recruiter emails, interviewed at 10
| companies, and received 10 offers, mostly in the upper end of
| the $200k-400k range.
|
| The secret is to take a full time job and then only work 20-30
| hours a week. Pre-pandemic I was only really productive 4 hours
| a day anyways, but I had to sit in an office the entire day.
| With remote work, it's much easier to do "full-time" work.
| throwaway98727 wrote:
| At most companies you get full benefits at 30 hours a week.
| rhodysurf wrote:
| I think their comment went over your head
| ghaff wrote:
| Totally. Circumstances differ of course. How efficient are
| you? What's the overall workload? To what degree can you work
| asynchronously?
|
| But working remotely, the reality is that at least some
| people can get off without working a 9-5 day so long as they
| are at least somewhat available during the workday.
| AQuantized wrote:
| The way many people I've known seem to achieve flexibility is
| to accept a role somewhere relatively laid back, typically at a
| large but non-tech corporation. If they're coming from a much
| more intense environment and working remotely, it often
| requires only a couple of hours work a day to over perform, if
| that.
|
| It seems like it's almost impossible to get a role that's
| explicitly part time (as you've experienced) but plenty of
| companies are willing to offer lower salaries while turning a
| blind eye to enforcing the supposedly 40 hour work week.
|
| The other ways seem to involve some combination of working for
| yourself, consulting, and short periods of full time employment
| interspersed with not formally working.
| wadefletch wrote:
| When you say you made yourself available, what does that mean
| in practice? Targeted network outreach? A LinkedIn post?
| kube-system wrote:
| In my experience, tech consulting firms are very friendly to
| contracting arrangements. They tend not to be stuck in a "butts
| in seats" culture because of how they operate with their
| customers.
| dvtrn wrote:
| I've long suspected this. Question for anyone who wants to
| take a stab at it: how, as someone wanting an 'in' to the
| consulting world, to best find and separate companies that
| are actual _consulting firms_ and not just burn-and-churn MSP
| shops that carefully and sometimes convincingly disguise
| themself as such?
| kube-system wrote:
| In my opinion, I would ask three things:
|
| 1. Ask about the makeup of a typical team. The more layers
| of bloat and regurgitation between the customer and the
| developer, the more likelihood that the people doing the
| actual work need a high degree of hand-holding.
|
| 2. Ask about their overall approach to customer success,
| and specifically, what they do _before_ they start
| development. Good quality consulting firms will have
| entirely separate non-development projects focusing on
| fully understanding the problem space before they ever
| start development. If their customers just throw software
| requirements on their desk and ask work to start tomorrow,
| they're probably not competing on premium quality
| solutions.
|
| 3. Ask about how (or if) the development team works cross-
| functionally with the customers' business teams. Burn-and-
| churn shops will hide their developers from their
| customers. High performing teams may send a developer solo
| on a flight to a customer site.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Excellent feedback, thank you!
| x0x0 wrote:
| If you think your job as an engineer is to write code, then
| sure -- part time makes sense.
|
| If you think your job as an engineer is to build a solution as
| a team, then one person hopping in and out of availability
| creates a hassle for an entire team. Can't have project
| meetings on Mon / Fri because X is never there. If a project
| with involvement by a part timer isn't done by eod Thursday, a
| fulltime person has 2 dead work days until the part time person
| shows up again. etc etc.
| bonniemuffin wrote:
| I agree that someone working fewer days per week might be
| hard to fit into a full-time team culture, but someone
| working fewer hours per day ought to be pretty easy. For the
| "fewer hours per day" case, it's just like working across
| different time zones, which many companies are already well-
| acclimated to doing -- e.g. you need to schedule all your
| meetings with this person in the morning because their 5pm is
| at our 11am.
| [deleted]
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| Don't see this working in USA.
|
| I've never been to Europe, but work with many who are from there.
| You get socialized healthcare, cities with easy transit, and for
| the most part things are close.
|
| In the US, we don't have health insurance unless we buy it
| ourselves ($$$$) or our company provides it ($). We don't have
| easy transit in most cities, and also people do live far away
| from the business centers.
|
| That's why in the USA, most people want full time work.
| Unfortunately, the mega corporations that some of y'all work for
| ensure that this becomes harder and harder. Hope your RSUs are
| worth it!
| gopher_space wrote:
| I think the US could convince non-retired people to cut back on
| the work week. For example, I think you could demonstrate that
| you need a workforce with fucked up backs _alongside_ easy
| access to opioids to trigger our crisis.
| BadCookie wrote:
| The ACA made it possible to go part-time in the US. It costs
| just over $1k/month for my family of three for a silver plan
| with no subsidies.
| the-alchemist wrote:
| In addition, I heard in some states (CA, I think?), even a
| single member LLC has to be offered the same group rate for
| health insurance that other small-company (<100 employees)
| get.
|
| Maybe someone can confirm.
| Animats wrote:
| _" They want rockstars, but they themselves are not that."_ Yes,
| that problem.
|
| Zappos is a shoe store. Uber is a taxi company.
| bogwog wrote:
| I wonder if hiring big teams is a status/ego thing. I've never
| been in that position, but I couldn't imagine myself deciding
| that I need an Uber-scale development team to build a service
| like Uber. Just seems wasteful and like it'd be a nightmare to
| manage.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The size of a team is a directors' pissing contest.
|
| The chain of responsibility for that goes up to the investors
| who put millions in a company and pressured the founders to
| "SCALE FAST"
| Animats wrote:
| _I wonder if hiring big teams is a status /ego thing._
|
| In a few cases, yes, definitely. Soylent was an extreme
| example. They went on and on about their overcomplicated
| "tech stack", at a time when, from their sales volume, they
| were processing a few sales transactions per minute. All they
| needed was a basic shopping cart program. They're still
| around, now classified as a "food products" company, selling
| wholesale, and considered an overpriced Slim-Fast.
| tarr11 wrote:
| OP says after 4 hours of software development work, "they are
| done" and after that it's just "obsessive tweaking".
|
| They also say they started their own business and wanted to work
| part time at a company.
|
| Who is getting the "4 hours of work" and who is getting the
| "obsessive tweaking"?
|
| Not sure how these 2 statements align.
| nurettin wrote:
| > Why not hire part-time developers?
|
| Because they don't show up when your teams need the most
| interaction. If you have the luxury of giving a developer a six
| month job which requires absolutely no interaction, great. Go
| ahead. But your part-timer won't show up at various critical
| times. Unless they are absolutely dedicated, they will miss
| weeklies and disappear especially when they release to prod and
| the bugs start getting reported. And you have no way of
| penalizing it.
| rendall wrote:
| It sounds like you're talking about irresponsible and
| unreliable engineers, not part-time engineers.
| ghaff wrote:
| It depends on what "part-time" means. If part-time means I'll
| take Fridays off (which are often low meeting days anyway)
| and will (flexibly) not work 8 hours most days, it may be
| fine. If it means I'll take several one to two month-long
| vacations a year, that's something very different.
|
| The manner in which you're working less absolutely matters.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| From an employer's point of view this makes little sense. Having
| to deal with the extra paperwork associated with the extra staff
| is very expensive and ultimately you get less production output
| when you hire part time. I think a 4 day week is probably a more
| likely option for developers to request and attain.
|
| The other option is contract work. There you set your own hours.
| prohobo wrote:
| You lost me with "extra". What I'm talking about are core
| product team members, not freelancers. Maybe I'm hitting on the
| wrong issue here, but if I was a team member coding 4 hours a
| day I'd be just as productive as ever.
|
| The problem I'm recognizing now is that maybe I'm really just
| miffed about the "butts in seats" mentality. I'd have no issue
| working "full-time" if that was just a way to say "team member"
| and didn't mean that I have to sit on my ass all day because
| big boss man likes it that way.
|
| I'm either part of the team or a contractor anyway, so might as
| well make it official.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > You lost me with "extra". What I'm talking about are core
| product team members, not freelancers.
|
| It was "extra paperwork associated with the extra staff".
|
| As in, adding X% more staff means X% more staff-related
| paperwork.
| prohobo wrote:
| So don't hire so many people? I don't understand the
| problem. Why would they be hiring "extras" anyway? As
| backup?
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Not extra as in "not needed", but extra as in "more than
| in the alternative" (with the alternative coming from the
| post title).
|
| The idea being that if everyone's part-time, you need
| more people to get the same work done relative to if
| everyone was full-time.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Here are two disadvantages that seem real to me:
|
| (1) Turn-around time. If you need a small feature developed and
| it's going to take a full-time developer 3 weeks from start to
| finish, how long will it take a developer who works half time? 6
| weeks.
|
| (2) Team scalability. A lot of people prefer smaller teams of
| developers because large teams don't seem to scale well. (A team
| of 10 people usually isn't twice as productive as a team of 5. At
| least, this is a pretty common view.) If your team has part-time
| employees, then it will need to have more employees to handle a
| given workload.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| For any C++ / computer vision people who are in this position:
| Kitware pays hourly, and at least in the medical research
| department I was in, you pick how many hours you work per week,
| down to about 30 hours. I usually worked 32 hour weeks when I was
| there.
| issa wrote:
| I think your basic premise might not be correct. If you only are
| getting 4 productive hours of work done per day, then something
| is wrong. I would say you probably only get 4 productive hours of
| WRITING CODE (maybe much less), but during that long lunch break,
| or bike ride, or whatever, you are probably thinking about the
| problem (consciously or not).
|
| If you work part time on two different projects, you simply won't
| be as productive, because you won't have that "down time" to
| think about problems.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The prior mega-thread seemed to indicate the average time spent
| was around that many hours
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581125
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I'll throw out a typical day for me, a data analyst:
|
| 0800 workday starts
|
| 0800-0830 daily standup
|
| 0830-0930 check and reply to emails
|
| *0930-1100 ACTUAL WORK*
|
| 1100-1130 lunch
|
| 1130-1200 check and reply to emails
|
| 1200-1300 meeting with [some product] team over
|
| 1300-1315 coffee break with colleagues
|
| *1315-1500 ACTUAL WORK*
|
| 1500-1600 Some meeting
|
| 1600 workday ends
|
| As you can see, that gives me less than 4 hours of "real" work
| toward the product. Some days there's less meetings, other days
| there's much more. But in any case, I'd point out meetings as
| the main culprit. Lots and lots of emails, too. It's pretty
| much a never-ending stream.
|
| But at least with modern meetings over Zoom/Teams/etc., you're
| more free to do some work in the background. Before COVID, we
| pretty much had 100% physical meetings. Or remote meetings in
| conference rooms.
| ec109685 wrote:
| I don't get how replying to email and attending meetings
| isn't real work.
|
| If you aren't adding value to your employer by performing
| those tasks, ask your manager to abstain.
| issa wrote:
| I am jealous of your work experience that you can make this
| comment. In organizations that run really well, this isn't
| an issue. But there are a lot of development jobs that
| involve frequent touch-points with middle managers who
| don't bring much to the table except for taking time out of
| developer's days to appear busy. And I say that with no
| offense intended to any middle managers. Good project
| managers are worth their weight in gold.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It sounds like you just lack context. These people aren't
| adding any value to _your_ day but they are adding value
| to the business. They stay informed on the status of
| everything going on in their sphere and use that to keep
| key people informed and spot when things are going wrong.
| issa wrote:
| Absolutely. Sometimes. I was trying to differentiate
| between the people who do contribute and those who don't.
| I think it's been well documented that meetings can
| easily become bloated at some orgs. And if you've been
| around enough, you have definitely come across at least
| one person who just does busy work.
| issa wrote:
| Estimating timelines is a simple but great example. If I
| use my experience on similar projects, I can probably
| give you an excellent estimate of how long it will take
| to build a new project in about half an hour. Or, I could
| break it down for you, task-by-task, and come up with the
| exact same number in 8 hours.
| issa wrote:
| I would hesitate to apply this in all situations, but in a
| lot of them, all the meetings, and maybe even the emails
| (although that seems excessive), help you when it comes to
| making decisions during the "actual" work portions of your
| day.
| drewcoo wrote:
| That may be true, but if companies don't pay me for passive
| "work" I do for them during that downtime, then why worry about
| its effectiveness?
| [deleted]
| prohobo wrote:
| I don't really feel the difference between planning/coding.
| It's all the same to me in terms of problem solving.
|
| Also, I already do this as a consultant, and clients are
| usually mostly focused on speed and quality. So I give them 4
| hours a day, I take a couple hours off then I plug away at my
| own projects for a few more hours.
|
| The context switch plus the long break makes it work for me,
| but everyone is different.
|
| Depending on the project, thinking about solutions during down-
| time does make sense - but no employer I've ever come across
| sees it as productive anyway. There's always the silent
| expectation to _look_ like you 're actively working. In any
| case, I'm often thinking about my work during the day
| regardless of whether I'm on the clock or not so this is a moot
| issue for me.
| brailsafe wrote:
| What amount of time are you billing for, and how do you track
| it?
| prohobo wrote:
| I bill for every hour I spend actively engaging with the
| work. Usually I max out at about 4 hours, but sometimes go
| to 8 hours when there are other roles involved (graphics
| design, devops, meetings, etc.)
|
| Tracking depends on the client and project, but usually I
| input my work on HourStack.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> Depending on the project, thinking about solutions during
| down-time does make sense - but no employer I've ever come
| across sees it as productive anyway.
|
| Indeed, if you look at products that are sold for automating
| the management of skilled workers, such as JIRA and activity
| tracking, the unstated goal is to eliminate slack. If I can
| persuade a manager that I need to spend time thinking about
| solutions, even doing that has to be codified as an entry in
| a tracking app, with a plan and a deadline.
|
| Part time work might end up being the only way to regain that
| slack, and the cost in compensation might be worth it for a
| lot of workers. Especially if they can also relocate to a low
| cost region.
|
| Simply due to my age, and where I live, I've dealt with and
| know a lot of doctors. A large fraction of them have switched
| to part-time status, or they're professors with limited
| clinical schedules. I play in a band with a guy who is a
| retired part-time doctor. He lives in a very modest little
| house, and has enough wealth to live on.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| My work would have to have much more interesting problems for
| this to be the case.
| missizii wrote:
| Part time work for developers would also help women who don't
| want to work full time when they have small children. If I had a
| part time option when my children were small, I would have
| embraced it. My career was thriving, but there was no "step back"
| option for me. If you want more women in tech, recognize that the
| first shift of daycare & school prep, the second shift of work,
| and the third shift of cooking, cleaning, and caring, is
| exhausting and unpleasant, even when both parents try to share
| the burden.
| Scarblac wrote:
| > Part time work for developers would also help women who don't
| want to work full time when they have small children.
|
| And men with the same wish.
| dudul wrote:
| > Part time work for developers would also help women who don't
| want to work full time when they have small children.
|
| How about "parent" instead of "women"?
| missizii wrote:
| 1. Tech has small percentage of women. The ridiculous under
| representation of female coders is widely recognized as a
| problem and something that should be fixed. There are
| programs for recruiting women into CS Majors. But the
| imbalance will remain when women have babies and are given
| only the choices of the third shift or leaving their careers.
| 2. Women who choose breastfeeding, which can be 3-4 hours a
| day total, are then in place to be the primary infant
| caregivers.
| efficientsticks wrote:
| As a senior dev who wants to work part-time for a moderate
| salary, I can tell you one reason is that recruiters do not want
| their applicants to end up with a lower salary!
|
| This I think explains a large part of why it feels like there's a
| status quo inertia in the job market.
| shafyy wrote:
| I really hope that part-time becomes more mainstream in the
| future. I currently work part-time (4 days a week, although I'd
| prefer 3) and it's a big change from 5 days a week.
|
| I also have a feeling that this is more common in Europe vs. US
| (not sure if true).
|
| Edit to add: I also think that a company gets more than 40% from
| a person who works 40%. There's a big difference if a smart
| person doesn't work for you at all or works for you a bit. If
| that person makes smart decisions it's worth much more than their
| "linear" work time.
| a2a2eceac wrote:
| This.
|
| I've been at 32 hrs/week, in two senior SW engineering jobs
| (sequentially), for 5 years, with appropriate pay reduction.
| Many/most people I work with don't know I have a reduced
| schedule, since I take my off time in the morning before most of
| my colleagues have caught up on Slack (and my guess is they are
| not clocking in 40 hrs, even at 100% pay). I also contracted for
| 50-100% time, variable, for about ten years, and got important
| work done during this time. So it's possible to work very
| productively with less than a full time commitment.
|
| I'm at a stage in my career & life where money is less of a
| concern than time. My next move will definitely be to average
| less than 32 hrs/week (ideally 20). My preference would be to
| work at the same / a similar job and just scale back the salary
| and the hours, but suspect it will wind up as a series of
| stressful full-time jobs or contracts with gaps in between to
| recharge and work on personal things, petering out until I get
| sick of that rhythm and decide there is enough in the piggy bank.
|
| If it plays out this way, that's a shame, because I feel like I
| add more value to a team the longer I stay; and someone won't
| benefit from 30 years of experience for a lot less than a full
| time staff engineer costs. I can't change (much) the cultural
| things that cause this situation, but it gives me some hope to
| see it advocated for here.
| Moru wrote:
| During covid I stepped back to 40% work thanks to government
| support. We were allowed to work with something else the rest
| of the time and I called the local home care unit to ask if
| they wanted help. Since then I have been doing part time work
| there up to 60% to cover for all the sick workers. I'm thinking
| of continuing this after the pandemic, there is a big mental
| difference between the jobs which does wonders for stress
| relieve. Both are stressy but completely different ways.
| foxbarrington wrote:
| My consultancy is built around creating teams of hourly devs. It
| works great in practice but there's a lot of talking to clients
| in the beginning. A lot of companies are very attached to the
| idea of w2 salaries.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Do you find you have to do a lot of outbound "sales" to push
| the concept of hourly devs or are you more likely to see this
| attachment after a company is already exploring working with
| you? That is, so companies get cold feet after they learn more
| about the hourly dev concept you provide?
| buro9 wrote:
| Two big reasons off the top of my head:
|
| 1. Two people working a 20h week does not mean the same costs as
| a single person working a 40h week (think payroll, software
| licensing, pension admin, healthcare, etc).
|
| So costs rise as a result.
|
| 2. A job generally has a base load of admin and toil
| (communication, on-call, interviewing, PR reviews, etc) and you
| can't reduce or distribute the base load well enough to yield
| productive output from the remaining work time with part-time
| workers and some of this adds more toil when distributed across
| more people (i.e. on-call requires more handovers during the week
| and takes more communication).
|
| So productivity is reduced.*
|
| For companies to consider doing this they'd need to perform an
| trial to satisfy themselves that the above can be overcome. But
| even doing that may not be possible with existing employees and
| risks instilling discontent amongst those not in the trial. It's
| high risk to try.
|
| * Unless the entire company is 100% part-time and somehow base
| load is fundamentally reworked, in which case #1 still applies.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| I'd also imagine you just have more communication overhead with
| more people. E.x. standups will take longer if you have twice
| as many people working half as much. And communication costs
| might even scale O(n^2) of people, not hours worked.
|
| I think that makes part time workers unattractive.
| jvvw wrote:
| I worked part-time (3 days per week and the 2.5 per week) as a
| developer for 7 or 8 years and found that you had to be as
| ruthless as you could get away with with 2. I deliberately
| worked Fridays as it was often quiet and easy to get lots of
| work done.
|
| It worked pretty well but I don't think it would have worked
| for all projects. Stuff without too much communications
| overhead was better.
|
| I was full-time first and requested part-time by which time I
| had proved myself, knew the systems etc.
| pictur wrote:
| I find it odd that companies see it as more important to be
| directly there than how much they take advantage of full-time
| employees. but I guess that's what's useful for them.
| brimble wrote:
| Because the hourly rate you have to charge if you're actually
| counting every hour you work, to match the rate you get for
| actually-productive salaried hours, causes serious sticker shock.
| asfarley wrote:
| You have to enjoy the shock. Savour it.
| jupp0r wrote:
| I consider a company paying me for a full time job when I "only"
| have 50% of my work time be super productive focus time a bonus,
| not something that needs to be fixed. Just imagine you had a 50%
| job (presumably for half the compensation). Would all of that
| time be hyper productive focus time? (rhetorical question, the
| answer is no)
|
| Could you take two of those 50% jobs and be productive all the
| time? (no)
|
| I don't understand why we see this well known fact in human
| psychology as a problem instead of an inevitable part of doing
| business (both as an employee and an employer). Margins seem to
| be high enough to make software engineers extremely productive
| given the way the industry currently works. Of course,
| flexibility and work life balance can always be improved, but
| there are lots of companies where everybody is pretty happy about
| that aspect and the business is running well.
|
| If you as a company have great culture and compensation that's up
| to market specs, you also don't have problems hiring people, even
| if it might take some time in the current market.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| There's no way I will ever expect corporations to use their
| brains. They are a unique example of idiocy. This particular
| essay calls out only one of their bizarrely stupid ways of
| functioning.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Sounds like an USA issue, it's quite popular in Europe afaik.
|
| Part time developers are generally a niche (mostly by choice,
| people want to get full time pay), but I know plenty of people
| who work 3 days per week and many more who work 4 days per week.
|
| They mostly do it for work-life balance and to pay less taxes in
| some backward southern European countries where tax don't make
| sense (eg. in one country you can make the same money post tax
| whether you earn 65k or 90k, so contractors try to work up to the
| 65k limit and work less days).
|
| Likewise you can find consultant roles for N days per week
| relatively easily.
| renewiltord wrote:
| People do get hired part-time. One of my friends recently got
| hired for approx $700k/yr 20h/wk.
| mooreds wrote:
| "coordination costs" is the short answer. As you work fewer
| hours, more of your time is devoted to coordination vs doing the
| work. (Or you can have someone else do the coordination, meaning
| they have less time to do the work.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm is the longer
| one.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| > I, like many others, learned the hard way not to ever get
| invested in a company I don't own. We don't get rewarded for it -
| we get bullshit stock options and pats on the back.
|
| I've been thinking about this a while, without investigation
| (doh). But I figure folks here might know the answer. What stops
| companies, especially startups, from giving employees share
| grants instead of options? Is it hard to do or is it just that
| they don't want to/don't believe in the company enough to make
| this a differentiator in the job market? If it's hard, is there a
| space in the market for a ?aaS to make it easier?
| awildfivreld wrote:
| I work as a part time developer right now, however that is in
| parallel with studies so that might affect my view a little bit.
| I am also a junior dev, which also might affect my experiences.
|
| I have experienced that the amount of work produced is not
| linearly correlated with the amount of hours worked. I find that
| in the periods I work full-time, I get more done per hour than
| otherwise.
|
| What I have found has the largest (negative) impact on my
| performance is the context switching that is required when I get
| back to work tasks. I have to get into that mindset again, which
| takes time. I've tried to reduce the amount of context switching
| by grouping work-days and uni-days, but I still notice the
| difference.
|
| It would perhaps be different if I had time to (sub)consciously
| think about the problems at work during non-work days, but in my
| case that is taken by learning other things.
|
| But hey, I like my job a lot, so perhaps full time is not as
| "soul killing" for me as other people.
| mettamage wrote:
| The correlation depends. I am quite an insomniac. By having 4
| days of work instead of 5, I can spread my time better in order
| to work on the good sleeping days and chill on the bad ones.
|
| Example:
|
| Monday: I sleep shit, I work, I survive
|
| Tuesday: I sleep horrible again, I work, I barely survive
|
| Wednesday: if I'd have worked 5 days per week this would be the
| day that I would be severely underperforming. Instead, it's my
| free day, I catch up on sleep.
|
| Thursday: I happen to sleep well. I perform well.
|
| Friday: I slept meh, I perform well.
|
| Weekend: I sleep horrible, so I make sure that I just chill the
| whole day and make sure I'll catch enough sleep somehow.
|
| Monday: I'm well-rested and happen to sleep well. I perform
| well.
|
| Having a free day at Wednesday in particular makes sure it's
| very tough to become too tired, even as an insomniac like me. I
| worked 5 days per week before, it's not possible to perform
| well when I was hitting sleep issues. Going through a week
| where I didn't drown in sleep deprivation was a blessing. Now
| though, it's simply a problem that I can always fix.
|
| And yes, I've tried many things I used to be much worse. I'm
| improving. I've made a few comments on what I've tried (and
| what works for me).
| ciphol wrote:
| Question for those who have or have considered part-time work -
| how does your employer/manager look at this?
|
| Do they view you as a regular worker who wants to strike a
| different work/money balance, or as a slacker who isn't committed
| to the company or their own career growth and can't be relied
| upon for any serious project?
|
| When it comes to the experiences of people I know, my impression
| is that it's accepted for women with children to seek a part-time
| role, but for men it would automatically stigmatize them as a
| slacker. I'm curious if others have the same impression.
| keerthiko wrote:
| As a cofounder of a very small company (8 FT, 2 part-time, 2-10
| contractors varying by season), but one with a longer life than
| many startups newer than us (10+ years since our first
| revenue), I have been trying to normalize long-term part-time
| hires in all critical roles for some time now at our org.
|
| Yet, it is hard to overcome the cultural energy around the
| implications "part time = low impact", "part time = temporary",
| "part time = mercenary", "part time = lazy", "part time = not
| passionate". This sentiment arises from colleagues, investors,
| leadership, customers, and hell, the part time employee
| themselves at times (some kind of internalized contempt for
| wanting/needing/preferring to go part time).
|
| My partner just got their role converted to part-time starting
| March, after consciously coming to the conclusion that it was
| the only healthy way to remain in their career, despite not
| having children. They still processing to get over the feeling
| of guilt and of being less-than somehow for not being okay with
| handing over their full cognitive capacity and waking hours,
| especially without being an "accepted exception", ie someone
| with kids, being a caretaker, or a person with a (visible)
| disability.
|
| I want to live in a world where people can passionately work on
| something as part of a team, long-term, while being fairly
| compensated for that work, for less than 30 hours a week. If
| possible, I myself want to have that level of involvement even
| as a cofounder or leader of a business/project/organization so
| I can give my diverse passions the attention they deserve,
| without it "being weird" to my cofounders or other teammates.
| jdsleppy wrote:
| I'm working hourly on a contract where I advised the company I
| could only work 15-20 hours a week. It can be a win-win I
| believe, but with tradeoffs for both sides.
|
| I'm able to make the 3-4 hours of work a day be extremely
| productive. I always deliver in fewer hours than were budgeted
| for the work. As a contractor, there are no extraneous meetings
| to slow me down. But I'm still involved in client meetings as
| needed, understand their needs, and take ownership of the
| codebase to my immense satisfaction.
|
| It's not very different than working "full time" from home where
| you might take a walk, run an errand, cook your lunch, etc., but
| I can flex the schedule even further without any guilt. The
| change in mindset from "taking a break from full-time work" for
| an errand versus "I'm not billing this hour, I'll do whatever I
| want" is empowering.
|
| The negatives: less pay in total for me (but hourly rate can be
| negotiated), and features might (but won't necessarily) get done
| more slowly in terms of calendar days.
|
| BTW a typical day might be:
|
| - daycare drop-off 9:30, exercise
|
| - 10:30 shower, chores, life tasks
|
| - 11:45 cook and eat lunch
|
| - 12:30-4:30 work with a break for walking or playing piano
|
| I do some "down time" thinking about problems as I fall asleep at
| night or on walks.
| rr808 wrote:
| Working as a developer means you have to write docs, investigate
| designs, talk to users, interview people, go to meetings, do
| support, do corporate BS, training. Sure a few people can skip
| this stuff but usually its the most junior grades who can
| concentrate code only.
| prohobo wrote:
| What the hell is investigating a design?
|
| Also, no company I've worked for ever bothered with proper
| documentation, and I've never seen anyone lower than tech lead
| ever do any of those kinds of things more than once or twice a
| month (besides meetings).
|
| I'll concede these kinds of responsibilities might be more
| common in larger companies or different fields, but I'm
| thinking more about smaller startups.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I guess, like you, that it happens, but I haven't seen it in
| the smallest startups to very large enterprises. They all
| say, like everyone on HN, that they do all of this, but it is
| more a wish than reality as far as I have ever seen (30+
| years, tech consulting in 100s of companies, for 1 person
| shop to 100000+ employee enterprise). The stories are always
| of similarly 'utopia' style coming in but when actually in
| there, nothing of that happens.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I think by "investigating a design" he means looking at how a
| component or system is structured to understand how it works.
| This is pretty common as a lot of developers will get called
| to work on a piece of infrastructure that they aren't
| familiar with. They have to understand what they're working
| on so they apply an effective change
|
| Also, documentation is huge. I've worked with a lot of small
| companies and startups that have adopted it to share
| knowledge and to ease troubleshooting/onboarding. If you
| aren't doing it at work, consider it. There are a lot of
| approaches to it, such as self-documenting code, writing
| knowledgebase articles, recording demo videos, leaving
| contextual details in PRs, and even simply linking these
| pieces together so they're easy to find
| diiaann wrote:
| I've worked with part time developers. Sometimes it works really
| well, sometimes it doesn't.
|
| If someone wants to work part time with you and don't have any
| other contracts, they rarely want to do work during predictable
| hours. If they get blocked outside of business hours, it's ideal
| if you have someone who can unblock them when they happen to be
| working. Or you could also work out on some predetermined working
| hours.
| tibbar wrote:
| Yeah... I've worked with part time engineers in the past and been
| one myself several times too. The main problem is that people
| flake. Your part time position is not as important to them as
| their other job, their degree, their time off. Lots of people
| think they can be productive for 10-15 hours of their usual
| Netflix time and then find out that they have no energy or
| motivation. Part-time engineers have a way of falling off the
| map, getting behind on work. You don't give your important work
| to someone who clocks in for a few hours randomly every week, and
| it's too much trouble to bother if they're only doing unimportant
| work.
|
| Of course some people thrive in this role, but joining an
| engineering team part time is a skill by itself, just as
| important as raw engineering ability. People with backgrounds in
| project management, for instance, tend to have the organization
| and follow through to pull this off.
| mettamage wrote:
| Come see The Netherlands, you'd be surprised by the difference
| in culture :)
|
| 4 day work weeks (32 hour weeks) are normal and part-timers are
| on many teams. 5 day work weeks are normal as well. 3 day work
| weeks, I haven't seen those around me.
| nmca wrote:
| I think remote might help - part time x2 or part time + degree
| feels likely unsustainable, but part time + more surfing? Seems
| like it might work.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Because you are excepted to work 24/7. If you are hired part time
| you are just being payed less to work the same 24/7 hours.
| uranium wrote:
| This was discussed a bit last year:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749497
|
| I've worked part-time for the past 10+ years now, at Google,
| Makani, and Elemeno Health [60%, 80%, and 40% duty cycle
| respectively]. It's awesome for work-life balance if you can
| swing it, and a lot more productive than many people would think.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| How did you start that conversation? How was it received? What
| do you do in your not-work time?
| uranium wrote:
| When I came back from paternity leave with my first child, I
| told my boss I really wanted to go part time, and he
| supported me. Google had a standard easy of doing it, so it
| was just a matter of getting approval up to VP level, which
| went pretty smoothly.
|
| When I applied to transfer to Makani, we negotiated a bit,
| and decided that I'd go up to 80% because I really wanted the
| job and they apparently really wanted me.
|
| With Elemeno, I was already advising the company when I left
| Makani. I got a layoff package and didn't need paying for a
| while, and they couldn't afford me anyway. So we decided I'd
| help them temporarily until they could afford a full time
| engineer, and they paid me in stock and minimum wage. After
| about 18 months our agreement expired just as my COBRA was
| running out. I helped them draft a requisition for my
| replacement, but it didn't really make sense. For a bit more
| than they were paying me for 2 days a week, they'd maybe have
| been able to hire someone with a year's experience who'd be
| getting less done in their 5 days a week. So I switched to
| salary+benefits (some of the salary going to pay the other
| 60% of the health insurance) and that's worked great ever
| since, even now that we've been able to afford more full time
| engineers.
|
| Incidentally, we're hiring for a number of areas right now,
| including engineering. We're aiming for full time, but it is
| a very flexible, diverse, and family friendly workplace.
|
| https://www.elemenohealth.com/careers/
| jamesmishra wrote:
| Why not hire for part-time roles at Elemano? Didn't you
| just say that you are working there part-time?
| uranium wrote:
| Oh, and outside of work I spend a lot of time co-parenting 2
| kids, cooking (especially since covid), doing personal
| projects, practicing guitar, exercising, etc.
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