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Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

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Re: Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

#101

Post by giobox »

carlmr wrote: post #49
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the description, it would probably be a better fit to work as a contractor via an agency. You get the hit of the agency comission but at least most of the talking will be through some Project manager assigned to the client.

That hit in commission can be very efficient, since you save a lot of time you can bill at a high rate.

I have literally never seen this, in my experience the agency is usually not much more than a body shop - every agency I've worked with charges a significant hourly rate which is not reflective of what the agency employee will receive. It is almost always significantly more than a few percentage points.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

#102

Post by eklavya »

switz wrote: post #31

If you have any experience with the game Counterstrike, reach out to me. Email is in my profile. I run a small, bootstrapped B2C business and have a number of interesting projects I could hand off to people. It’s a weird prerequisite, but without it there generally isn’t enough context to do meaningful work sans a lot of hand holding.

I am curious, why the weird requirement?

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

#104

Post by panda888888 »

Early-stage startups, ideally ones with fewer than 50 employees. If you can be employee #10 or so, you can work on the project/company for a year or two; at that point, it should be obvious if the company will be successful/get acquired or if it will fail. It's a lot less weird to job hop in the startup world, and if you can get your foot in the door, smaller companies are more likely to be flexible about contracting, part time, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

#108

Post by city17 »

hobo_in_library wrote: post #55
itsmemattchung wrote: post #52

There's plenty of part-time work out there: launch your own LLC and multiplex between clients. Source: I launched my own software consulting business back in July 2022 and I work with a handful of customers "part-time" (e.g. project based work, 10 hours a week).

Would you mind sharing how you found your customers? That feels like the hardest part

Would also be interested in hearing about this. Especially finding clients with 10h/week projects can be difficult.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

#109

Post by LouisSayers »

I had a friend introduce me to a coworking space startup which wanted small fixes 5-10h per week.

I was the only person working on the codebase, deployment was broken, but the code was actually pretty good and had a test suite. The guy I was working with was easy going and let me take the reigns.

It was one of the best gigs I've had. Sadly the work stopped (their business was a casualty of the pandemic).

I'm not sure how you'd go about finding these types of jobs, but they do exist!

Best of luck.

Re: Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

#110

Post by joeld42 »

I do this, what I do is avoid recruiters and look for job postings that are a good fit, then send them an email asking if they'd be interested in discussing part time contract work instead of FTE. Often they say no, they want full-time (especially at larger companies) but sometimes they are willing to chat about it.

I think you have to have enough experience that you (and the employer) are comfortable skipping the interview gauntlet. After all, if you're contract if you're not doing good work they can just stop. One thing that is helpful is to suggest working on a small, limited project for like 2-4 weeks, and they can decide if they want to continue working with you or not. (of course, you have to do a good job on the project).

It's a little weird, there are times when I'm scrambling for work and it seems like there's nothing out there, and other times when I'm turning away work, but if you can deal with the unpredictability it can be good.

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