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Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#61

Post by malandrew »

purrcat259 wrote: post #26
matthewmacleod wrote: post #16

I would advise you to just make it pro-rata. Don't fiddle around and worry about the relative pocket-change of overheads. You will save yourself lots of headaches, and my experience is that you will get more value out of two employees working 20 hours a week than you will out of one employee working 40 hours. It all evens out in the end. Aside: I really want to encourage you to do this. In my previous job, I went to…

Hey, I have a few questions if you don't mind I am working 30 hour work week. I recently switched jobs and I consider myself a strong candidate. In nearly all of my interviews, as soon as I mentioned wishing to work 30 hours (because I want to have time to sharpen my skills in my other 10 hours, which I always sold as a positive feedback loop which helps me be more knowlegable at work), the HR admin/recruiter would g…

Divulge this after the interview at the offer stage once they've decided they want you. How much you work is a negotiation concern just like salary.

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#62

Post by LukeShu »

pmyteh wrote: post #22
AdrianB1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a sex discrimination if you offer different conditions based on sex, not on hours worked. If part time workers have the same offer no matter the sex, then it is quite bizarre to build a sex discrimination case.

In Britain, it's definitely something you need to watch out for. > indirect discrimination - putting rules or arrangements in place that apply to everyone, but that put someone with a protected characteristic at an unfair disadvantage (from https://www.gov.uk/discrimination-your-rights/how-you-can-be... ). There have definitely been cases around aspects of part-time working which have been held to be indirect discrim…

The same thing exists in the US, we call it "disparate impact".

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#63

Post by cbanek »

tsss wrote: post #58
brianwawok wrote: post #25

Remember the downside: Knowledge sharing and communication. Think of a company going from 1 to 2 people. You go from the entire app in 1 persons head, to having to communicate and talk about decisions. There is a reason solo founders can do some really good things. Now imagine going from 5 to 10 people. The communication web of the two are different. 4 possible communication points vs 9. What about meetings and discu…

As the company gets bigger this becomes less of an issue because there is communication overhead anyway. And don't forget the other side of the coin: As you increase the number of employees you decrease the risk of a bad hire and similarly the risk of knowledge gaps when an employee leaves. There are already so many inefficiencies; Even if two people each working 20h are less efficient than one person working 40h, th…

I respectfully disagree. While there is communication overhead, it really does scale with the number of people you have to communicate with. If you have twice the people working half the time, you still have twice the communication cost.

Moreover, the communication overhead will eat up a much larger percentage of working time, since the person is only working half time. But you can't just communicate half as much. Any fixed overhead, such as status meetings, breaks, etc will suffer from the same effect.

Then there's the concept of flow. It's hard to get into a high productive state doing something like programming if you are working 4 hours a day, and 1 hour a day is overhead. Even if you get into that zone, you will benefit from it for a short period of time. For me, it can easily take half an hour to get my mind back to where I was on the previous day.

Ramping up and learning a codebase is also an overhead, and will take longer in terms of days (since you aren't working as long), take communication time, and then once you are an expert, you'll bring a smaller amount of time to bear against the problem.

In terms of teams, having a larger team (2x as large, let's say) means that you will get more good hires and more bad hires. But bad hires are far more of a problem than good hires, especially if they spend all the time communicating, asking questions, and making work for others. One bad hire can ruin a team. One good hire really cannot make a bad team into a good team.

All of this assumes also that all the part time people are working at the same time and able to communicate, which almost certainly won't be the case. Part time workers will not always be able to communicate, and may have to wait a while for an answer, further reducing productivity.

It's not only not negligible, but I worry it's not scalable.

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#64

Post by Wowfunhappy »

sopooneo wrote: post #59
pmyteh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benefits are a much smaller part of the package. Health coverage, for example, is nationally provided. For most of my employers, the main benefits would be vacation (which would be pro-rata), pension (ditto), and sick leave (effectively ditto, as it pays out based on actual salary). There are some much smaller fringe benefits (gym discounts, say) which would be given regardless of hours worked, but I'm not sure that…

One interesting thing about pro-rata vacation for anyone thinking about going to part time: you still get exactly the same number of weeks off regardless. The trick to that I will leave as an exercise to the reader. It's something I was thrilled to discover by accident.

> The trick to that I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

Huh? Sorry, I'm not following.

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#65

Post by sopooneo »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #64
sopooneo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One interesting thing about pro-rata vacation for anyone thinking about going to part time: you still get exactly the same number of weeks off regardless. The trick to that I will leave as an exercise to the reader. It's something I was thrilled to discover by accident.

> The trick to that I will leave as an exercise to the reader. Huh? Sorry, I'm not following.

Sorry. Didn't mean to be coy. But, to make the math easier, imagine a full timer 25 days of vacation per year = five weeks. Great.

Now let's say that person goes down to 80% time, working four days a week. Now they only earn 25 days * 80% = 20 days of vacation per year. But this person only works four days a week. So to spend a full week away only requires using up four vacation days. (20 days of vacation) / (4 days/week) = five weeks. Great.

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#66

Post by Wowfunhappy »

sopooneo wrote: post #65
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The trick to that I will leave as an exercise to the reader. Huh? Sorry, I'm not following.

Sorry. Didn't mean to be coy. But, to make the math easier, imagine a full timer 25 days of vacation per year = five weeks. Great. Now let's say that person goes down to 80% time, working four days a week. Now they only earn 25 days * 80% = 20 days of vacation per year. But this person only works four days a week. So to spend a full week away only requires using up four vacation days. (20 days of vacation) / (4 days/…

Ah, thanks. This only works if you work fewer days per week as opposed to fewer hours per day.

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#67

Post by antoinevg »

ghaff wrote: post #44
antoinevg wrote: post #35

Yeah, if you're not offering me 75% pay for 50% work I'm not interested. My peak productivity is 3 days a week. The gains from working more than that are marginal at best.

Are you offline for the other two days? It may not affect you much but "You can't schedule meetings with me or get answers to questions on Monday or Friday" tends to have an impact on other people in most jobs. Do you get 75% pay for 50% work? Based on no particular experience, it seems that would be difficult to sell.

I've found that folk ask better questions if I reduce my availability.

I get paid considerably more than 75% for 50% _time_. [1] Mainly because I'm in a position where I get paid by the value of my work rather than by the amount of time I waste behind a computer monitor.

[1] My bad. I should have said time instead of work.

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#68

Post by yoz-y »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #47
ghaff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that's pretty common. Old-line companies (including in tech) often still have the sick-time/vacation distinction but my impression is that it's relatively uncommon in newer companies. It has to some degree been replaced with "unlimited" vacation but that comes with its own set of issues.

What issues does that come with, in your opinion?

Not parent but unlimited vacation policy is often criticised as a way to bully people into taking even less vacation. Since you can’t know how much is “okay” you end up in a guilt trip if you take more than some colleague.

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#69

Post by londons_explore »

tonyarkles wrote: post #51
asdkfjasl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, although it's worth noting that there are probably some fixed overheads of being employed that eat up some of the otherwise expected benefits. Let's consider a scenario where there are 4h average fixed overhead for working at a company. Now let's run the 0.6 time vs. 1.0 time scenarios. 1.0 time. 40h - 4h overhead = 36h. Pay = 1. Work-to-pay ratio is 36h:1p. 0.6 time. 24h - 4h overhead = 20h. Pay = 0.…

> The corollary of this is that you'd really better make sure you have little fixed overhead time for your workers if they are working fractional time. That was one of the big things that me working part-time on a team helped with: they significantly cut down on the mandatory meeting overhead; early on a significant fraction of my time (40%?) was spent in meetings. We cut that down and everyone on the team benefited.

Not enough people are brave enough to just walk out of non-useful meetings.

By demanding an agenda upfront, attendees can decide if it's really useful to attend, and sending out notes afterwards means people who didn't attend can catch up. As a bonus, send the agenda beforehand with collaborative editing, and lots of things end up getting resolved before the meeting even happens.

Re: Ask HN: How do you scale salary for part-time work?

#70

Post by stepbeek »

dwb wrote: post #24

You're seriously considering paying part-time employees less per hour than full-time employees? Am I really reading that right?

Sorry, I was a little ambiguous. We're not considering paying less per unit time. This is fully illegal in the UK even if we did consider it.

What we are considering is whether a part-time employee is significantly more productive per unit time to such an extent that pro-rated pay would be considered unfair.

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