It all depends on your options. If you think you can find someone else equally capable, that fits your culture, then don't hire this guy. I think we work in a field where some guys can do in 1 day what others would do in a week or more. It's not only a matter of putting long hours. In my company, we have a guy working remote from around the world, I'm not even sure how many hours he's supposed to work for us but he's not full time. He has been extremely helpful in his own ways (fixing bugs, reviewing code...). I'm glad we've been flexible enough to accommodate his profile.
Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
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Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#22I would hire him if he really is that capable.
Edit: misunderstood that the colleague actually isn’t currently working for OP. Still, I stand by that if he was good before and you trust him to do a good job, then he’d make a good hire.
Think of it this way: you cannot, in a million years, think that an employee is ever going to be as passionate about _your_ project as you are. It’ll never happen.
So deal with it. Remember that if push comes to shove and you lose money, you’d be firing him due to not being able to pay him. And the same would happen to you if the roles were reversed. You’ll never be part of a “family” in a company, despite what everyone out there says. Business is not family, it’s money.
If he’s putting in good work while part time, then that’s all you need from him.
Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#23He's hedging his bets because you are a very risky proposition.
No employee is going to drink the Kool-Aid like the founders until the project proves itself. If it's going well, he'll come on full-time. If not, he doesn't have a hole in his resume and his bank account.
If this person has the chops you need, do the deal and prove your worth by landing customers and investors.
Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#24Meh... In most cases, talking about "passion" in this context is just a roundabout way of saying "we want people to work harder for less compensation." Expecting founders to have "passion" is fine, since they (presumably) own equity stakes that will make them wealthy if the company is successful. But unless you're giving your early hires a large stake in the company, I'd suggest dropping the "passion" verbiage and tr…
Just to add a point to the parent comment: passion is a spark you fuel with CASH (and other incentives) to burn brightly, if at all. Also, if your guy can get the job done in 3 days whats the issue ? I'd interpret that to mean you hired a highly competent engineer.
Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, "passion" is a huge red flag word for me. In the same realm as "ninja" or "rockstar."
What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work you do because of the mission and/or technical challenge and/or team? Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are? Generally, I've never worried about that being called passion.
My passion is to my family, my craft, and to my own personal projects and ventures.
If you hire me for money you'll get my talent, my time, my undivided attention, my friendly demeanour, and you might mistake a display of excitement or passion here and there because a juicy problem was solved with elegance, to passion to your company but it's just the passion to my craft. Passion (and I agree - ninja and rockstar) should be removed from the hiring lexicon.
Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, "passion" is a huge red flag word for me. In the same realm as "ninja" or "rockstar."
What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work you do because of the mission and/or technical challenge and/or team? Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are? Generally, I've never worried about that being called passion.
> Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are?
We have a word that literally translates as "professional pride." Now I'm not sure it has the right vibe in English, but it captures the idea that you do high quality work and you wouldn't do a sloppy job, even if the job sucks.
For example, I would like such a plumber, because I know they will be careful not to make a mess, and they will clean up after them, and they are careful and will double check their work to make sure it's fully done and solid and not going to leak.
I don't expect them to be passionate about working with clogged pipes full of literal shit. I'm OK with them not wanting to spend 16 hours a day doing plumbing; if they only do three days a week but perform a respectful job, that is perfectly fine. In fact I'd be a little concerned if they said they're passionate about plumbing..
> What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work
Enjoying the work. That's it.
To me, passion is something much deeper and even intimate. If you devote your life to something and you'd do it even when it doesn't pay the bills, I could accept it as passion. Otherwise, it's just a job that you enjoy.
Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, "passion" is a huge red flag word for me. In the same realm as "ninja" or "rockstar."
What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work you do because of the mission and/or technical challenge and/or team? Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are? Generally, I've never worried about that being called passion.
I always thought it was an American thing(the asking for passion part) and a culture gap between them and "us" foreigners/Europeans. But it sounds like it's not exclusive to foreigners working with Americans.
The way I see it, I bring a lot of experience to the table as well as my passion to solve problems. But it's extremely hard to be passionate for the "vision" of the 20th company trying to revolutionize log processing(when the founders never even did their due diligence) for example. I get that the founders may have had some personal experience that led them to be passionate about a certain problem.
But when they ask me to help them in a specific topic they lack experience in and then ask me to be passionate about working the next 2 years doing mundane work I personally think it's incredibly disrespectful towards me or anyone in my position.
I used to try to explain why I thought like that, but nowadays I mostly agree with the other people here and treat it as a red flag WRT how complicated it will be to get work done around these kinds of founders.
Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#28I think it depends on the management team and on the hire. Just like some people can work remotely effectively and others cannot... some people can work part-time effectively and others cannot.
I've had this be very successful one time with a senior developer who was working in roughly the same stack across side projects as well as what I had hired him for. He was able to time-slice very well. He could come in and in a fraction of the time of the rest of the team make a meaningful impact in both pushing his own features as well as reviewing others' code/architecture.
I've found in running a consulting practice that if people need to split their time across projects that they generally do their best work when they can devote a consistent set of days to specifics projects/team (Project A on Mon-Wed, Project B on Thu, Project C on Fri). Trying to time-slice throughout the day of 4hr with Project A and 2hr with Project B and 2hr with Project C becomes too much context switching for most people.
One other thing to keep in mind: if people do not work enough on a single project, they will not achieve enough momentum to do great things. Or if the rest of the team is working full-time, it may be too much effort to keep them in the loop of everything that has changed since it is moving at a faster pace than what their time allows. You can try to overcome this by not working on critical parts of the product or having their features not be depended upon by others.
Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work you do because of the mission and/or technical challenge and/or team? Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are? Generally, I've never worried about that being called passion.
My passion is to my family, my craft, and to my own personal projects and ventures. If you hire me for money you'll get my talent, my time, my undivided attention, my friendly demeanour, and you might mistake a display of excitement or passion here and there because a juicy problem was solved with elegance, to passion to your company but it's just the passion to my craft. Passion (and I agree - ninja and rockstar) sh…
I would go even further - passion is the promise to stuff an employee's life with emotional bullshit.
Some people actually need this from work, in particular those who have very little interests outside work. That's why it works best for the young and restless.
Re: Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
#30Hire good people.
Are they good? Then hire them.
Are they not good? Don’t hire them.
Everything else is a distraction at this stage.
N days of good people is better than 0 days of no one.
Also, you’re the leader, you live the culture, others will follow your lead.