Why not hire part-time developers?

> 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?

>>> 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.

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.

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.

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.