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Why not hire part-time developers?

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Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#41

Post by learc83 »

tomrod wrote: post #11
qrohlf wrote: post #10

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…

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,…

I’ve always been able to successfully negotiate those IP ownership clauses. Usually without any hassle at all.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#42

Post by throwaway98727 »

vincentmarle wrote: post #17
qrohlf wrote: post #10

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…

> 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 t…

At most companies you get full benefits at 30 hours a week.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#43

Post by mettamage »

awildfivreld wrote: post #23

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 large…

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).

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#44

Post by mooreds »

hash872 wrote: post #15
qrohlf wrote: post #10

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…

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 n…

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.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#45

Post by buro9 »

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.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#46

Post by kube-system »

dvtrn wrote: post #27
kube-system wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#47

Post by jupp0r »

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.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#48

Post by mooreds »

"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.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#49

Post by rhodysurf »

throwaway98727 wrote: post #42
vincentmarle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

At most companies you get full benefits at 30 hours a week.

I think their comment went over your head

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#50

Post by x0x0 »

qrohlf wrote: post #10

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…

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.

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