Why not hire part-time developers?

- 5 day a week schedule

- 2 hour turnaround time for questions during core business hours

I've encountered teams that use patterns like MVVM and VIPER, simply because they are designed to break projects into discrete components, so larger teams can work on them.

I have also been told that we shouldn't use advanced development techniques, because other developers can't understand the tech.

The project that I'm working on, has a scope that usually is implemented by a team of 10 or more engineers. That's nuts. It's a fairly ambitious app, but it's just an iOS app. I've done a ton of these, alone. I also wrote the backend; which is not my forte, but I don't like the selection for backends, out there.

I have control issues, I guess...

> I’m essentially an advocate for hiring fewer people and with more precision.

So am I, but that does not seem to be how the industry works.

I remember talking with a startup manager, several years ago, and they told me that the entire industry is based around engineers never staying at a company more than two years; with 18 months being the norm. I know that they had a heavy turnover, during the two years we worked with them.

That has many, many downsides. Of course, you have the issue of "too many cooks spoil the soup," but you also have people writing code that they have no intention of maintaining, so why bother doing a good job?

I have always been of the opinion that we keep teams together for years. It helps them to become "unified," and "move as one." That pays off, big time.

But it also requires a completely different management style from what seems to be the norm, these days, and that, apparently, is too big an ask.

FWIW, I would have been happy with part-time gig work. No one wants to work with us "olds," though, so I have found people that want the work I do, and it is far more than full-time.

No money, but I don't really care.

They also say they started their own business and wanted to work part time at a company.

Who is getting the “4 hours of work” and who is getting the “obsessive tweaking”?

Not sure how these 2 statements align.

A lot of this translates to the work environment. Someone making $300k might feel exceptionally rewarded for their work, until they find out that their peer makes $320k. Suddenly that $300k no longer looks that desirable anymore. Call it an innate quest for justice, call it culture shock, call it whatever you want - if you cannot see why your individual arrangement might produce a net negative result for the rest of the company, then you're ignoring the reality.

You just have to implement certain rules and treat everyone the same. You're either a full-time company, or you're a part-time company. You're either an on-site company, or you're a remote company. If you allow hybrid, you have to allow it for everyone. And if one person gets to work 20 hours a week, then it needs to be a 0-friction process for everyone else to transition to the same arrangement if they so desire. From a staffing point of view, that last part is an absolute managerial nightmare ("sorry, the project will be pushed back by 12 months because all of our engineers decided to move to part-time, and we cannot hire new engineers, because the existing staff may also move back to full-time at any given point").

There is, however, a solution for you - just work for extremely well-funded early-stage startups, because their CEOs will be more than glad to rock the boat internally in exchange for your skills and experience that they would be otherwise struggling to find in a full-time hire. By the time that startup scales and their CEO starts thinking about culture and retention, you'll be off to the next boat that you can rock as hard you'd like.