71–80 of 306 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve always been able to successfully negotiate those IP ownership clauses. Usually without any hassle at all.
US person detected. Good luck negotiating any terms in Europe. Not happening.
This. I've been at 32 hrs/week, in two senior SW engineering jobs (sequentially), for 5 years, with appropriate pay reduction. Many/most people I work with don't know I have a reduced schedule, since I take my off time in the morning before most of my colleagues have caught up on Slack (and my guess is they are not clocking in 40 hrs, even at 100% pay). I also contracted for 50-100% time, variable, for about ten year…
> with over-fitted teams (do you really need 40 engineers to build this?) 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…
Yes, I've seen this kind of thing happen, too. Project complexity grows to justify the size of the team, not the other way around. A project that should take two good developers three months, gets assigned to a team of 40. That team has eng managers and eng manager managers and has to deal with all that communication and organizational bandwidth. We have all these people, so some of them must do core business logic, some of them will integrate 3rd party frameworks, some will do frontend/ui. And we need to take design time to draw the lines between these modules so nobody is stepping on anyone else's work. And we have to have stable APIs between all these, so we need an API design. Also, we need robust continuous integration and test frameworks because there are so many people committing, so we'll need to designate at least one, maybe multiple build engineers. And thanks to the tech lead / architect, we have many layers of abstraction, so the project can be mentally understood by 40 people. We also need to serialize and deserialize JSON between each layer, so that each could in theory be reused in a different project. Oh, and because of this complexity it's going to take the team ten months. A year and a half later, this massive CRUD app is released!
Meanwhile, two skilled engineers could have just sat together and developed that same CRUD app without all the complexity and layers of abstraction.
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…
There are a lot of things in this world that are not rooted in rational/pragmatic concerns. For example, in the automotive industry, a lot of the margin comes from upper-end variants of any given model, which are perhaps 10% more capable as the base model but cost disproportionally more and are a lot more desirable. Why do people go for that? Emotional reasons. Are the $2,000 vintage Nikes worth that much, especially…
The deal in companies is that it's relatively easy to reduce your work % but it's a one way street. To get back your manager needs to find a budget the same way as if they were hiring (but I don't know anyone who did want to increase it back).
Seems to work well.
This was discussed a bit last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749497 I've worked part-time for the past 10+ years now, at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health [60%, 80%, and 40% duty cycle respectively]. It's awesome for work-life balance if you can swing it, and a lot more productive than many people would think.
How did you start that conversation? How was it received? What do you do in your not-work time?
When I applied to transfer to Makani, we negotiated a bit, and decided that I'd go up to 80% because I really wanted the job and they apparently really wanted me.
With Elemeno, I was already advising the company when I left Makani. I got a layoff package and didn't need paying for a while, and they couldn't afford me anyway. So we decided I'd help them temporarily until they could afford a full time engineer, and they paid me in stock and minimum wage. After about 18 months our agreement expired just as my COBRA was running out. I helped them draft a requisition for my replacement, but it didn't really make sense. For a bit more than they were paying me for 2 days a week, they'd maybe have been able to hire someone with a year's experience who'd be getting less done in their 5 days a week. So I switched to salary+benefits (some of the salary going to pay the other 60% of the health insurance) and that's worked great ever since, even now that we've been able to afford more full time engineers.
Incidentally, we're hiring for a number of areas right now, including engineering. We're aiming for full time, but it is a very flexible, diverse, and family friendly workplace.
This was discussed a bit last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749497 I've worked part-time for the past 10+ years now, at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health [60%, 80%, and 40% duty cycle respectively]. It's awesome for work-life balance if you can swing it, and a lot more productive than many people would think.
How did you start that conversation? How was it received? What do you do in your not-work time?
I also have a feeling that this is more common in Europe vs. US (not sure if true).
Edit to add: I also think that a company gets more than 40% from a person who works 40%. There's a big difference if a smart person doesn't work for you at all or works for you a bit. If that person makes smart decisions it's worth much more than their "linear" work time.
I think your basic premise might not be correct. If you only are getting 4 productive hours of work done per day, then something is wrong. I would say you probably only get 4 productive hours of WRITING CODE (maybe much less), but during that long lunch break, or bike ride, or whatever, you are probably thinking about the problem (consciously or not). If you work part time on two different projects, you simply won't…