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Why not hire part-time developers?

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Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#111

Post by hash872 »

ars wrote: post #62
hash872 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you hiring them per/hour? Why not do a part time salary position? They are expected to spend an agreed number of hours per week (or maybe do it by the day) and the salary is proportional to that. If they want to change the hours then renegotiate time and salary.

I think the pool of developers who are not freelancers, are OK with part-time work, don't need more salary than you're paying them for part-time work (like they have a cheap lifestyle or are already well-off?), and won't continuously keep looking for more work is in practice just a very small number of people. Sure, there's some people that meet that description, but just not very many. There's a reason the labor market has evolved to the binary of either being a full-time employee or a freelancer on project-based assignments

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#112

Post by issa »

Gigachad wrote: post #110
issa wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am jealous of your work experience that you can make this comment. In organizations that run really well, this isn't an issue. But there are a lot of development jobs that involve frequent touch-points with middle managers who don't bring much to the table except for taking time out of developer's days to appear busy. And I say that with no offense intended to any middle managers. Good project managers are worth th…

It sounds like you just lack context. These people aren’t adding any value to _your_ day but they are adding value to the business. They stay informed on the status of everything going on in their sphere and use that to keep key people informed and spot when things are going wrong.

Absolutely. Sometimes. I was trying to differentiate between the people who do contribute and those who don't. I think it's been well documented that meetings can easily become bloated at some orgs. And if you've been around enough, you have definitely come across at least one person who just does busy work.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#114

Post by issa »

Gigachad wrote: post #110
issa wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am jealous of your work experience that you can make this comment. In organizations that run really well, this isn't an issue. But there are a lot of development jobs that involve frequent touch-points with middle managers who don't bring much to the table except for taking time out of developer's days to appear busy. And I say that with no offense intended to any middle managers. Good project managers are worth th…

It sounds like you just lack context. These people aren’t adding any value to _your_ day but they are adding value to the business. They stay informed on the status of everything going on in their sphere and use that to keep key people informed and spot when things are going wrong.

Estimating timelines is a simple but great example. If I use my experience on similar projects, I can probably give you an excellent estimate of how long it will take to build a new project in about half an hour. Or, I could break it down for you, task-by-task, and come up with the exact same number in 8 hours.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#115

Post by tbrownaw »

prohobo wrote: post #60
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #56

From an employer's point of view this makes little sense. Having to deal with the extra paperwork associated with the extra staff is very expensive and ultimately you get less production output when you hire part time. I think a 4 day week is probably a more likely option for developers to request and attain. The other option is contract work. There you set your own hours.

You lost me with "extra". What I'm talking about are core product team members, not freelancers. Maybe I'm hitting on the wrong issue here, but if I was a team member coding 4 hours a day I'd be just as productive as ever. The problem I'm recognizing now is that maybe I'm really just miffed about the "butts in seats" mentality. I'd have no issue working "full-time" if that was just a way to say "team member" and didn…

> You lost me with "extra". What I'm talking about are core product team members, not freelancers.

It was "extra paperwork associated with the extra staff".

As in, adding X% more staff means X% more staff-related paperwork.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#116

Post by jvvw »

buro9 wrote: post #45

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 produ…

I worked part-time (3 days per week and the 2.5 per week) as a developer for 7 or 8 years and found that you had to be as ruthless as you could get away with with 2. I deliberately worked Fridays as it was often quiet and easy to get lots of work done.

It worked pretty well but I don't think it would have worked for all projects. Stuff without too much communications overhead was better.

I was full-time first and requested part-time by which time I had proved myself, knew the systems etc.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#118

Post by yibg »

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…

We’ve tried part time developers, but so far haven’t been able to do it successfully. The problem usually comes down to 2 things:

1) there is a constant amount of overhead that is always needed regardless of how long you work for in a week. Meetings and collaboration to figure out what to build, discuss issues etc. if these take up 10 hours a week a full time dev has 30 hours to do other things where as a half time dev only has 10 hours. So 2 half time dev just doesn’t get as much done as 1 full time. I guess this is also why 2 engineers don’t get twice as much done as 1, all things being equal.

2) Most part time dev candidates I’ve seen aren’t doing just a single part time job, they are doing either multiple part time jobs or a full time job + part time job. Either way the mental energy is already gone.

Maybe there is a way to make part time work, I just haven’t figured it out yet.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#119

Post by adrianmonk »

Here are two disadvantages that seem real to me:

(1) Turn-around time. If you need a small feature developed and it's going to take a full-time developer 3 weeks from start to finish, how long will it take a developer who works half time? 6 weeks.

(2) Team scalability. A lot of people prefer smaller teams of developers because large teams don't seem to scale well. (A team of 10 people usually isn't twice as productive as a team of 5. At least, this is a pretty common view.) If your team has part-time employees, then it will need to have more employees to handle a given workload.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#120

Post by missizii »

dudul wrote: post #92
missizii wrote: post #14

Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children. If I had a part time option when my children were small, I would have embraced it. My career was thriving, but there was no “step back” option for me. If you want more women in tech, recognize that the first shift of daycare & school prep, the second shift of work, and the third shift of cooking, cleani…

> Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children. How about "parent" instead of "women"?

1. Tech has small percentage of women. The ridiculous under representation of female coders is widely recognized as a problem and something that should be fixed. There are programs for recruiting women into CS Majors. But the imbalance will remain when women have babies and are given only the choices of the third shift or leaving their careers. 2. Women who choose breastfeeding, which can be 3-4 hours a day total, are then in place to be the primary infant caregivers.
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