141–150 of 306 posts
Maybe projects that aren’t sexy and won’t get anyone promoted would still be fun to work on part-time.
If the big platforms let people with experience go tackle a few issues in their spare time without chaining them to a desk, maybe they could finally fix all these dumb bugs they’re accumulating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So don't hire so many people? I don't understand the problem. Why would they be hiring "extras" anyway? As backup?
Not extra as in "not needed", but extra as in "more than in the alternative" (with the alternative coming from the post title). The idea being that if everyone's part-time, you need more people to get the same work done relative to if everyone was full-time.
How many part-time devs do you think I'm suggesting you need? Is hiring one person for 20-30 hours a week really so much more difficult?
Most web stuff can be done with a few devs, and by the time that becomes a problem you should be rolling in money anyway.
It's not like I'm saying it's wrong to hire full-time devs, most people are fine with that and if they want to let them at it. But a candidate doesn't need to be discounted just because they're only available part-time; they could be a huge boon to the team regardless.
I think this could help a lot with companies that clearly abandon some of their apps and let code slowly accumulate hundreds of tiny bugs. Maybe projects that aren’t sexy and won’t get anyone promoted would still be fun to work on part-time. If the big platforms let people with experience go tackle a few issues in their spare time without chaining them to a desk, maybe they could finally fix all these dumb bugs they’…
I currently feel like it's too out there to comfortably propose to companies I'm interviewing at. If a job description explicitly stated "open to discussing part-time opportunities" and leadership was realistically aligned with the time commitments part-time engineers would face, I would definitely bring it up as a possibility.
There's so many companies doing cool work. Individually we commonly end up contracting our aspirations in service of one endeavor. That makes sense for some companies. For others, the benefits in terms of production value and having their engineers exposed to multivariate problems could be huge. I'm particularly thinking if companies that have straightforward apps to present or deliver their services, like a video app, community apps, etc. A lot of those problems are solved, and I'm not sure it makes sense to invest a huge amount, in terms of full-time work, in executing on those visions.
I'm also curious what it would be like to manage a part-time engineer. Work life balance would have to be front and center. Processes for dealing with emergencies would need to be realistic. Demands from management would need to be broken down with part-time chunks in mind, and so on.
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 d…
There's your problem.
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 d…
I have successfully gotten 80% four-day-week at a string of engagements... but I work in the non-profit academic sector, and get paid quite a bit less than that $200K+ salary.
I think a four-day-week, or even a three-day-week, makes a lot more sense than tha 4-hours-a-day 5-day-week the OP was suggesting.
Because, yeah, one (or certainly two) meetings could pretty much blow a 4-hour-day. But at the 4-eight-hour-day schedule I've been doing, I feel like there is still plenty of time for meetings and overhead, and I am pretty confident I end up 95% as productive working a four-day 32 hours as I would be working 40 hours. I feel like it would still work pretty well at 3-eight-hour-days too.
Below that -- or trying to work four-hour days instead of fewer eight-hour days, I could definitely see problems with "overhead" or lack of commitment.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
Yeah that 2nd point is that quite often people need "full time salary" so it is not that management somehow has backwards thinking. I have a friend that can really work 4 hours a day, but he is a special case where he does not have a family to upkeep and no mortgage. He is also a bit hard on the frugality. But finding such person is basically 1 in a million. If I post a job with 4h a day which amounts to 1/2 of a nor…
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…
If not what's the difference, do you think?
I'd say it would probably be important to have a set schedule for the less-than-full-time workers. Or at least as set as the full-timers.
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 unde…
Have you worked part time? Sorry, but this is exactly how I work. When I work, I do focused work, and when I get tired, I usually finish what I was doing and then stop working. I switch off, relax, repeat. Have worked this way for a few years and I could never go back to the old way.
The problem with 40 hour jobs is that you're anyways only productive for like 50% of that and then the rest of the day you're stuck in a prison. You can't go outside and do any other things to relax, and you also can't fully focus. I don't understand why not more people are rebelling against that.
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…
I have done both part-time consulting and part-time contract development. Pure consulting (when one's output is advice) is doable part time, because you're not a blocker and generally don't have to keep up with the day to day.
But I would only do part-time contract development under pretty specific circumstances: 1) I'm the only dev on the project (or at least I know the other devs really well), 2) I am not on the critical path for anything urgent, 3) the organization can sustain an interest in the work (and therefore in paying me) despite it not being urgent.
For example, I knew somebody who needed a discrete service, a PDF form-filler, replaced. The old version was a pain operationally and I think it was built on EOLed tech in a language the team didn't know. That was a fine part-time project because the existing thing worked tolerably well; I was just cleaning up a mess that bothered them. I'd feel the same about, say, tech debt cleanup. Or quick, throwaway prototyping.
But in general, software is a team sport, a collective intellectual work that requires a high level of coordination between both devs and many others. I don't want to be part time on a team of well-meshed full-timers because the overhead of keeping track of the team's progress is fixed. I'd have to spend a notable percentage of my time keeping up, and I'll be adding to the coordination burden of the team despite not contributing as much, so my net ROI is lower. I'd hate it.
That said, I'd be interested to see a project that's, say, all 4-day-a-week people. Maybe even people who work 6 hours a day, 4 days a week. I could imagine that working pretty well while still being enough to keep stakeholders satisfied.