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Why not hire part-time developers?

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Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#241

Post by eyelidlessness »

dahfizz wrote: post #238
eyelidlessness wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative in my experience is working on a team with a shared sense of mission. We meet at most one hour a week. We do a lot of asynchronous collaboration, it’s not always as efficient as it could be, but no one is asking for more meeting time to address that.

> We do a lot of asynchronous collaboration, It sounds like you just amortize the "meetings" differently. Having to answer lots of async emails / slacks can waste just as much time as scheduled meetings.

We actually do most of this in issues and review. Chat is used as it should be: clarification, refining ideas in progress. I’m more sensitive to communication overhead than most, I recognize meetings masked as other communications, this is definitely not that.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#243

Post by raz32dust »

Who is stopping you from finishing work early and going to to do personal work? I work in a large FAANG-ish company and developers are only expected to complete their tasks - nobody is watching when they clock in and out so you can still work 4 hours if you can be as productive.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#244

Post by twblalock »

hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #169
wpietri wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer, I agree there's a cultural issue, but think there are pragmatic issues. 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 d…

Even your pragmatic issues have a strong cultural component. There are quite a few important projects that on my team that we could afford to have take 20% longer. It's more important they have a good result than they arrive as soon as possible. We also have some projects we need done ASAP, which would naturally fall to a full-timer.

So, it makes sense to hire part-time people when the timelines can slip and they aren't on the critical path? That's not a very good sales pitch.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#245

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

prohobo wrote: post #142
tbrownaw wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's kind of my point, this is a project management problem. Maybe they should be re-considering what needs to get done in the first place. Or how long it will take. The only projects I can think of needing "a lot of work" (ie. large dev team and many hours) would be AAA games and god damn operating systems. How many part-time devs do you think I'm suggesting you need? Is hiring one person for 20-30 hours a week re…

The idea that if you hire SWEs for 4 hours, you'll get 4 hours straight of programming out of them is wishful thinking. The individual might go in with that mindset but long term it will take a very dedicated individual to do it. It's not sustainable by most employees. There's also the fact that a job is more than programming. A company will get at most 2 to 3ish hours of output from a programmer. So then the company will need to hire many more programmers plus the associated employees that support human resources and such.

The idea that most companies over hire employees speaks to the fact that it's difficult to figure out how many people are needed for a project. Hiring a group of part time workers does nothing to fix that situation.

I like the idea of working part time but for it to happen it would need to be a hard push by the workers via a union or something similar. From an employer's point of view it just doesn't make sense.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#246

Post by nabeards »

I have found it incredibly difficult to find anyone willing to work part-time freelance (1099) work. Seeing some folks in here actually embracing it is great news. If you are a JS dev and looking for part-time, message me on Keybase or email me@{myKeybaseUsername}.com (see profile).

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#247

Post by jbmsf »

I've been working part-time for the last few years. I generally work a full week, but split my time between two companies. It seems to work; neither company would have been able to hire me full time either because they can't offer me enough stake, interesting enough work, or have too much of the sort of dysfunction that only a large stake or interesting work justify tolerating.

I can't pretend it was easy to make happen. I have a long career behind me and found positions mostly through my own network. (I have found a few companies that were willing to hire part time via traditional recruiting channels, but it's a minority.)

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#248

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

twblalock wrote: post #244
hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even your pragmatic issues have a strong cultural component. There are quite a few important projects that on my team that we could afford to have take 20% longer. It's more important they have a good result than they arrive as soon as possible. We also have some projects we need done ASAP, which would naturally fall to a full-timer.

So, it makes sense to hire part-time people when the timelines can slip and they aren't on the critical path? That's not a very good sales pitch.

I'm getting downvoted, but I really don't see the problem? Not all of our projects even have a timeline to slip.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#249

Post by yibg »

keerthiko wrote: post #208
yibg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavily depends on the nature of the work in question and size of team. Larger the team, and more foreign the domain the more time is needed to coordinate work.

Broadly, I disagree, at least when talking about any team or sub-team focused on software development. It depends more on the personalities, values and organization of the workplace and the team — for any size, if more than 20% of people involved need to spend more than 2 hrs/week in meetings — it is an organizational/ops issue, not an inherent feature of the work. > more foreign the domain the more time is needed to…

Foreign to the engineers. Onboarding still takes time, regardless of documentation. There is a reason why CPAs takes a year to complete, even though there are lots of high quality written material that have been used for decades. Ever tried getting productive yourself quickly when working with some domain specific software like accounting? There is a lot of context that needs to be learned.

Re: Why not hire part-time developers?

#250

Post by [deleted] »

yibg wrote: post #205
keerthiko wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run a 5-person dev team (1 designer, 2 technical founders, 1 dev full-time, +1 part-time dev) with 30 minutes of sync-time per week for non-founders. Our part-time dev can perfectly run with those specs thanks to our encouragement of daily documentation and written specs rather than waiting for a big meeting to ask and be asked questions.

Heavily depends on the nature of the work in question and size of team. Larger the team, and more foreign the domain the more time is needed to coordinate work.

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