251–260 of 306 posts
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).
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…
Don't see this working in USA. I've never been to Europe, but work with many who are from there. You get socialized healthcare, cities with easy transit, and for the most part things are close. In the US, we don't have health insurance unless we buy it ourselves ($$$$) or our company provides it ($). We don't have easy transit in most cities, and also people do live far away from the business centers. That's why in t…
I haven't worked in a fulltime software development job for almost two decades now. Never has it been a problem. Never was my parttime requirement the reason to not hire me. I don't even consider fulltime an option.
I'm very surprised at how people here react to this idea. Untill you pointed out it may be cultural thing.
Another reason for me to not even consider working for a US tech company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, ar…
I still don't see how this is an argument to say that it would benefit "women" instead of "parents" in general.
This is both a serious problem and a solution to social imbalance. Again and again, polls show many of the women would stop working alltogether¹ if their only option is fulltime.
This does give men some unfair advantage in career options or pay raises, though. It is cited as an important reason for payment inequality between men and women.
¹ The irony is that this would change the parttime ratio: one reason why it is this high in the Netherlands, is because those mothers in many other European countries, simply don't have a job at all. The Nordics being a positive, exception, by the way.
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…
But he is actually talking about offering his first 20 hours to a client, which is what I do as a consulting CTO. It works out exceptionally well for my clients. And I have had few issues when I hire contractors who juggle a couple part time clients. If you do that full time, you quickly learn time management.
He's also right there is no market for this for programmers beyond Upwork or Toptal. Companies rather pay a premium to get 4 productive hours, 2 hours of email and meetings, and 2 hours of coffee and socializing.
One exception might be DevOps, which is more project based.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the alternative? Have some PM+EM write a perfectly detailed spec for you to implement? That sounds like hell. I can't imagine spending all my time building something that I had no input on designing.
Hire senior level people part time. That don’t need to spend lots of time getting context. They can figure out how to solve problems matching your team’s coding style without extra meetings.
That don’t need to spend lots of
time getting context. They can figure
out how to solve problems matching
your team’s coding style without
extra meetings.
Coding bits of functionality for an existing business is not a matter of "matching the team's coding style."
Heck, there are often not even engineering "problems" to "solve." It's a matter of figuring out integration with existing systems and processes, understanding the business itself, etc. That's why part-timers don't make sense. They can't just walk in, sit down, and code.
And if you could tee things up for them, to the point where they could just sit down and code, then 90% of the work is already done. And your part-time coder will take longer to deliver... why would management want to wait 2 weeks for a part time person to complete 40 hours of pure coding work, versus 1 week for a fulltimer?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mar…
This would be a situation akin to what an economist talks about, when they talk about perfectly competitive markets (driving profits down to zero/"normal" levels).
What we have now, with the market offering almost exclusively fulltime jobs, is actually markedly different: Whenever you switch jobs, you're, to some extent, buying a cat in a sack, taking a risk that the new job will end up being worse than the previous one. The risk is a barrier to entry, akin to what an economist talks about in connection with limit pricing. Here a market incumbent can charge a premium over a perfectly competitive price, because a would-be market entrant cannot sustain enough profit on the perfectly competitive price to also pay back his initial investment of market entry.
Or another point, based on a thought experiment: Say you are staffing a company purely with 20hr employees who are using the other 20hrs to have a go at starting their own businesses. Assume, further, that the personal fulfillment of having a successful business of your own is something you can never hope to match for your employees, so that everyone who is successful will leave. Your company is now staffed exclusively with employees who are bad at entrepreneurship. -- This is vastly oversimplifying of course, as you can just fail at building a company by being unlucky rather than intrinsically "bad", but you can see how it acts as some kind of a negative selection effect that works against the company offering the 20hr deal.