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For sale: 8 hours/week of my time

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For sale: 8 hours/week of my time

#1

Post by gbruins »

I have a full time job as a software engineer that I enjoy. I work 4 10-hour days and have Fridays off. High inflation and increased expenses are driving me back into the job market looking for ways to supplement my income, but I don't want to fight for gigs on freelance platforms like Upwork.

Ideally I want a reliable project where I can invest 8-12 hours per week. One idea I had was to offer my services to companies looking to fill full time roles as a 'bridge' employee until they find their full time candidate (I could even participate in the interview process).

I guess I'm looking for a 'long term gig'. Am I nuts? Or is there a job board out there for companies/startups that need just a bit of extra help?

Re: For sale: 8 hours/week of my time

#7

Post by IceMetalPunk »

gbruins wrote: post #5
IceMetalPunk wrote: post #2

I believe that's called contract work.

Your belief is correct! The contract work I see seems to fall into 2 buckets: short term gig, or temporary 40/hr per week. I'm looking for a some kind of middle ground: long term 8/hr week.

Good luck finding that, but I don't see many employers being good with a schedule like that for a contractor or employee. At best, you might be able to get a paid internship with those hours, but (a) it won't be much of a paycheck, and (b) they'll probably expect you to become a full-time employee at some point, and won't likely hire you even for an internship without that possibility.

Re: For sale: 8 hours/week of my time

#9

Post by hnaccount2001 »

I’m not sure about 8 hours but I’ve had some success with ~15hrs distributed throughout a week so the employer knows they can get in touch with me most days. Unfortunately I think this that finding these sorts of gigs requires a lot of up-front networking or grinding away on freelance sites until you hook something medium-term, like a half-year contract or whatever.

Re: For sale: 8 hours/week of my time

#10

Post by adrianmsmith »

gbruins wrote: post #5
IceMetalPunk wrote: post #2

I believe that's called contract work.

Your belief is correct! The contract work I see seems to fall into 2 buckets: short term gig, or temporary 40/hr per week. I'm looking for a some kind of middle ground: long term 8/hr week.

I think you'd need to be a specialist and advisor in something that a company needs and currently isn't good at.

I mean, if you're a company and you want some development done, you probably don't want it taking 5 times as long as it need be. You'd rather hire someone 5 days a week (even for a short period of time) rather than someone 1 day a week.

But for advising the teams companies already have about something they don't know about but you do, it could still make sense for the company. E.g. for a while I helped quite a few companies do MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 transitions (a while ago now obviously!) It was something I became quite good at but companies didn't want to build up the internal knowledge because they only needed to do it once. I would come in and discuss their situation, advise them, come back a bit later to see how they were getting on and review what they'd done, etc.

Focus on things you're good at that other companies might not have knowledge of. Particular programming languages, particular tasks such as optimization or software design, particular databases, particular clouds perhaps. Or migrations and transitions where it doesn't make sense for the company to build up knowledge as they only do it once.

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