4 ms·

Cool. Now start offering more part time roles.

echelon 5y ago
- Live and move anywhere. - Set your own hours. - Four day work weeks. - Part time roles. - Work for both FANGMA and a startup [1] - Sabbaticals. [1] (Startup could be flexible so there's no overlap in meetings/oncall. Also makes it super easy to switch jobs while still getting paid from one of the two roles.)
- askonomm 5y ago
  I just realized how spoiled us dev folk are. If only my grandmother would know the cushy life I get to live while still complaining about it she would slap me.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    A good grandma would be overjoyed that her descendants had progressed to the point where these were their chief complaints. Absolutely incredible.
  - RationPhantoms 5y ago
    I still wonder why I peruse HN for this reason (as a non-SWE). It's incredible how the business world panders to software engineers.
    - cableshaft 5y ago
      They pander to whoever brings in the money. Salespeople at my wife's job get away with much worse bullshit than I ever got away with at any coding job. Like one guy at her job brings in like 40% of the company's total revenue, which their total revenue was apparently around 60 million last year, so he brings in about 24 million. Apparently other people complain that he doesn't really do anything the vast majority of the time, and doesn't do anything coworkers ask them to do that's part of the job description for other salespeople, and the execs won't do anything about it (and apparently are very scared of him leaving since they think he'll take all those clients with him). ...which I agree with the execs not doing anything, by the way. That revenue is way more important than making sure that employee is "putting in a solid 8 hour work day" or "being a team player". Software engineers get some slack from the business but not that much slack. If I could have a few short conversations a year with the computer and it spat out software that generated millions in revenue I absolutely would, but no, I have to do the research and design and development to make sure the software does what it needs to do. And then it helps generate millions of dollars, of which I get a comparatively tiny fraction compared to what I bet that salesperson gets. Most of us are still getting a raw deal compared to salespeople (well, effective salespeople, at least).
    - kortilla 5y ago
      > It's incredible how the business world panders to software engineers. Supply and demand is the only force here, software engineers aren’t special.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    All you have to do is spend a decade locked indoors staring at a screen, then it's easy street.
- shagie 5y ago
  Live and work anywhere has tax code challenges - especially when that expands beyond the country that someone is in. I've mentioned part time roles in another comment and really don't see that being feasible. Working for two companies simultaneously gets into some tricky IP and non-compete situations (that are even enforceable in California - see Techno Lite, Inc. v. Emcod, LLC).
cmauniada 5y ago
This is next, I’d love this. I’m currently in a weird position. My job pays for a full time salary but with less than part time work. I’m not sure if I should pick up another full time job with full time work or a part time job with part time work.
shagie 5y ago
For a developer role, I have difficulty seeing how part time is economical. An article from 2019: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/720122267 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/720122267 > GARCIA: The occupation with the single biggest part-time penalty is web developer. Wages for part-time web developers are 49.5% less than wages for full-time web developers. And that is our PLANET MONEY indicator - part-time web developers make only about half as much per hour as full-time web developers. So if a FTE is making $100/h and working 40h/w, a part time developer is making $50/h and working 20h/w... though those are just numbers that I made up. They will vary. The issue for the organization is that as a developer, part time makes a complete hash of the maker schedule when combined with actually having meetings. I've been able to get my managers to try to schedule meetings clustered together so that I have chunks of time where I can work each day. But if I was part time - either fewer days per week or fewer hours per day, that would in turn translate to smaller maker time blocks or maker time blocks that were separated from each other by more than a day. I see this with part time interns - where the ones work work each day are much more efficient at what they're doing than the ones that come in twice a week and have to get back into the grove of what they were working on and that takes a significant part of the time of when they get back in for that day.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  Part-time is much more difficult to find and much less lucrative than full-time consulting part of the time. The big leap is you have to give up the perceived stability of your monthly paycheck. You are unemployed and unpaid by default. The easiest way to deal with this is to keep 6-12 months’ worth of living expenses in cash. You can tune your risk this way; less cash, more risk.
rr808 5y ago
I love the idea of part time but realistically you have to spend loads of time outside regular hours just to keep up to date.
- azemetre 5y ago
  I have a hard time believing this for most software roles (which is just basic web development, scaling issues aside). I can easily envision myself working part time on a react application or creating a spring app. Not exactly ground breaking stuff here.
  - snicker7 5y ago
    Programming is the easy part. It’s the collaboration and communication that get you. Working part time means a higher ratio of your time is spent communicating and syncing up rather than doing “actual work”.
    - shagie 5y ago
      This also may suffer from an explosion of Brook's Law. So, now you're working less on "actual work" which means that for the organization to get similar amounts of stuff done, they need to hire more people... which means that a larger portion of the time is spent communicating and syncing up.
      - pydry 5y ago
        This is every large company I've worked at in the last 5 years. Brooks' law has exponentially increased the amount of syncing required and the explosion of open source and SaaSes has shrunk the amount of coding required.
  - rr808 5y ago
    The problem is in 10 years when no one uses react or spring. Like my friends that know Visual Basic.

- Live and move anywhere. - Set your own hours. - Four day work weeks. - Part time roles. - Work for both FANGMA and a startup [1] - Sabbaticals. [1] (Startup could be flexible so there's no overlap in meetings/oncall. Also makes it super easy to switch jobs while still getting paid from one of the two roles.)

askonomm 5y ago
I just realized how spoiled us dev folk are. If only my grandmother would know the cushy life I get to live while still complaining about it she would slap me.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  A good grandma would be overjoyed that her descendants had progressed to the point where these were their chief complaints. Absolutely incredible.
- RationPhantoms 5y ago
  I still wonder why I peruse HN for this reason (as a non-SWE). It's incredible how the business world panders to software engineers.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    They pander to whoever brings in the money. Salespeople at my wife's job get away with much worse bullshit than I ever got away with at any coding job. Like one guy at her job brings in like 40% of the company's total revenue, which their total revenue was apparently around 60 million last year, so he brings in about 24 million. Apparently other people complain that he doesn't really do anything the vast majority of the time, and doesn't do anything coworkers ask them to do that's part of the job description for other salespeople, and the execs won't do anything about it (and apparently are very scared of him leaving since they think he'll take all those clients with him). ...which I agree with the execs not doing anything, by the way. That revenue is way more important than making sure that employee is "putting in a solid 8 hour work day" or "being a team player". Software engineers get some slack from the business but not that much slack. If I could have a few short conversations a year with the computer and it spat out software that generated millions in revenue I absolutely would, but no, I have to do the research and design and development to make sure the software does what it needs to do. And then it helps generate millions of dollars, of which I get a comparatively tiny fraction compared to what I bet that salesperson gets. Most of us are still getting a raw deal compared to salespeople (well, effective salespeople, at least).
  - kortilla 5y ago
    > It's incredible how the business world panders to software engineers. Supply and demand is the only force here, software engineers aren’t special.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  All you have to do is spend a decade locked indoors staring at a screen, then it's easy street.
shagie 5y ago
Live and work anywhere has tax code challenges - especially when that expands beyond the country that someone is in. I've mentioned part time roles in another comment and really don't see that being feasible. Working for two companies simultaneously gets into some tricky IP and non-compete situations (that are even enforceable in California - see Techno Lite, Inc. v. Emcod, LLC).

cmauniada 5y ago

This is next, I’d love this. I’m currently in a weird position. My job pays for a full time salary but with less than part time work. I’m not sure if I should pick up another full time job with full time work or a part time job with part time work.

shagie 5y ago

For a developer role, I have difficulty seeing how part time is economical. An article from 2019: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/720122267 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/720122267 > GARCIA: The occupation with the single biggest part-time penalty is web developer. Wages for part-time web developers are 49.5% less than wages for full-time web developers. And that is our PLANET MONEY indicator - part-time web developers make only about half as much per hour as full-time web developers. So if a FTE is making $100/h and working 40h/w, a part time developer is making $50/h and working 20h/w... though those are just numbers that I made up. They will vary. The issue for the organization is that as a developer, part time makes a complete hash of the maker schedule when combined with actually having meetings. I've been able to get my managers to try to schedule meetings clustered together so that I have chunks of time where I can work each day. But if I was part time - either fewer days per week or fewer hours per day, that would in turn translate to smaller maker time blocks or maker time blocks that were separated from each other by more than a day. I see this with part time interns - where the ones work work each day are much more efficient at what they're doing than the ones that come in twice a week and have to get back into the grove of what they were working on and that takes a significant part of the time of when they get back in for that day.

ahelwer 5y ago
Part-time is much more difficult to find and much less lucrative than full-time consulting part of the time. The big leap is you have to give up the perceived stability of your monthly paycheck. You are unemployed and unpaid by default. The easiest way to deal with this is to keep 6-12 months’ worth of living expenses in cash. You can tune your risk this way; less cash, more risk.

rr808 5y ago

I love the idea of part time but realistically you have to spend loads of time outside regular hours just to keep up to date.

azemetre 5y ago
I have a hard time believing this for most software roles (which is just basic web development, scaling issues aside). I can easily envision myself working part time on a react application or creating a spring app. Not exactly ground breaking stuff here.
- snicker7 5y ago
  Programming is the easy part. It’s the collaboration and communication that get you. Working part time means a higher ratio of your time is spent communicating and syncing up rather than doing “actual work”.
  - shagie 5y ago
    This also may suffer from an explosion of Brook's Law. So, now you're working less on "actual work" which means that for the organization to get similar amounts of stuff done, they need to hire more people... which means that a larger portion of the time is spent communicating and syncing up.
    - pydry 5y ago
      This is every large company I've worked at in the last 5 years. Brooks' law has exponentially increased the amount of syncing required and the explosion of open source and SaaSes has shrunk the amount of coding required.
- rr808 5y ago
  The problem is in 10 years when no one uses react or spring. Like my friends that know Visual Basic.