20 ms·

Why not hire part-time developers?

• nabeards 5y ago
  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).
  • simne 5y ago
    Sent message to your email. Regards.
• Apocryphon 5y ago
  This is the sort of idea that could make r/overemployed mainstream.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• issa 5y ago
  I think your basic premise might not be correct. If you only are getting 4 productive hours of work done per day, then something is wrong. I would say you probably only get 4 productive hours of WRITING CODE (maybe much less), but during that long lunch break, or bike ride, or whatever, you are probably thinking about the problem (consciously or not). If you work part time on two different projects, you simply won't be as productive, because you won't have that "down time" to think about problems.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    The prior mega-thread seemed to indicate the average time spent was around that many hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581125
  • prohobo 5y ago
    I don't really feel the difference between planning/coding. It's all the same to me in terms of problem solving. Also, I already do this as a consultant, and clients are usually mostly focused on speed and quality. So I give them 4 hours a day, I take a couple hours off then I plug away at my own projects for a few more hours. The context switch plus the long break makes it work for me, but everyone is different. Depending on the project, thinking about solutions during down-time does make sense - but no employer I've ever come across sees it as productive anyway. There's always the silent expectation to look like you're actively working. In any case, I'm often thinking about my work during the day regardless of whether I'm on the clock or not so this is a moot issue for me.
    • brailsafe 5y ago
      What amount of time are you billing for, and how do you track it?
      • prohobo 5y ago
        I bill for every hour I spend actively engaging with the work. Usually I max out at about 4 hours, but sometimes go to 8 hours when there are other roles involved (graphics design, devops, meetings, etc.) Tracking depends on the client and project, but usually I input my work on HourStack.
    • analog31 5y ago
      >>> Depending on the project, thinking about solutions during down-time does make sense - but no employer I've ever come across sees it as productive anyway. Indeed, if you look at products that are sold for automating the management of skilled workers, such as JIRA and activity tracking, the unstated goal is to eliminate slack. If I can persuade a manager that I need to spend time thinking about solutions, even doing that has to be codified as an entry in a tracking app, with a plan and a deadline. Part time work might end up being the only way to regain that slack, and the cost in compensation might be worth it for a lot of workers. Especially if they can also relocate to a low cost region. Simply due to my age, and where I live, I've dealt with and know a lot of doctors. A large fraction of them have switched to part-time status, or they're professors with limited clinical schedules. I play in a band with a guy who is a retired part-time doctor. He lives in a very modest little house, and has enough wealth to live on.
  • drewcoo 5y ago
    That may be true, but if companies don't pay me for passive "work" I do for them during that downtime, then why worry about its effectiveness?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • anothernewdude 5y ago
    My work would have to have much more interesting problems for this to be the case.
  • TrackerFF 5y ago
    I'll throw out a typical day for me, a data analyst: 0800 workday starts 0800-0830 daily standup 0830-0930 check and reply to emails *0930-1100 ACTUAL WORK* 1100-1130 lunch 1130-1200 check and reply to emails 1200-1300 meeting with [some product] team over 1300-1315 coffee break with colleagues *1315-1500 ACTUAL WORK* 1500-1600 Some meeting 1600 workday ends As you can see, that gives me less than 4 hours of "real" work toward the product. Some days there's less meetings, other days there's much more. But in any case, I'd point out meetings as the main culprit. Lots and lots of emails, too. It's pretty much a never-ending stream. But at least with modern meetings over Zoom/Teams/etc., you're more free to do some work in the background. Before COVID, we pretty much had 100% physical meetings. Or remote meetings in conference rooms.
    • ec109685 5y ago
      I don’t get how replying to email and attending meetings isn’t real work. If you aren’t adding value to your employer by performing those tasks, ask your manager to abstain.
      • issa 5y ago
        I am jealous of your work experience that you can make this comment. In organizations that run really well, this isn't an issue. But there are a lot of development jobs that involve frequent touch-points with middle managers who don't bring much to the table except for taking time out of developer's days to appear busy. And I say that with no offense intended to any middle managers. Good project managers are worth their weight in gold.
        • Gigachad 5y ago
          It sounds like you just lack context. These people aren’t adding any value to _your_ day but they are adding value to the business. They stay informed on the status of everything going on in their sphere and use that to keep key people informed and spot when things are going wrong.
          • 5y ago
  • asdff 5y ago
    I think another part of it is that rarely are you employed to do one single thing for 8 hours a day. So yes, I do only have 4 productive hours a day for this one project, because I am spending the other hours focused on the other projects and tasks laid in my lap by my employer.
• brimble 5y ago
  Because the hourly rate you have to charge if you're actually counting every hour you work, to match the rate you get for actually-productive salaried hours, causes serious sticker shock.
  • asfarley 5y ago
    You have to enjoy the shock. Savour it.
• rr808 5y ago
  Working as a developer means you have to write docs, investigate designs, talk to users, interview people, go to meetings, do support, do corporate BS, training. Sure a few people can skip this stuff but usually its the most junior grades who can concentrate code only.
  • prohobo 5y ago
    What the hell is investigating a design? Also, no company I've worked for ever bothered with proper documentation, and I've never seen anyone lower than tech lead ever do any of those kinds of things more than once or twice a month (besides meetings). I'll concede these kinds of responsibilities might be more common in larger companies or different fields, but I'm thinking more about smaller startups.
    • Minor49er 5y ago
      I think by "investigating a design" he means looking at how a component or system is structured to understand how it works. This is pretty common as a lot of developers will get called to work on a piece of infrastructure that they aren't familiar with. They have to understand what they're working on so they apply an effective change Also, documentation is huge. I've worked with a lot of small companies and startups that have adopted it to share knowledge and to ease troubleshooting/onboarding. If you aren't doing it at work, consider it. There are a lot of approaches to it, such as self-documenting code, writing knowledgebase articles, recording demo videos, leaving contextual details in PRs, and even simply linking these pieces together so they're easy to find
    • tluyben2 5y ago
      I guess, like you, that it happens, but I haven’t seen it in the smallest startups to very large enterprises. They all say, like everyone on HN, that they do all of this, but it is more a wish than reality as far as I have ever seen (30+ years, tech consulting in 100s of companies, for 1 person shop to 100000+ employee enterprise). The stories are always of similarly ‘utopia’ style coming in but when actually in there, nothing of that happens.
• nullandvoid 5y ago
  I've just gone down to 4 days pro-rata, and have enjoyed the additional time to work on my own projects, and get on top of any chores (and honestly sometimes just re-charge). From this point forward I'm attempting to optimize for personal development and fulfillment through building more things that tickle my own intellectual itches, rather than a bigger job title.
• qrohlf 5y ago
  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 W-2 arrangements. I got interviewed and then ghosted by two companies, was offered a laughably low rate by a third, and a fourth showed interest but then basically told me that I'd need to work a 40-hour week. I know that a vocal minority has success in part-time consulting, but it's quite difficult to accomplish if you live outside of a tech hub (I'm based in Central Oregon) and don't have SV connections. Contrast that with when I gave up and decided to make myself available for full-time (remote) work. In the span of about 5 weeks, I got over 200 recruiter emails, interviewed at 10 companies, and received 10 offers, mostly in the upper end of the $200k-400k range. I firmly believe that this is a cultural block, rather than one that's rooted in rational/pragmatic concerns. Tech companies want to feel like they're getting your full intellectual output, even if that's demonstrably false in the status quo. There's also this issue that gets brought up of "if Bob is gone half the time, isn't that going to breed resentment with his full-time coworkers?" (answer: only if you have a shitty "butts in seats" management culture). I honestly don't think we're going to see meaningful change in this area for a while. The 40-hour work week is something that's heavily ingrained in tech culture, to the point where certain companies' "perks" are heavily tuned towards incentivizing you to stay at the office longer and frequently turn that 40 hours into 60. I think it will take an external disruptive event on the scale of COVID-19 in order to change this aspect of tech culture.
  • tomrod 5y ago
    Taking it to first principles, I don't see part time as feasible until documentation has negligible marginal cost. It takes time to get people up to speed. Another blocker is the inane requirement in employment agreements by many large corps in the US that they own your IP while you work for them, regardless how it was developed or what the topic is (one place I worked at owned children's books if you published them, despite being a software developer). Until that is unacceptable, either legally or culturally, working part-time presents a conflict of interest. Rather than valuing the breadth a part-timer might bring, it's viewed as a liability.
• QuadmasterXLII 5y ago
  For any C++ / computer vision people who are in this position: Kitware pays hourly, and at least in the medical research department I was in, you pick how many hours you work per week, down to about 30 hours. I usually worked 32 hour weeks when I was there.
• missizii 5y ago
  Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children. If I had a part time option when my children were small, I would have embraced it. My career was thriving, but there was no “step back” option for me. If you want more women in tech, recognize that the first shift of daycare & school prep, the second shift of work, and the third shift of cooking, cleaning, and caring, is exhausting and unpleasant, even when both parents try to share the burden.
  • Scarblac 5y ago
    > Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children. And men with the same wish.
  • dudul 5y ago
    > Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children. How about "parent" instead of "women"?
    • missizii 5y ago
      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, are then in place to be the primary infant caregivers.
      • dudul 5y ago
        I still don't see how this is an argument to say that it would benefit "women" instead of "parents" in general.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
• foxbarrington 5y ago
  My consultancy is built around creating teams of hourly devs. It works great in practice but there’s a lot of talking to clients in the beginning. A lot of companies are very attached to the idea of w2 salaries.
  • notreallyserio 5y ago
    Do you find you have to do a lot of outbound "sales" to push the concept of hourly devs or are you more likely to see this attachment after a company is already exploring working with you? That is, so companies get cold feet after they learn more about the hourly dev concept you provide?
    • foxbarrington 5y ago
      It's not so much cold feet as it is confusing to them. e.g. "Wait, so they're hourly, not full-time?" "They bill hourly, but they will put in between 30 and 40 hours of work each week, which is about what you'd expect from most full-time employees"
• notreallyserio 5y ago
  > I, like many others, learned the hard way not to ever get invested in a company I don’t own. We don’t get rewarded for it - we get bullshit stock options and pats on the back. I've been thinking about this a while, without investigation (doh). But I figure folks here might know the answer. What stops companies, especially startups, from giving employees share grants instead of options? Is it hard to do or is it just that they don't want to/don't believe in the company enough to make this a differentiator in the job market? If it's hard, is there a space in the market for a ?aaS to make it easier?
• awildfivreld 5y ago
  I work as a part time developer right now, however that is in parallel with studies so that might affect my view a little bit. I am also a junior dev, which also might affect my experiences. I have experienced that the amount of work produced is not linearly correlated with the amount of hours worked. I find that in the periods I work full-time, I get more done per hour than otherwise. What I have found has the largest (negative) impact on my performance is the context switching that is required when I get back to work tasks. I have to get into that mindset again, which takes time. I've tried to reduce the amount of context switching by grouping work-days and uni-days, but I still notice the difference. It would perhaps be different if I had time to (sub)consciously think about the problems at work during non-work days, but in my case that is taken by learning other things. But hey, I like my job a lot, so perhaps full time is not as "soul killing" for me as other people.
  • mettamage 5y ago
    The correlation depends. I am quite an insomniac. By having 4 days of work instead of 5, I can spread my time better in order to work on the good sleeping days and chill on the bad ones. Example: Monday: I sleep shit, I work, I survive Tuesday: I sleep horrible again, I work, I barely survive Wednesday: if I'd have worked 5 days per week this would be the day that I would be severely underperforming. Instead, it's my free day, I catch up on sleep. Thursday: I happen to sleep well. I perform well. Friday: I slept meh, I perform well. Weekend: I sleep horrible, so I make sure that I just chill the whole day and make sure I'll catch enough sleep somehow. Monday: I'm well-rested and happen to sleep well. I perform well. Having a free day at Wednesday in particular makes sure it's very tough to become too tired, even as an insomniac like me. I worked 5 days per week before, it's not possible to perform well when I was hitting sleep issues. Going through a week where I didn't drown in sleep deprivation was a blessing. Now though, it's simply a problem that I can always fix. And yes, I've tried many things I used to be much worse. I'm improving. I've made a few comments on what I've tried (and what works for me).
• ciphol 5y ago
  Question for those who have or have considered part-time work - how does your employer/manager look at this? Do they view you as a regular worker who wants to strike a different work/money balance, or as a slacker who isn't committed to the company or their own career growth and can't be relied upon for any serious project? When it comes to the experiences of people I know, my impression is that it's accepted for women with children to seek a part-time role, but for men it would automatically stigmatize them as a slacker. I'm curious if others have the same impression.
  • keerthiko 5y ago
    As a cofounder of a very small company (8 FT, 2 part-time, 2-10 contractors varying by season), but one with a longer life than many startups newer than us (10+ years since our first revenue), I have been trying to normalize long-term part-time hires in all critical roles for some time now at our org. Yet, it is hard to overcome the cultural energy around the implications "part time = low impact", "part time = temporary", "part time = mercenary", "part time = lazy", "part time = not passionate". This sentiment arises from colleagues, investors, leadership, customers, and hell, the part time employee themselves at times (some kind of internalized contempt for wanting/needing/preferring to go part time). My partner just got their role converted to part-time starting March, after consciously coming to the conclusion that it was the only healthy way to remain in their career, despite not having children. They still processing to get over the feeling of guilt and of being less-than somehow for not being okay with handing over their full cognitive capacity and waking hours, especially without being an "accepted exception", ie someone with kids, being a caretaker, or a person with a (visible) disability. I want to live in a world where people can passionately work on something as part of a team, long-term, while being fairly compensated for that work, for less than 30 hours a week. If possible, I myself want to have that level of involvement even as a cofounder or leader of a business/project/organization so I can give my diverse passions the attention they deserve, without it "being weird" to my cofounders or other teammates.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      > I want to live in a world where people can passionately work on something as part of a team, long-term, while being fairly compensated for that work, for less than 30 hours a week. Thanks for that. I appreciate and applaud your ethos.
• jdsleppy 5y ago
  I'm working hourly on a contract where I advised the company I could only work 15-20 hours a week. It can be a win-win I believe, but with tradeoffs for both sides. I'm able to make the 3-4 hours of work a day be extremely productive. I always deliver in fewer hours than were budgeted for the work. As a contractor, there are no extraneous meetings to slow me down. But I'm still involved in client meetings as needed, understand their needs, and take ownership of the codebase to my immense satisfaction. It's not very different than working "full time" from home where you might take a walk, run an errand, cook your lunch, etc., but I can flex the schedule even further without any guilt. The change in mindset from "taking a break from full-time work" for an errand versus "I'm not billing this hour, I'll do whatever I want" is empowering. The negatives: less pay in total for me (but hourly rate can be negotiated), and features might (but won't necessarily) get done more slowly in terms of calendar days. BTW a typical day might be: - daycare drop-off 9:30, exercise - 10:30 shower, chores, life tasks - 11:45 cook and eat lunch - 12:30-4:30 work with a break for walking or playing piano I do some "down time" thinking about problems as I fall asleep at night or on walks.
  • lupire 5y ago
    Nutshell: part time is full time but you don't get paid to feel guilty when you're not working.
• tibbar 5y ago
  Yeah… I’ve worked with part time engineers in the past and been one myself several times too. The main problem is that people flake. Your part time position is not as important to them as their other job, their degree, their time off. Lots of people think they can be productive for 10-15 hours of their usual Netflix time and then find out that they have no energy or motivation. Part-time engineers have a way of falling off the map, getting behind on work. You don’t give your important work to someone who clocks in for a few hours randomly every week, and it’s too much trouble to bother if they’re only doing unimportant work. Of course some people thrive in this role, but joining an engineering team part time is a skill by itself, just as important as raw engineering ability. People with backgrounds in project management, for instance, tend to have the organization and follow through to pull this off.
  • mettamage 5y ago
    Come see The Netherlands, you'd be surprised by the difference in culture :) 4 day work weeks (32 hour weeks) are normal and part-timers are on many teams. 5 day work weeks are normal as well. 3 day work weeks, I haven't seen those around me.
  • nmca 5y ago
    I think remote might help - part time x2 or part time + degree feels likely unsustainable, but part time + more surfing? Seems like it might work.
• uranium 5y ago
  This was discussed a bit last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749497 I've worked part-time for the past 10+ years now, at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health [60%, 80%, and 40% duty cycle respectively]. It's awesome for work-life balance if you can swing it, and a lot more productive than many people would think.
  • mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    How did you start that conversation? How was it received? What do you do in your not-work time?
    • uranium 5y ago
      When I came back from paternity leave with my first child, I told my boss I really wanted to go part time, and he supported me. Google had a standard easy of doing it, so it was just a matter of getting approval up to VP level, which went pretty smoothly. When I applied to transfer to Makani, we negotiated a bit, and decided that I'd go up to 80% because I really wanted the job and they apparently really wanted me. With Elemeno, I was already advising the company when I left Makani. I got a layoff package and didn't need paying for a while, and they couldn't afford me anyway. So we decided I'd help them temporarily until they could afford a full time engineer, and they paid me in stock and minimum wage. After about 18 months our agreement expired just as my COBRA was running out. I helped them draft a requisition for my replacement, but it didn't really make sense. For a bit more than they were paying me for 2 days a week, they'd maybe have been able to hire someone with a year's experience who'd be getting less done in their 5 days a week. So I switched to salary+benefits (some of the salary going to pay the other 60% of the health insurance) and that's worked great ever since, even now that we've been able to afford more full time engineers. Incidentally, we're hiring for a number of areas right now, including engineering. We're aiming for full time, but it is a very flexible, diverse, and family friendly workplace. https://www.elemenohealth.com/careers/ https://www.elemenohealth.com/careers/
      • jamesmishra 5y ago
• me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
  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 the USA, most people want full time work. Unfortunately, the mega corporations that some of y'all work for ensure that this becomes harder and harder. Hope your RSUs are worth it!
  • gopher_space 5y ago
    I think the US could convince non-retired people to cut back on the work week. For example, I think you could demonstrate that you need a workforce with fucked up backs alongside easy access to opioids to trigger our crisis.
  • BadCookie 5y ago
    The ACA made it possible to go part-time in the US. It costs just over $1k/month for my family of three for a silver plan with no subsidies.
    • the-alchemist 5y ago
      In addition, I heard in some states (CA, I think?), even a single member LLC has to be offered the same group rate for health insurance that other small-company (<100 employees) get. Maybe someone can confirm.
  • berkes 5y ago
    I'm from the Netherlands, which is parttime king of the world. 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.
• buro9 5y ago
  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 productive output from the remaining work time with part-time workers and some of this adds more toil when distributed across more people (i.e. on-call requires more handovers during the week and takes more communication). So productivity is reduced.* For companies to consider doing this they'd need to perform an trial to satisfy themselves that the above can be overcome. But even doing that may not be possible with existing employees and risks instilling discontent amongst those not in the trial. It's high risk to try. * Unless the entire company is 100% part-time and somehow base load is fundamentally reworked, in which case #1 still applies.
  • Tyr42 5y ago
    I'd also imagine you just have more communication overhead with more people. E.x. standups will take longer if you have twice as many people working half as much. And communication costs might even scale O(n^2) of people, not hours worked. I think that makes part time workers unattractive.
    • lupire 5y ago
      Easy solution is to not have standups, which are wholly unnecessary.
  • jvvw 5y ago
    I worked part-time (3 days per week and the 2.5 per week) as a developer for 7 or 8 years and found that you had to be as ruthless as you could get away with with 2. I deliberately worked Fridays as it was often quiet and easy to get lots of work done. It worked pretty well but I don't think it would have worked for all projects. Stuff without too much communications overhead was better. I was full-time first and requested part-time by which time I had proved myself, knew the systems etc.
  • 5y ago
• jupp0r 5y ago
  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 understand why we see this well known fact in human psychology as a problem instead of an inevitable part of doing business (both as an employee and an employer). Margins seem to be high enough to make software engineers extremely productive given the way the industry currently works. Of course, flexibility and work life balance can always be improved, but there are lots of companies where everybody is pretty happy about that aspect and the business is running well. If you as a company have great culture and compensation that's up to market specs, you also don't have problems hiring people, even if it might take some time in the current market.
  • cloogshicer 5y ago
    > Would all of that time be hyper productive focus time? (rhetorical question, the answer is no) 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.
    • jupp0r 5y ago
      > 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'll go outside and relax after or before work and on weekends. This is fine for me personally, but I can see how it might not be the same for everybody (I don't have a commute for example, which helps). I have not done part time work, but I expect I would just be unproductive 25% of the time and productive 25% of the time, at the same ratio as before. I've had many 4 week vacations and they didn't do much for my productivity (except maintaining it long-term I assume).
• mooreds 5y ago
  "coordination costs" is the short answer. As you work fewer hours, more of your time is devoted to coordination vs doing the work. (Or you can have someone else do the coordination, meaning they have less time to do the work.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm is the longer one.
• Animats 5y ago
  "They want rockstars, but they themselves are not that." Yes, that problem. Zappos is a shoe store. Uber is a taxi company.
  • bogwog 5y ago
    I wonder if hiring big teams is a status/ego thing. I’ve never been in that position, but I couldn’t imagine myself deciding that I need an Uber-scale development team to build a service like Uber. Just seems wasteful and like it’d be a nightmare to manage.
    • Animats 5y ago
      I wonder if hiring big teams is a status/ego thing. In a few cases, yes, definitely. Soylent was an extreme example. They went on and on about their overcomplicated "tech stack", at a time when, from their sales volume, they were processing a few sales transactions per minute. All they needed was a basic shopping cart program. They're still around, now classified as a "food products" company, selling wholesale, and considered an overpriced Slim-Fast.
    • jokethrowaway 5y ago
      The size of a team is a directors' pissing contest. The chain of responsibility for that goes up to the investors who put millions in a company and pressured the founders to "SCALE FAST"
  • Traster 5y ago
    I've been thinking this a lot recently. Go to Uber, you're working at a taxi company. Go work for Facebook- two choices, nothing you do matters, or you're selling perverts adverts. Go work for Google - you have no choice their entire company is built on a search engine that hasn't changed much in 20 years, but you'll feel real proud of those "various bug fixes" that Google Sheets got in its latest release. These companies want geniuses, but maybe not because you're going to make them billions, maybe just because if you're working there you won't be building a compatitor that costs them billions.
• tarr11 5y ago
  OP says after 4 hours of software development work, “they are done” and after that it’s just “obsessive tweaking”. They also say they started their own business and wanted to work part time at a company. Who is getting the “4 hours of work” and who is getting the “obsessive tweaking”? Not sure how these 2 statements align.
• throwaway98727 5y ago
  For less than 40 hours a week, start with: - 5 day a week schedule - 2 hour turnaround time for questions during core business hours
  • prohobo 5y ago
    Yeah, that seems fair to me.
• ricardobayes 5y ago
  We have a guy on a 10-hour weekly contract and his output nearly matches his full-time peers.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > with over-fitted teams (do you really need 40 engineers to build this?) I've encountered teams that use patterns like MVVM and VIPER, simply because they are designed to break projects into discrete components, so larger teams can work on them. I have also been told that we shouldn't use advanced development techniques, because other developers can't understand the tech. The project that I'm working on, has a scope that usually is implemented by a team of 10 or more engineers. That's nuts. It's a fairly ambitious app, but it's just an iOS app. I've done a ton of these, alone. I also wrote the backend; which is not my forte, but I don't like the selection for backends, out there. I have control issues, I guess... > I’m essentially an advocate for hiring fewer people and with more precision. So am I, but that does not seem to be how the industry works. I remember talking with a startup manager, several years ago, and they told me that the entire industry is based around engineers never staying at a company more than two years; with 18 months being the norm. I know that they had a heavy turnover, during the two years we worked with them. That has many, many downsides. Of course, you have the issue of "too many cooks spoil the soup," but you also have people writing code that they have no intention of maintaining, so why bother doing a good job? I have always been of the opinion that we keep teams together for years. It helps them to become "unified," and "move as one." That pays off, big time. But it also requires a completely different management style from what seems to be the norm, these days, and that, apparently, is too big an ask. FWIW, I would have been happy with part-time gig work. No one wants to work with us "olds," though, so I have found people that want the work I do, and it is far more than full-time. No money, but I don't really care.
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    > I've encountered teams that use patterns like MVVM and VIPER, simply because they are designed to break projects into discrete components, so larger teams can work on them. Yes, I've seen this kind of thing happen, too. Project complexity grows to justify the size of the team, not the other way around. A project that should take two good developers three months, gets assigned to a team of 40. That team has eng managers and eng manager managers and has to deal with all that communication and organizational bandwidth. We have all these people, so some of them must do core business logic, some of them will integrate 3rd party frameworks, some will do frontend/ui. And we need to take design time to draw the lines between these modules so nobody is stepping on anyone else's work. And we have to have stable APIs between all these, so we need an API design. Also, we need robust continuous integration and test frameworks because there are so many people committing, so we'll need to designate at least one, maybe multiple build engineers. And thanks to the tech lead / architect, we have many layers of abstraction, so the project can be mentally understood by 40 people. We also need to serialize and deserialize JSON between each layer, so that each could in theory be reused in a different project. Oh, and because of this complexity it's going to take the team ten months. A year and a half later, this massive CRUD app is released! Meanwhile, two skilled engineers could have just sat together and developed that same CRUD app without all the complexity and layers of abstraction.
• WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
  From an employer's point of view this makes little sense. Having to deal with the extra paperwork associated with the extra staff is very expensive and ultimately you get less production output when you hire part time. I think a 4 day week is probably a more likely option for developers to request and attain. The other option is contract work. There you set your own hours.
  • prohobo 5y ago
    You lost me with "extra". What I'm talking about are core product team members, not freelancers. Maybe I'm hitting on the wrong issue here, but if I was a team member coding 4 hours a day I'd be just as productive as ever. The problem I'm recognizing now is that maybe I'm really just miffed about the "butts in seats" mentality. I'd have no issue working "full-time" if that was just a way to say "team member" and didn't mean that I have to sit on my ass all day because big boss man likes it that way. I'm either part of the team or a contractor anyway, so might as well make it official.
    • tbrownaw 5y ago
      > You lost me with "extra". What I'm talking about are core product team members, not freelancers. It was "extra paperwork associated with the extra staff". As in, adding X% more staff means X% more staff-related paperwork.
      • prohobo 5y ago
        So don't hire so many people? I don't understand the problem. Why would they be hiring "extras" anyway? As backup?
        • tbrownaw 5y ago
          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.
• addsubtract 5y ago
  I’m a SWE who has a long term goal/dream of working for myself. I’m sure lots of readers here have this exact same dream. It is hard to pull yourself away from the nice salary and benefits of the corporate job. The opportunity cost of working for myself and failing for a year or two is very high when salaries are 250k+ for senior devs. It would be great to reduce the risk with part-time work. I hope it becomes more normalized. The problem I see is the ramp time for new workers to get productive. If the workers are part-time it is longer. For those who are concerned with “hours worked”, that’s just bad management. Set concrete goals and then evaluate worker output. Hours is irrelevant. I hope I find the courage to try breaking out “on my own” before it is too late. The one thing we all cannot buy is more time.
• a2a2eceac 5y ago
  This. I've been at 32 hrs/week, in two senior SW engineering jobs (sequentially), for 5 years, with appropriate pay reduction. Many/most people I work with don't know I have a reduced schedule, since I take my off time in the morning before most of my colleagues have caught up on Slack (and my guess is they are not clocking in 40 hrs, even at 100% pay). I also contracted for 50-100% time, variable, for about ten years, and got important work done during this time. So it's possible to work very productively with less than a full time commitment. I'm at a stage in my career & life where money is less of a concern than time. My next move will definitely be to average less than 32 hrs/week (ideally 20). My preference would be to work at the same / a similar job and just scale back the salary and the hours, but suspect it will wind up as a series of stressful full-time jobs or contracts with gaps in between to recharge and work on personal things, petering out until I get sick of that rhythm and decide there is enough in the piggy bank. If it plays out this way, that's a shame, because I feel like I add more value to a team the longer I stay; and someone won't benefit from 30 years of experience for a lot less than a full time staff engineer costs. I can't change (much) the cultural things that cause this situation, but it gives me some hope to see it advocated for here.
  • Moru 5y ago
    During covid I stepped back to 40% work thanks to government support. We were allowed to work with something else the rest of the time and I called the local home care unit to ask if they wanted help. Since then I have been doing part time work there up to 60% to cover for all the sick workers. I'm thinking of continuing this after the pandemic, there is a big mental difference between the jobs which does wonders for stress relieve. Both are stressy but completely different ways.
• diiaann 5y ago
  I've worked with part time developers. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn't. If someone wants to work part time with you and don't have any other contracts, they rarely want to do work during predictable hours. If they get blocked outside of business hours, it's ideal if you have someone who can unblock them when they happen to be working. Or you could also work out on some predetermined working hours.
• deleted 5y ago
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• shafyy 5y ago
  I really hope that part-time becomes more mainstream in the future. I currently work part-time (4 days a week, although I'd prefer 3) and it's a big change from 5 days a week. I also have a feeling that this is more common in Europe vs. US (not sure if true). Edit to add: I also think that a company gets more than 40% from a person who works 40%. There's a big difference if a smart person doesn't work for you at all or works for you a bit. If that person makes smart decisions it's worth much more than their "linear" work time.
• nurettin 5y ago
  > Why not hire part-time developers? Because they don't show up when your teams need the most interaction. If you have the luxury of giving a developer a six month job which requires absolutely no interaction, great. Go ahead. But your part-timer won't show up at various critical times. Unless they are absolutely dedicated, they will miss weeklies and disappear especially when they release to prod and the bugs start getting reported. And you have no way of penalizing it.
  • rendall 5y ago
    It sounds like you're talking about irresponsible and unreliable engineers, not part-time engineers.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      It depends on what "part-time" means. If part-time means I'll take Fridays off (which are often low meeting days anyway) and will (flexibly) not work 8 hours most days, it may be fine. If it means I'll take several one to two month-long vacations a year, that's something very different. The manner in which you're working less absolutely matters.
      • rendall 5y ago
        Definitely. I think what matters most, to most teams, is a scheduled consistency and regular contributions, whether that's "full time except for winter" or "30% allocation" or "alternating weeks" or whatever.
• pictur 5y ago
  I find it odd that companies see it as more important to be directly there than how much they take advantage of full-time employees. but I guess that's what's useful for them.
• scrapcode 5y ago
  I have been looking for something like this recently in order to get a feel of what it is like to work as a developer on a team. I am knee deep in a stable yet unexciting career in software acquisition, but can’t help to wonder daily if I should pivot for more esteem and self-actualization reasons. I have been developing personal tools/apps/as a ‘hobby’ for most of my life, and also have an undergrad degree in CS with a focus on development, but we all know how these things can differ when it becomes a job. I could love it, I could hate it. It would be great to have access to part-time work, or even non-traditional internship type roles for little money, to not only get an idea of if the industry-as-a-job is for me, but for me and some team to get a better idea of whether or not we’d work well together. I’m stuck in the middle of making enough in my current field to make taking on a junior dev role a large risk for my family, but don’t feel like I have the professional experience to be what anyone is looking for in periodic freelance work. I have even started responding to some recruiters trying to portray this, in case something comes up, but I don’t think that is much in their wheelhouse. I’m open to suggestions if anyone has come across something like this.
  • moffkalast 5y ago
    The company I work at is basically all part-time devs, including myself. There are upsides and downsides with it however. I absolutely love the freedom it offers, since as long as projects have good progress you can work any time, anywhere, take any amount of days off or work any amount of hours you want without having to tell anyone anything. On the other hand there's no paid time off or vacation bonus, your credit rating is non-existent and no bank will lend you anything, it doesn't count towards the pension period, you need to file taxes manually every month, etc. This is in Europe so as you might imagine most of the government systems in place are rigidly designed for the standard full time job which is rather infuriating in most aspects.
• softwarebeware 5y ago
  There’s no way I will ever expect corporations to use their brains. They are a unique example of idiocy. This particular essay calls out only one of their bizarrely stupid ways of functioning.
• charcircuit 5y ago
  Because you are excepted to work 24/7. If you are hired part time you are just being payed less to work the same 24/7 hours.
• adrianmonk 5y ago
  Here are two disadvantages that seem real to me: (1) Turn-around time. If you need a small feature developed and it's going to take a full-time developer 3 weeks from start to finish, how long will it take a developer who works half time? 6 weeks. (2) Team scalability. A lot of people prefer smaller teams of developers because large teams don't seem to scale well. (A team of 10 people usually isn't twice as productive as a team of 5. At least, this is a pretty common view.) If your team has part-time employees, then it will need to have more employees to handle a given workload.
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Sounds like an USA issue, it's quite popular in Europe afaik. Part time developers are generally a niche (mostly by choice, people want to get full time pay), but I know plenty of people who work 3 days per week and many more who work 4 days per week. They mostly do it for work-life balance and to pay less taxes in some backward southern European countries where tax don't make sense (eg. in one country you can make the same money post tax whether you earn 65k or 90k, so contractors try to work up to the 65k limit and work less days). Likewise you can find consultant roles for N days per week relatively easily.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  People do get hired part-time. One of my friends recently got hired for approx $700k/yr 20h/wk.
• efficientsticks 5y ago
  As a senior dev who wants to work part-time for a moderate salary, I can tell you one reason is that recruiters do not want their applicants to end up with a lower salary! This I think explains a large part of why it feels like there’s a status quo inertia in the job market.
• makecheck 5y ago
  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’re accumulating.
  • nefitty 5y ago
    I'd be super down to throw my shoulder into a couple projects at once. It would personally help with some of the exhaustion that happens when focusing on one codebase. It would be a lower risk for organizations and provide a more affordable chunk of value for increasing the quality of their product. 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.
• datavirtue 5y ago
  I just find places where I can work part time for full time pay. Glowing reviews. Just don't bring it up. 10-3 then it's off to the bike trail. My biggest problem is boot licking devs who actually hover in front of their machine for ten hours straight and nag me over chat.
• urthor 5y ago
  I don't see how part-time developers will ever work. As a developer we are not paid for the time in a chair. We're paid to have the "code base, and all the business context" in our brain. Then solve problems. If you're a part time developer, what you're not doing is devoting less time to output. What you're doing is devoting less time to meetings and knowing the codebase. Aka input. And everyone knows, the better you know a codebase, your productivity is logarithmic. As your mental model of your problems improve linearly, your productivity grows exponentially.
  • scarecrowbob 5y ago
    Serious question for you: why stop at 40 hours a week?
    • urthor 5y ago
      I mean, there's quite a lot of famous employers that pay you a lot of money to work more than 40 hours a week no? But also, the nature of education etc means that a mediocre developer who works 70 hours a week, will probably be less effective than a brilliant savant working 20 hours. Usually, instead of paying the mediocre developer to work 80 hours a week, it's cheaper to pay a better developer double, to work 40 hours.
• scarecrowbob 5y ago
  Ive been doing 6-ish hours/day 5ish days/week for the last 6 years. That's really what's kept me at my job. Sometimes it gets really wonky, especially when there is a crunch time. Or, lately I've been cleaning up AWS accounts for other companies and handed unreliable AWS instances that page me at bad hours. I have to be pretty aggressive about counting how much I am working and not working more than what I've agreed to work. But to be honest, I'm quite a bit more productive than some folks at the business (my boss is ostensibly selling my labor for ~$170/hr, at least). I'm pretty sure if my boss wanted to raise my pay by 30% to bring me up to 40h, I wouldn't be 30% more productive. I'm occasionally not stoked on things like how much vacation time I get or my pay in general (it's low for my position, but high is you account for the reduced hours). But on the whole, I do so much other crap in my life that I really don;t wanna sell another 10h of my time a week. And holy hell I never want to work in an office that doesn't have a mixing console and a bunch of vintage mics.
• PeneDiabolico 5y ago
  I've noticed something similar the past few years. For context, through highschool I interned as a software developer and was hired full-time during my gap year. Now, I'm studying a bachelor's in Computer Science in a foreign country and my visa only allows part-time work. I've been offered full-time positions and I have to decline because I don't feel like getting deported. I hardly see part-time positions. I constantly apply to new positions, mention my work limits, and contact recruiters but no luck yet. It's disheartening to work retail when I could be working in software development improving my skills and with less financial stress.
• lwhi 5y ago
  I've worked part time before, and it has worked .. but I think the key thing that has allowed it to work is being open to flexibility. I will shift my days / hours if necessary. I'm able to request they shift if need be too.
• ryanSrich 5y ago
  I’ve been hiring part time developers with great success for the last 2 years. I have people working anywhere from 10 to 40 hours per week. It’s certainly not without issues, but they’re all solvable. If anyone has questions, or wants to be added to my future hire list, feel free to email me (in bio). Or drop questions below.
• asdff 5y ago
  I'm honestly surprised at the amount of pushback against part time work in this thread. When you hire a consultant or contract labor, isn't that basically what you are doing? Bringing in part time labor? I think a lot of the complaints about it not scaling well (need to pay for two healthcare plans for two part time employees vs 1 full time, etc) also don't make any sense. Isn't money fungible? Who cares who exactly is in charge of the chunk of money that gets spent on healthcare for the employee at the time? Just pay people in cash just like you would another small business you are contracting with, and let the employee use a portion of that cash flow to pay for their healthcare and other benefits programs, just like what happens with the small business you contract with. The rate they quote you to pay them should therefore be including both the cost of their labor and their overhead. In other words, treat these employees like independent small businesses, and all the hand wringing and consternation should just melt away. And who knows, maybe these employees will really run with this small business consultancy model and build and expand their business in their own right.
  • GauntletWizard 5y ago
    A lot of consulting is done for 1-3 month sprints. It's often (neither always or for all people, but for many people much of the time) a lot mentally easier to work full time on a project for a month to six than to work for 20 hours a week on a project all of the time. I'm a full time part time consultant and try to arrange my schedule for weeks at at time with individual customers, even if I do some small work as hours at a time.
• Supersam654 5y ago
  Something that I haven't seen discussed (on HN or elsewhere) is normalizing longer workweeks for more pay. I understand there are many life circumstances that would make a shorter workweek desirable but there are also some circumstances that would make a normal 50- or 60-hour workweek desirable too (early retirement is the big one that comes to mind for me). Can anyone here speak to hiring or being hired with the explicit agreement of working longer weeks for more money? I realize that crunch weeks and overwork happen too but that's not really what I'm thinking of.
• lmeyerov 5y ago
  If you are into webgl / js perf, we actually have an opening that would work well for this. We'd love full-time, but part-time for a long time is great too: build@graphistry.c*m . The project is encapsulated and multi-phase, so low meeting overhead etc. More about steady deep progress and occasional performance brainstorming vs day-to-day close collaboration more typical of our product layer work. Likewise, we are a global remote team uses to OSS async practices, so more about for whoever hacking on the next gen of a large-scale data viz rendering engine would be fun.
• catsarebetter 5y ago
  This is... not a very balanced perspective. Most engs I know are happy with their jobs or will career switch, very few are trying to start businesses. I personally agree with most of the article but I know that's not a super common response to these values. Could you provide some data?
• raz32dust 5y ago
  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.
• jbmsf 5y ago
  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.)
• vippy 5y ago
• liquidcool 5y ago
  I almost responded without reading the article, assuming he was talking about moonlighters. Meaning hiring developers who have already put in 40 hours somewhere else. Many responding here seem to be making the same assumption. That's always been a disaster (as the employer). 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.
• gyulai 5y ago
  Maybe companies are afraid of handing too much bargaining power to the employee: 20hr weeks basically mean you can get a whole second 20hr job. After a while of truly getting to know both jobs, you will likely leave the worse one. You could do this iteratively. (Use the 20hrs that you just freed up to find yet another job, then quit the worse one again; rinse and repeat until you have a truly great job). 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.
  • tobylane 5y ago
    On your last paragraph: It would be the people who failed at, or weren’t interested in, entrepreneurship. That might be like minded people, who just want the challenge of the job and not the company. It could be full of people who want to climb the ladder you describe but not jump to the next one.
    • gyulai 5y ago
      That's why I set up the thought experiment, somewhat unnaturally, by saying: Assume that this is what everyone's secret motivation is... But I perfectly agree, that the motives could be completely non-threatening. For example, if your company is all family-minded people who just want 20hr jobs so they can spend the rest with their families, then there is no real negative selection effect. But the human psyche is hard-wired to focus on threats over opportunities, and I can see how these sorts of threats weigh in heavily in managers' decision making.
• tobyhinloopen 5y ago
  Having worked with contractors, part time contractors only work if they’re working on actionable tasks and don’t require much creativity. Well documented issues which require a well defined set of changes in code.
• midjji 5y ago
  I think part of it is overhead and parts of it is cultural, basically people dont think people who are looking for part time work are serious about that work, or that they already have some other job. Buddy of mine has been wanting to work part time for more than a decade, getting shitty jobs and ofting having to switch, or accept jobs that were full time etc. But after his first kid employeers were suddenly much more willing to take someone part time, its kinda the effective case for new parents anyways, and no one wondered about if he had a second job anymore. I dont think thats why hes had two kids in a row, but he seems very happy with it. Its not really a long term solution, and studies have long shown that kids, in particular with you as a primary caregiver, has along term negative effect on career and salary, but so does part time work. And it might be a long term solution if your kid has extra needs. Though just saying that is probably alot healthier than munchhausen by proxy^^
• finchisko 5y ago
  I would never hire part-time developer once again. I did once and burned heavily. That guy had own startup. For few months it worked to some degree (because he was hungry for cash). But afterwhile, his mind and focus was back to his own startup. Hi performance dropped significantly and he just use us to fund his business and used our hardware to test his app.
• dataduck 5y ago
  As much as I would love to work part-time, there's a good reason for a company to avoid this: co-ordination costs scale quadratically. Yes, good management practices can help mitigate this, but I'm sure we're all aware of how adding extra people to a team doesn't scale its productivity proportionally, and I'm convinced this is at least part of the picture. That said, if the co-ordination costs are not prohibitive and such an arrangement allows you to get better talent than you'd otherwise have access to, it might still be a good deal. For a small team that needs a small amount of high-level expertise, but doesn't have enough for such a person to do all day, this could be the best option.
• Meph504 5y ago
  I think hiring part time developers is a horrible idea for anything not proof of concept or minimum viable. I've seen it time and time again over 20 years, and the results are pretty similar to outsourcing. 1) people don't account for all activities that aren't programming and far underestimate how much of those things take up crazy amounts of time. 2) part time generally has little to no vested interest, and generally aren't concerned with the long term prospects of employment (and I don't blame them) I feel bad for the author of the article, if he is foolish enough to stick around a job they don't like in this climate, they are suffering for no reason. and failing to gain the experience and knowledge that will carry them through the rest of their career. There is a difference in someone with 5 years of experience, and someone who has done the same first year experience over and over for 5 years. And that usually comes across pretty strongly during the interview process. And their tactics seem like a great way to struggle to find advanced positions later in life.
• Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  > Let me throw one more gripe into the mix: with all of the mentioned above, a lot of us don’t want to, or can’t work full-time. None of us even work full-time as it is, considering that most engineers only have about 4 hours of productive energy each day, unless they’re utterly obsessed with a project or pumped full of stimulants. Even then, going over that limit often causes more problems than it fixes. This is a hard pill to swallow for managers, but maybe this is what being a full time developer really is all about? 4 hours of real work and 4 hours of just loafing around? Forcing oneself to write more code just leads to bloated software. And not doing it while fretting over not giving the employer their money's worth for the last 4 hours is only going to increase stress and hurt performance for the first 4. Maybe instead going for a walk, taking a nap or chatting with other developers is just as much part of what's "real work" for a developer. > When I’m building my own projects, this is great. I simply stop and pick it up again the next day. By being disciplined in putting in the work each day, and not overdoing it, I end up architecting solutions that are simple and elegant. This is exactly what the industry needs. Paying for 40 hours and only getting 20 quality hours in front of the computer is probably more profitable for the company in the long run than demanding the full 40 and getting a lot of convoluted garbage.
  • DerArzt 5y ago
    A good balance that I have been trying to achieve is working my tickets, and when I start to really feel drained from that in the day I take a break. This break, can be a short walk, or a longer "study session" in which I crack open the technical book that I am working through at the moment (just finished the Pragmatic Programmer). Some folks may call the study session slacking, but I have made it a point to work in places that say they want that sort of self directed growth, so I don't sweat it.
• ListeningPie 5y ago
  This blog is about 2 weeks old. Is it just a really good title or some other force to get so much attention in such a short amount of time?
• pjmlp 5y ago
  I once worked on a project that the tasks were budget by ticket and given to a pool of contractors. You really don't want to work on such kind of source code.
• 0_zymandias 5y ago
  In a prior gig I was fortunate enough to work for an organization that graciously accommodated my wishes to reduce my hours - dropping to an 80% schedule (4dx8h) which I was able to further scale back to 60% schedule (4dx6h) schedule. I really wanted to try a 3dx8h schedule but this was an ask too far for them - the 4 days off per week I was hoping for (yes spoiled me!) would be too much of a gap to work around for my team, which made sense. To be truthful, I could've shrunk my time down to 10h per week and I still would have wanted fewer hours - and this was at a place where the team was 100% remote, the tech work fairly interesting and the work very impactful! But I'd been doing software dev for so long (> 30 years) up to that point, mostly in startup environments, and I was clearly burned out on it. So no optimizing of my work schedule would ever make me feel great, so I ultimately left. During my 60% schedule stint, I believe I was easily better than 60% as productive as I was when I was FT - I was better rested and focused. I did find it much more difficult to stop working after 6h due to conditioning and maybe to prove my value despite the shorter hours and also I'm a bit of workaholic (hence the burnout). It was much easier to unhook on the days I wasn't working because I didn't need the discipline to stop what I was doing at an earlier time - I never got started on those days so it was a non-issue! Anyways, just a reminder that if you can get a part-time schedule, it's not always easy to stick to the part-time hours - takes more discipline than I had. Peevish aside: There can be some trickiness when it comes to factoring in vacation time and holidays for part-time salaried work, most notably if the scheduled workdays are less than 8 hours, like I was doing with my 60% schedule of 4dx6h per week. The HR system used by the organization granted a certain number of vacation days per year, which is pretty standard. For example, the org may have granted say 20 vacation days per year. Then I'd be granted 60% of that or 12 vacation days instead - fair enough. But _technically_ my working days were 6h long, so whereas FT devs would get the equivalent of 160h of vacation, I'd get 72h of vacation which isn't 60% (96h of vacation would be 60%, or what amounts to 12 of my 6h workdays). I know "poor baby", ha! Anyways, it didn't matter enough to me to address the discrepancy as I was happy and super appreciative just to have a salaried 60% part-time job with full benefits. Probably should have my head examined for leaving that, but burnout is real and stuff was getting kinda weird there ...
• alrofinn777 5y ago
  This has been a great read and it’s a real comfort to see what other people have gone through and that I’m not going mad. I believe my ex has been emotionally abusing me to the point where I have now been diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. After years of me apologising re our break up we were back seeing each other again only for me to find out he was seeing other woman at the same time. When I confronted them and him he made me feel like I was psycho and manipulative. I have explained to him why all this hurts me. I have finally told him about my depression and I honestly thought he would have supported me but instead he is giving me the silent treatment when he knows how hurtful I find this. I know I need to move on but I’m finding it very hard so l had to hire an ethical hacker who help me hack his phone then l discovered he’s a filty liar.I am so grateful for the job done by the ethical hacker. you can contact them also via : Kelvinethicalhacker@gmail.com Text,call or whatsapp on: +1(341)465-4599. Gfg