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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

by 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.
- learc83 5y ago
  I’ve always been able to successfully negotiate those IP ownership clauses. Usually without any hassle at all.
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    US person detected. Good luck negotiating any terms in Europe. Not happening.
    - 6345dhjdsf 5y ago
      Brit here. Garbage. I have simply told the mixed US/UK company I worked for that they had no rights over a personal project of mine and they were cool with that. By your dismissive, failure-assured attitude I can guess that you've never tried.
      - lupire 5y ago
        > Brit here. OK > Garbage. Hmm...
        ricardobayes 5y ago
        "Litter"
    - msh 5y ago
      Europa is a big place and how things like this work varies a lot.
    - iarenaza 5y ago
      Spaniard here. Definitely negotiated IP terms for my current contract :-)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - jokethrowaway 5y ago
hash872 5y ago
As someone who's hired part-time developers off and on for years.... the issue is that they typically start out working the agreed-upon number of hours, then begin to work less & less over time. There's no feasible way to make someone work more hours remotely, and they're usually sharp enough to get partway into a project before flaking out so that it's difficult to just replace them- you'd have to hire an entirely new developer to understand what they've done to date. From the developers' point of view I think they're just constantly looking for new work, better-paying work, or at least lining up a project for the future- then they get overloaded and choose to flake out on the client. In theory hiring freelancers part-time should be a great solution for everyone involved, in practice the issue is flakiness
- throwaway98727 5y ago
  More money per hour is a buffer for finding work after your project ends.
- prohobo 5y ago
  I agree this is a real problem for freelancers, but for part-time employees? It might be that someone needs to make a better system for remote work that gives some options for enforcement.
- mooreds 5y ago
  How is this different than a full time employee who starts to slack off? Or is your point that part time employees are more likely to slack off because they are looking for other work/have other responsibilities that take precedence? Because I've definitely seen my share of fulltime employees who slacked pretty darn hard.
  - kradeelav 5y ago
    Not OP, but there's more tools managers have to guide slacking IC's back in line when they're full time. Loyalty to coworkers/"company culture", easier to discipline if it goes on the official performance review, more of an "official" paper trail available versus contractors and part time who may be hired even by a third party agency. Part time / contractors are sometimes, not always, but sometimes in general lower quality as far as work ethic goes.
vincentmarle 5y ago
> 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. The secret is to take a full time job and then only work 20-30 hours a week. Pre-pandemic I was only really productive 4 hours a day anyways, but I had to sit in an office the entire day. With remote work, it’s much easier to do “full-time” work.
- throwaway98727 5y ago
  At most companies you get full benefits at 30 hours a week.
  - rhodysurf 5y ago
    I think their comment went over your head
- ghaff 5y ago
  Totally. Circumstances differ of course. How efficient are you? What's the overall workload? To what degree can you work asynchronously? But working remotely, the reality is that at least some people can get off without working a 9-5 day so long as they are at least somewhat available during the workday.
AQuantized 5y ago
The way many people I've known seem to achieve flexibility is to accept a role somewhere relatively laid back, typically at a large but non-tech corporation. If they're coming from a much more intense environment and working remotely, it often requires only a couple of hours work a day to over perform, if that. It seems like it's almost impossible to get a role that's explicitly part time (as you've experienced) but plenty of companies are willing to offer lower salaries while turning a blind eye to enforcing the supposedly 40 hour work week. The other ways seem to involve some combination of working for yourself, consulting, and short periods of full time employment interspersed with not formally working.
- lupire 5y ago
  How do you in advance if it's relatively laid back?
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    You don’t. You’re taking the laid back job for the flexibility. If you want to make lots of money and climb the dev ladder, you work for startups or giant corps offering RSUs
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    If you're explicitly looking for part time you're probably not looking to advance too. It's kinda either/or
kube-system 5y ago
In my experience, tech consulting firms are very friendly to contracting arrangements. They tend not to be stuck in a “butts in seats” culture because of how they operate with their customers.
- dvtrn 5y ago
  I've long suspected this. Question for anyone who wants to take a stab at it: how, as someone wanting an 'in' to the consulting world, to best find and separate companies that are actual consulting firms and not just burn-and-churn MSP shops that carefully and sometimes convincingly disguise themself as such?
  - kube-system 5y ago
    In my opinion, I would ask three things: 1. Ask about the makeup of a typical team. The more layers of bloat and regurgitation between the customer and the developer, the more likelihood that the people doing the actual work need a high degree of hand-holding. 2. Ask about their overall approach to customer success, and specifically, what they do before they start development. Good quality consulting firms will have entirely separate non-development projects focusing on fully understanding the problem space before they ever start development. If their customers just throw software requirements on their desk and ask work to start tomorrow, they’re probably not competing on premium quality solutions. 3. Ask about how (or if) the development team works cross-functionally with the customers’ business teams. Burn-and-churn shops will hide their developers from their customers. High performing teams may send a developer solo on a flight to a customer site.
    - dvtrn 5y ago
      Excellent feedback, thank you!
  - nunez 5y ago
    Finally something I can answer! I've been doing tech consulting for over six years now. - Straight up ask them if they're an MSP, lol. MSP isn't a bad business at all; I highly recommend it for juniors needing an in or people who want a lot of exposure to a lot of companies simultaneously. But you don't want MSP work. - Avoid avoid AVOID WITCH companies (Wipro, Infosys, Tata/TCS, Cognizant, HCL). While they have _some_ A-team strategic work, the lion's share of their business is butts in seats labor arbitrage. - Also avoid WITCH-adjacent companies (Teksystems et al). Same reason. - Do a LinkedIn deep dive. If a majority of the company's employees work in an offshore location, they are more than likely butts in seats. This isn't always the case, but it's generally safe to assume so. If you're really interested in what they've got going on, bring it up in the interview and turn your bullshit meter to 11. - This gets a little tricky for big tech shops, though (Red Hat, IBM, Accenture). They have a lot of butts-in-seats stuff, but they also have a lot of very interesting, very high-impact projects. There are ways to monitor what you're being considered for during the interview process; see below. - Ask about some engagements they've done (client names don't matter), generally ones they are proud of. Ask about how those projects were structured, the number of people involved, and the objectives. Huge implementation projects usually have a high BIS factor, but some consulting companies charge through the roof for onshore consulting with an emphasis on high-quality software craftsmanship. This usually comes out in the interview; the interviewer mentioning xDD, hard 40 hour limits, and first principles is a good sign. - Ask them "in your opinion, what's the ratio of staff augmentation to strategic work at this firm?" BIS work is called "staff augmentation" or "staff aug." Not all staff aug is BIS (some better firms take staff aug since it's much easier to sell than strategy but the consultants assigned to those still have autonomy, i.e. they can roll of when they've had enough/they can contest decisions with support of their engagement team/etc), but a high ratio of staff aug to strategy work smells like high BIS. - The technical interview should be focused on your thought process and experience. "Tell me how you designed this system/explain this decision/if I changed x, what would happen" are some questions that should come up. If they are asking you very-specific trivia (what command would you run to do x/what is the name of y component that does z), then expect a high BIS factor.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hetspookjee 5y ago
I believe a large part is also due to the incentives of recruiters and how they is structured. Most recruiters take a fee that depends on the hours put in or a percentage of the total contract, or a mix. Surely some exceptions exist but I believe most are incentivised to only go for atleast 32 hours to make it worth the effort, and thus don’t bother eating a potential 40 hour contract on a smaller 16 hour one. I see the flawed logic but I’ve asked around a ton already and it’s always no while I know the market is there when I’m already inside. I just haven’t met the right clients I guess.
- lupire 5y ago
  Not really. Yes they will push for more, but by far the most important factor in sales income is number of deals closed, not +30% deal size.
x0x0 5y ago
If you think your job as an engineer is to write code, then sure -- part time makes sense. If you think your job as an engineer is to build a solution as a team, then one person hopping in and out of availability creates a hassle for an entire team. Can't have project meetings on Mon / Fri because X is never there. If a project with involvement by a part timer isn't done by eod Thursday, a fulltime person has 2 dead work days until the part time person shows up again. etc etc.
- bonniemuffin 5y ago
  I agree that someone working fewer days per week might be hard to fit into a full-time team culture, but someone working fewer hours per day ought to be pretty easy. For the "fewer hours per day" case, it's just like working across different time zones, which many companies are already well-acclimated to doing -- e.g. you need to schedule all your meetings with this person in the morning because their 5pm is at our 11am.
  - x0x0 5y ago
    Not easy at all if you have remote workers. Someone from EST works 9am-1pm; someone from PST starts work at 9:30am. Daily overlap: 30 minutes. Yes it could be solved if you want to define core hours in the middle of the day, but I suspect people who want half time work don't view working in the middle of the day every day as the point of the exercise.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  But this is great. If your company culture doesn’t depend on everyone always being there, it has a million benefits unrelated to productivity. Working becomes so much more relaxing.
  - lupire 5y ago
    But also less profitable per hour. Doing "line" work where you have no unique contribution means you have less negotiating power and so get paid less.
ricardobayes 5y ago
I experienced the same. I asked an acquaintance who runs a 1000+ dev company, why is it so difficult for devs to find part-time jobs. He replied that he had thought only admin staff could do that, he found the concept weird. Very much in line with "this is how it works" as the article mentioned.
- lupire 5y ago
  How did this person come to run the business?
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    Had some academic ties and some project was spun-off. But it was a long time ago, when C++ was the shiny new thing. How I understood the business grew naturally from 3 people to 1000+ today.
aerosmile 5y ago
There are a lot of things in this world that are not rooted in rational/pragmatic concerns. For example, in the automotive industry, a lot of the margin comes from upper-end variants of any given model, which are perhaps 10% more capable as the base model but cost disproportionally more and are a lot more desirable. Why do people go for that? Emotional reasons. Are the $2,000 vintage Nikes worth that much, especially if you end up actually wearing them? Depends on if you're deciding on a rational or emotional basis. A lot of this translates to the work environment. Someone making $300k might feel exceptionally rewarded for their work, until they find out that their peer makes $320k. Suddenly that $300k no longer looks that desirable anymore. Call it an innate quest for justice, call it culture shock, call it whatever you want - if you cannot see why your individual arrangement might produce a net negative result for the rest of the company, then you're ignoring the reality. You just have to implement certain rules and treat everyone the same. You're either a full-time company, or you're a part-time company. You're either an on-site company, or you're a remote company. If you allow hybrid, you have to allow it for everyone. And if one person gets to work 20 hours a week, then it needs to be a 0-friction process for everyone else to transition to the same arrangement if they so desire. From a staffing point of view, that last part is an absolute managerial nightmare ("sorry, the project will be pushed back by 12 months because all of our engineers decided to move to part-time, and we cannot hire new engineers, because the existing staff may also move back to full-time at any given point"). There is, however, a solution for you - just work for extremely well-funded early-stage startups, because their CEOs will be more than glad to rock the boat internally in exchange for your skills and experience that they would be otherwise struggling to find in a full-time hire. By the time that startup scales and their CEO starts thinking about culture and retention, you'll be off to the next boat that you can rock as hard you'd like.
- kuboble 5y ago
  In Switzerland it is extremely popular to work part-time in IT. To the point that most men I know have reduced to 4/5 when they became parents and most women to 3/5. The deal in companies is that it's relatively easy to reduce your work % but it's a one way street. To get back your manager needs to find a budget the same way as if they were hiring (but I don't know anyone who did want to increase it back). Seems to work well.
wadefletch 5y ago
When you say you made yourself available, what does that mean in practice? Targeted network outreach? A LinkedIn post?
ghaff 5y ago
I do think a lot of it is "tradition" for lack of a better word. That aside--and knowing some part-time contractors (not in technical roles)--a few things. 1.) A significant percentage of cost per employee to a company is benefits. So work half-time and the breakeven to the company is probably something like 1/3 pay if you get full-time benefits. 2.) The above doesn't even count that there are a lot of other overheads (management, coordination/meetings/collaboration) to having more people doing the same work. 3.) It depends what part-time means. Many of us might be OK with 4-day workweeks or shorter days--though to some degree those may be possible in practice today with the appropriate workload and degree of synchronicity. However, if your preference is to take month+ blocks of time off on a regular basis, that's much more difficult to accommodate. (And, if you unplug during those times you lose a lot of context. Earlier in my career, I did take month long vacations now and then but it's hard to norm as a regular thing for lots of good practical reasons.)
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
Most of my consulting has been full-time but I have had a few part time - generally these are in: 1. not in demand fields but fields that for some reason are momentarily needed by the company. 2. fields the company hopes to teach someone else to handle. 3. using technology that the company wants to move off of because they don't have anyone that knows it anymore. Those fields - Accessibility (achieving WCAG 1.0 conformance), XSL-T - had an xml + xsl-t generating website, team is rebuilding to React and know nothing about the old tech, DSSL stylesheets that needed to be moved to XSL-FO. I also nearly had a part time JQuery maintenance 2 month project about a year and a half ago. My suspicion, if it's an in-demand field people want you full time, that stuff is IN DEMAND after all.
yibg 5y ago
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 dev only has 10 hours. So 2 half time dev just doesn’t get as much done as 1 full time. I guess this is also why 2 engineers don’t get twice as much done as 1, all things being equal. 2) Most part time dev candidates I’ve seen aren’t doing just a single part time job, they are doing either multiple part time jobs or a full time job + part time job. Either way the mental energy is already gone. Maybe there is a way to make part time work, I just haven’t figured it out yet.
- ozim 5y ago
  Yeah that 2nd point is that quite often people need "full time salary" so it is not that management somehow has backwards thinking. I have a friend that can really work 4 hours a day, but he is a special case where he does not have a family to upkeep and no mortgage. He is also a bit hard on the frugality. But finding such person is basically 1 in a million. If I post a job with 4h a day which amounts to 1/2 of a normal salary I will probably never get a candidate. If I post a job with normal salary and then start explaining that it is 1/2 hours and accordingly paid, some people will get angry.
  - jpindar 5y ago
    I can live quite comfortably on half a typical salary, and I'm available.
  - mberger 5y ago
    I'm in the same situation as your friend and I know of at least 3 others in my friend circle. I don't think part time availability is as low as you think.
  - yibg 5y ago
    The other problem is with overhead 2 half time employees != 1 full time employee. There is the extra equipment cost, benefits (perhaps), management overhead etc. e.g. If I replace a team of 7 full time engineers with 14 half time engineers, do I keep 1 manager? That seems like a very large team for 1 person to handle, so now maybe I need another manager too. From a purely economic perspective hiring half time engineers at half the comp just doesn't seem to make sense. You can argue that half time engineers are more than half as productive as a full time engineer because as others have said full time engineers don't work a full 8 hours anyways. While theoretically that's true, as I originally posted, that's not what I've seen. Based on my anecdotal experience, half time engineers are less than half as productive as a full time engineer. So from both a productivity and economic perspective, it hasn't made sense.
wpietri 5y ago
As a developer, I agree there's a cultural issue, but think there are pragmatic issues. I have done both part-time consulting and part-time contract development. Pure consulting (when one's output is advice) is doable part time, because you're not a blocker and generally don't have to keep up with the day to day. But I would only do part-time contract development under pretty specific circumstances: 1) I'm the only dev on the project (or at least I know the other devs really well), 2) I am not on the critical path for anything urgent, 3) the organization can sustain an interest in the work (and therefore in paying me) despite it not being urgent. For example, I knew somebody who needed a discrete service, a PDF form-filler, replaced. The old version was a pain operationally and I think it was built on EOLed tech in a language the team didn't know. That was a fine part-time project because the existing thing worked tolerably well; I was just cleaning up a mess that bothered them. I'd feel the same about, say, tech debt cleanup. Or quick, throwaway prototyping. But in general, software is a team sport, a collective intellectual work that requires a high level of coordination between both devs and many others. I don't want to be part time on a team of well-meshed full-timers because the overhead of keeping track of the team's progress is fixed. I'd have to spend a notable percentage of my time keeping up, and I'll be adding to the coordination burden of the team despite not contributing as much, so my net ROI is lower. I'd hate it. That said, I'd be interested to see a project that's, say, all 4-day-a-week people. Maybe even people who work 6 hours a day, 4 days a week. I could imagine that working pretty well while still being enough to keep stakeholders satisfied.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
  Even your pragmatic issues have a strong cultural component. There are quite a few important projects that on my team that we could afford to have take 20% longer. It's more important they have a good result than they arrive as soon as possible. We also have some projects we need done ASAP, which would naturally fall to a full-timer.
  - twblalock 5y ago
    So, it makes sense to hire part-time people when the timelines can slip and they aren't on the critical path? That's not a very good sales pitch.
AmericanBlarney 5y ago
The bigger issue I've seen is that there's a relatively fixed amount of time required for overhead activities (e.g. compliance training) and context sharing (meetings). Purely hypothetically, if those sorts of activities eat up 10 hours a week, then a full time developer gets 30 productive hours, whereas a half time developer only gets 10. You might think there's room to cut down on overhead, and you might be right, but when the majority of employees are full-time, it may not be the most pressing issue to change.
brightball 5y ago
I’ve done part time and managed somebody doing part time. The biggest issue is that you have everybody else not tracking hours at all, just thinking about the work that needs to be done and one person who is militantly tracking hours to ensure that the exit the moment the clock hits the hours limit. It gets weird on a team of full timers if the part time person is expected to interact with the full timers at all, especially if they are all working and need to communicate with the person but they are out. Believe me, I sympathize though. It does create a strange dynamic though.
Thorrez 5y ago
itslennysfault 5y ago
Maybe try working through an agency? I'm in a similar boat, and I've been doing part-time work through Toptal. You certainly get more opportunities if you're full time, but I've been able to steadily get 10-20 hours a week at a rate that would come out around $300k if I was working full time. For me that is plenty to live comfortably and I'm able to choose to have more free time and not feel "owned" by a full time salary position that would likely be more like 60 hours a week of my time.

by qrohlf 5y ago

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.

learc83 5y ago
I’ve always been able to successfully negotiate those IP ownership clauses. Usually without any hassle at all.
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  US person detected. Good luck negotiating any terms in Europe. Not happening.
  - 6345dhjdsf 5y ago
    Brit here. Garbage. I have simply told the mixed US/UK company I worked for that they had no rights over a personal project of mine and they were cool with that. By your dismissive, failure-assured attitude I can guess that you've never tried.
    - lupire 5y ago
      > Brit here. OK > Garbage. Hmm...
      - ricardobayes 5y ago
        "Litter"
  - msh 5y ago
    Europa is a big place and how things like this work varies a lot.
  - iarenaza 5y ago
    Spaniard here. Definitely negotiated IP terms for my current contract :-)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago

hash872 5y ago

As someone who's hired part-time developers off and on for years.... the issue is that they typically start out working the agreed-upon number of hours, then begin to work less & less over time. There's no feasible way to make someone work more hours remotely, and they're usually sharp enough to get partway into a project before flaking out so that it's difficult to just replace them- you'd have to hire an entirely new developer to understand what they've done to date. From the developers' point of view I think they're just constantly looking for new work, better-paying work, or at least lining up a project for the future- then they get overloaded and choose to flake out on the client. In theory hiring freelancers part-time should be a great solution for everyone involved, in practice the issue is flakiness

throwaway98727 5y ago
More money per hour is a buffer for finding work after your project ends.
prohobo 5y ago
I agree this is a real problem for freelancers, but for part-time employees? It might be that someone needs to make a better system for remote work that gives some options for enforcement.
mooreds 5y ago
How is this different than a full time employee who starts to slack off? Or is your point that part time employees are more likely to slack off because they are looking for other work/have other responsibilities that take precedence? Because I've definitely seen my share of fulltime employees who slacked pretty darn hard.
- kradeelav 5y ago
  Not OP, but there's more tools managers have to guide slacking IC's back in line when they're full time. Loyalty to coworkers/"company culture", easier to discipline if it goes on the official performance review, more of an "official" paper trail available versus contractors and part time who may be hired even by a third party agency. Part time / contractors are sometimes, not always, but sometimes in general lower quality as far as work ethic goes.

vincentmarle 5y ago

> 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. The secret is to take a full time job and then only work 20-30 hours a week. Pre-pandemic I was only really productive 4 hours a day anyways, but I had to sit in an office the entire day. With remote work, it’s much easier to do “full-time” work.

throwaway98727 5y ago
At most companies you get full benefits at 30 hours a week.
- rhodysurf 5y ago
  I think their comment went over your head
ghaff 5y ago
Totally. Circumstances differ of course. How efficient are you? What's the overall workload? To what degree can you work asynchronously? But working remotely, the reality is that at least some people can get off without working a 9-5 day so long as they are at least somewhat available during the workday.

AQuantized 5y ago

The way many people I've known seem to achieve flexibility is to accept a role somewhere relatively laid back, typically at a large but non-tech corporation. If they're coming from a much more intense environment and working remotely, it often requires only a couple of hours work a day to over perform, if that. It seems like it's almost impossible to get a role that's explicitly part time (as you've experienced) but plenty of companies are willing to offer lower salaries while turning a blind eye to enforcing the supposedly 40 hour work week. The other ways seem to involve some combination of working for yourself, consulting, and short periods of full time employment interspersed with not formally working.

lupire 5y ago
How do you in advance if it's relatively laid back?
- yurishimo 5y ago
  You don’t. You’re taking the laid back job for the flexibility. If you want to make lots of money and climb the dev ladder, you work for startups or giant corps offering RSUs
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  If you're explicitly looking for part time you're probably not looking to advance too. It's kinda either/or

kube-system 5y ago

In my experience, tech consulting firms are very friendly to contracting arrangements. They tend not to be stuck in a “butts in seats” culture because of how they operate with their customers.

dvtrn 5y ago
I've long suspected this. Question for anyone who wants to take a stab at it: how, as someone wanting an 'in' to the consulting world, to best find and separate companies that are actual consulting firms and not just burn-and-churn MSP shops that carefully and sometimes convincingly disguise themself as such?
- kube-system 5y ago
  In my opinion, I would ask three things: 1. Ask about the makeup of a typical team. The more layers of bloat and regurgitation between the customer and the developer, the more likelihood that the people doing the actual work need a high degree of hand-holding. 2. Ask about their overall approach to customer success, and specifically, what they do before they start development. Good quality consulting firms will have entirely separate non-development projects focusing on fully understanding the problem space before they ever start development. If their customers just throw software requirements on their desk and ask work to start tomorrow, they’re probably not competing on premium quality solutions. 3. Ask about how (or if) the development team works cross-functionally with the customers’ business teams. Burn-and-churn shops will hide their developers from their customers. High performing teams may send a developer solo on a flight to a customer site.
  - dvtrn 5y ago
    Excellent feedback, thank you!
- nunez 5y ago
  Finally something I can answer! I've been doing tech consulting for over six years now. - Straight up ask them if they're an MSP, lol. MSP isn't a bad business at all; I highly recommend it for juniors needing an in or people who want a lot of exposure to a lot of companies simultaneously. But you don't want MSP work. - Avoid avoid AVOID WITCH companies (Wipro, Infosys, Tata/TCS, Cognizant, HCL). While they have _some_ A-team strategic work, the lion's share of their business is butts in seats labor arbitrage. - Also avoid WITCH-adjacent companies (Teksystems et al). Same reason. - Do a LinkedIn deep dive. If a majority of the company's employees work in an offshore location, they are more than likely butts in seats. This isn't always the case, but it's generally safe to assume so. If you're really interested in what they've got going on, bring it up in the interview and turn your bullshit meter to 11. - This gets a little tricky for big tech shops, though (Red Hat, IBM, Accenture). They have a lot of butts-in-seats stuff, but they also have a lot of very interesting, very high-impact projects. There are ways to monitor what you're being considered for during the interview process; see below. - Ask about some engagements they've done (client names don't matter), generally ones they are proud of. Ask about how those projects were structured, the number of people involved, and the objectives. Huge implementation projects usually have a high BIS factor, but some consulting companies charge through the roof for onshore consulting with an emphasis on high-quality software craftsmanship. This usually comes out in the interview; the interviewer mentioning xDD, hard 40 hour limits, and first principles is a good sign. - Ask them "in your opinion, what's the ratio of staff augmentation to strategic work at this firm?" BIS work is called "staff augmentation" or "staff aug." Not all staff aug is BIS (some better firms take staff aug since it's much easier to sell than strategy but the consultants assigned to those still have autonomy, i.e. they can roll of when they've had enough/they can contest decisions with support of their engagement team/etc), but a high ratio of staff aug to strategy work smells like high BIS. - The technical interview should be focused on your thought process and experience. "Tell me how you designed this system/explain this decision/if I changed x, what would happen" are some questions that should come up. If they are asking you very-specific trivia (what command would you run to do x/what is the name of y component that does z), then expect a high BIS factor.

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hetspookjee 5y ago

I believe a large part is also due to the incentives of recruiters and how they is structured. Most recruiters take a fee that depends on the hours put in or a percentage of the total contract, or a mix. Surely some exceptions exist but I believe most are incentivised to only go for atleast 32 hours to make it worth the effort, and thus don’t bother eating a potential 40 hour contract on a smaller 16 hour one. I see the flawed logic but I’ve asked around a ton already and it’s always no while I know the market is there when I’m already inside. I just haven’t met the right clients I guess.

lupire 5y ago
Not really. Yes they will push for more, but by far the most important factor in sales income is number of deals closed, not +30% deal size.

x0x0 5y ago

If you think your job as an engineer is to write code, then sure -- part time makes sense. If you think your job as an engineer is to build a solution as a team, then one person hopping in and out of availability creates a hassle for an entire team. Can't have project meetings on Mon / Fri because X is never there. If a project with involvement by a part timer isn't done by eod Thursday, a fulltime person has 2 dead work days until the part time person shows up again. etc etc.

bonniemuffin 5y ago
I agree that someone working fewer days per week might be hard to fit into a full-time team culture, but someone working fewer hours per day ought to be pretty easy. For the "fewer hours per day" case, it's just like working across different time zones, which many companies are already well-acclimated to doing -- e.g. you need to schedule all your meetings with this person in the morning because their 5pm is at our 11am.
- x0x0 5y ago
  Not easy at all if you have remote workers. Someone from EST works 9am-1pm; someone from PST starts work at 9:30am. Daily overlap: 30 minutes. Yes it could be solved if you want to define core hours in the middle of the day, but I suspect people who want half time work don't view working in the middle of the day every day as the point of the exercise.
Aeolun 5y ago
But this is great. If your company culture doesn’t depend on everyone always being there, it has a million benefits unrelated to productivity. Working becomes so much more relaxing.
- lupire 5y ago
  But also less profitable per hour. Doing "line" work where you have no unique contribution means you have less negotiating power and so get paid less.

ricardobayes 5y ago

I experienced the same. I asked an acquaintance who runs a 1000+ dev company, why is it so difficult for devs to find part-time jobs. He replied that he had thought only admin staff could do that, he found the concept weird. Very much in line with "this is how it works" as the article mentioned.

lupire 5y ago
How did this person come to run the business?
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  Had some academic ties and some project was spun-off. But it was a long time ago, when C++ was the shiny new thing. How I understood the business grew naturally from 3 people to 1000+ today.

aerosmile 5y ago

There are a lot of things in this world that are not rooted in rational/pragmatic concerns. For example, in the automotive industry, a lot of the margin comes from upper-end variants of any given model, which are perhaps 10% more capable as the base model but cost disproportionally more and are a lot more desirable. Why do people go for that? Emotional reasons. Are the $2,000 vintage Nikes worth that much, especially if you end up actually wearing them? Depends on if you're deciding on a rational or emotional basis. A lot of this translates to the work environment. Someone making $300k might feel exceptionally rewarded for their work, until they find out that their peer makes $320k. Suddenly that $300k no longer looks that desirable anymore. Call it an innate quest for justice, call it culture shock, call it whatever you want - if you cannot see why your individual arrangement might produce a net negative result for the rest of the company, then you're ignoring the reality. You just have to implement certain rules and treat everyone the same. You're either a full-time company, or you're a part-time company. You're either an on-site company, or you're a remote company. If you allow hybrid, you have to allow it for everyone. And if one person gets to work 20 hours a week, then it needs to be a 0-friction process for everyone else to transition to the same arrangement if they so desire. From a staffing point of view, that last part is an absolute managerial nightmare ("sorry, the project will be pushed back by 12 months because all of our engineers decided to move to part-time, and we cannot hire new engineers, because the existing staff may also move back to full-time at any given point"). There is, however, a solution for you - just work for extremely well-funded early-stage startups, because their CEOs will be more than glad to rock the boat internally in exchange for your skills and experience that they would be otherwise struggling to find in a full-time hire. By the time that startup scales and their CEO starts thinking about culture and retention, you'll be off to the next boat that you can rock as hard you'd like.

kuboble 5y ago
In Switzerland it is extremely popular to work part-time in IT. To the point that most men I know have reduced to 4/5 when they became parents and most women to 3/5. The deal in companies is that it's relatively easy to reduce your work % but it's a one way street. To get back your manager needs to find a budget the same way as if they were hiring (but I don't know anyone who did want to increase it back). Seems to work well.

wadefletch 5y ago

When you say you made yourself available, what does that mean in practice? Targeted network outreach? A LinkedIn post?

ghaff 5y ago

I do think a lot of it is "tradition" for lack of a better word. That aside--and knowing some part-time contractors (not in technical roles)--a few things. 1.) A significant percentage of cost per employee to a company is benefits. So work half-time and the breakeven to the company is probably something like 1/3 pay if you get full-time benefits. 2.) The above doesn't even count that there are a lot of other overheads (management, coordination/meetings/collaboration) to having more people doing the same work. 3.) It depends what part-time means. Many of us might be OK with 4-day workweeks or shorter days--though to some degree those may be possible in practice today with the appropriate workload and degree of synchronicity. However, if your preference is to take month+ blocks of time off on a regular basis, that's much more difficult to accommodate. (And, if you unplug during those times you lose a lot of context. Earlier in my career, I did take month long vacations now and then but it's hard to norm as a regular thing for lots of good practical reasons.)

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

Most of my consulting has been full-time but I have had a few part time - generally these are in: 1. not in demand fields but fields that for some reason are momentarily needed by the company. 2. fields the company hopes to teach someone else to handle. 3. using technology that the company wants to move off of because they don't have anyone that knows it anymore. Those fields - Accessibility (achieving WCAG 1.0 conformance), XSL-T - had an xml + xsl-t generating website, team is rebuilding to React and know nothing about the old tech, DSSL stylesheets that needed to be moved to XSL-FO. I also nearly had a part time JQuery maintenance 2 month project about a year and a half ago. My suspicion, if it's an in-demand field people want you full time, that stuff is IN DEMAND after all.

yibg 5y ago

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 dev only has 10 hours. So 2 half time dev just doesn’t get as much done as 1 full time. I guess this is also why 2 engineers don’t get twice as much done as 1, all things being equal. 2) Most part time dev candidates I’ve seen aren’t doing just a single part time job, they are doing either multiple part time jobs or a full time job + part time job. Either way the mental energy is already gone. Maybe there is a way to make part time work, I just haven’t figured it out yet.

ozim 5y ago
Yeah that 2nd point is that quite often people need "full time salary" so it is not that management somehow has backwards thinking. I have a friend that can really work 4 hours a day, but he is a special case where he does not have a family to upkeep and no mortgage. He is also a bit hard on the frugality. But finding such person is basically 1 in a million. If I post a job with 4h a day which amounts to 1/2 of a normal salary I will probably never get a candidate. If I post a job with normal salary and then start explaining that it is 1/2 hours and accordingly paid, some people will get angry.
- jpindar 5y ago
  I can live quite comfortably on half a typical salary, and I'm available.
- mberger 5y ago
  I'm in the same situation as your friend and I know of at least 3 others in my friend circle. I don't think part time availability is as low as you think.
- yibg 5y ago
  The other problem is with overhead 2 half time employees != 1 full time employee. There is the extra equipment cost, benefits (perhaps), management overhead etc. e.g. If I replace a team of 7 full time engineers with 14 half time engineers, do I keep 1 manager? That seems like a very large team for 1 person to handle, so now maybe I need another manager too. From a purely economic perspective hiring half time engineers at half the comp just doesn't seem to make sense. You can argue that half time engineers are more than half as productive as a full time engineer because as others have said full time engineers don't work a full 8 hours anyways. While theoretically that's true, as I originally posted, that's not what I've seen. Based on my anecdotal experience, half time engineers are less than half as productive as a full time engineer. So from both a productivity and economic perspective, it hasn't made sense.

wpietri 5y ago

As a developer, I agree there's a cultural issue, but think there are pragmatic issues. I have done both part-time consulting and part-time contract development. Pure consulting (when one's output is advice) is doable part time, because you're not a blocker and generally don't have to keep up with the day to day. But I would only do part-time contract development under pretty specific circumstances: 1) I'm the only dev on the project (or at least I know the other devs really well), 2) I am not on the critical path for anything urgent, 3) the organization can sustain an interest in the work (and therefore in paying me) despite it not being urgent. For example, I knew somebody who needed a discrete service, a PDF form-filler, replaced. The old version was a pain operationally and I think it was built on EOLed tech in a language the team didn't know. That was a fine part-time project because the existing thing worked tolerably well; I was just cleaning up a mess that bothered them. I'd feel the same about, say, tech debt cleanup. Or quick, throwaway prototyping. But in general, software is a team sport, a collective intellectual work that requires a high level of coordination between both devs and many others. I don't want to be part time on a team of well-meshed full-timers because the overhead of keeping track of the team's progress is fixed. I'd have to spend a notable percentage of my time keeping up, and I'll be adding to the coordination burden of the team despite not contributing as much, so my net ROI is lower. I'd hate it. That said, I'd be interested to see a project that's, say, all 4-day-a-week people. Maybe even people who work 6 hours a day, 4 days a week. I could imagine that working pretty well while still being enough to keep stakeholders satisfied.

hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
Even your pragmatic issues have a strong cultural component. There are quite a few important projects that on my team that we could afford to have take 20% longer. It's more important they have a good result than they arrive as soon as possible. We also have some projects we need done ASAP, which would naturally fall to a full-timer.
- twblalock 5y ago
  So, it makes sense to hire part-time people when the timelines can slip and they aren't on the critical path? That's not a very good sales pitch.

AmericanBlarney 5y ago

The bigger issue I've seen is that there's a relatively fixed amount of time required for overhead activities (e.g. compliance training) and context sharing (meetings). Purely hypothetically, if those sorts of activities eat up 10 hours a week, then a full time developer gets 30 productive hours, whereas a half time developer only gets 10. You might think there's room to cut down on overhead, and you might be right, but when the majority of employees are full-time, it may not be the most pressing issue to change.

brightball 5y ago

I’ve done part time and managed somebody doing part time. The biggest issue is that you have everybody else not tracking hours at all, just thinking about the work that needs to be done and one person who is militantly tracking hours to ensure that the exit the moment the clock hits the hours limit. It gets weird on a team of full timers if the part time person is expected to interact with the full timers at all, especially if they are all working and need to communicate with the person but they are out. Believe me, I sympathize though. It does create a strange dynamic though.

Thorrez 5y ago

itslennysfault 5y ago

Maybe try working through an agency? I'm in a similar boat, and I've been doing part-time work through Toptal. You certainly get more opportunities if you're full time, but I've been able to steadily get 10-20 hours a week at a rate that would come out around $300k if I was working full time. For me that is plenty to live comfortably and I'm able to choose to have more free time and not feel "owned" by a full time salary position that would likely be more like 60 hours a week of my time.