The idea that if you hire SWEs for 4 hours, you'll get 4 hours straight of programming out of them is wishful thinking. The individual might go in with that min

The idea that if you hire SWEs for 4 hours, you'll get 4 hours straight of programming out of them is wishful thinking. The individual might go in with that mindset but long term it will take a very dedicated individual to do it. It's not sustainable by most employees. There's also the fact that a job is more than programming. A company will get at most 2 to 3ish hours of output from a programmer. So then the company will need to hire many more programmers plus the associated employees that support human resources and such. The idea that most companies over hire employees speaks to the fact that it's difficult to figure out how many people are needed for a project. Hiring a group of part time workers does nothing to fix that situation. I like the idea of working part time but for it to happen it would need to be a hard push by the workers via a union or something similar. From an employer's point of view it just doesn't make sense.