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The future of work isn't just remote, it's part-time
- booleandilemma 4y agoThe future of work is...not working. It's going to look something like UBI and decoupling health insurance from employment. It's going to require widespread changes to our economy and how we define ourselves. Not everyone is going to need to work.
- jleyank 4y agoNot in the us it ain’t as full time work tends to be required for health care benefits. And these benefits become (quite) important as workers age or, horrors, commit parenthood or have medical issues. Quitting and paying 4-5x for their medical coverage isn’t realistic.
- ernestipark 4y ago(Author) This is certainly the biggest barrier for most. That being said, Google, for instance, allows you to work part time and maintain health benefits. Also, as is the case for me, there's a large contingent of married folks who have a spouse who can maintain benefits working a W2 while the other goes part-time.
- jdwyah 4y agoIs it possible for part timers to band together and form collectives to get healthcare as a group?
- bwestergard 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiring_hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiring_hall
- SkyPuncher 4y agoI always hear medical insurance being a blocker. Which, I find surprising. I was a contractor a few years back. I simply went to healthcare.gov and purchased a plan. It was a bit overwhelming because there were _so many_ options available, but it was essentially the same as buying car or home insurance.
- schemescape 4y agoThe options vary greatly depending on state and county. There is also a problem in some states where if your income is too low, there might not be any affordable plans. For many in tech, it’s probably not as dire as it seems, but it’s definitely not a solved problem.
- eatsyourtacos 4y agoIt's easy but can be expensive as hell. Currently paying $1300/mo in premiums for 4 people on a bronze plan with a 10k deductible and 30% co-insurance. Yay.
- rco8786 4y agoIt’s still pretty expensive, comparable to a mortgage, especially if you have a family. It’s a pretty major speed bump for folks just starting out in a contractor role just as a baseline expense.
- joshghent 4y agoBeen working part time for the past year (volunteering with the rest). It's a difficult mindset to get into coming from full time. And I struggle to speak with people who are adamant that they need full time commitment to accomplish anything. But, those are the types of people I don't want to work with. Although I have now built a decent client base, it was a huge challenge at the start to find remote, freelance and part time software contracts. It was usually a case of finding full time ones and convincing them that I could do part time. It has been hugely rewarding and I find myself thinking about work a lot less outside of work because it's no longer the biggest chunk of my week (or doesn't feel like it).
- ernestipark 4y agoCongrats. I'm seeing a lot more friends who have done what you have done How did you find clients?
- tra3 4y agoAs an employee I would love for this to be true. But I think employers, especially in North America will resist this. There’s already a worker shortage and with the boomer generation retiring we are going to lose further workers. Don’t see how businesses are going to be ok with employees only working part time. I feel like the transition will happen eventually but it’s going to be similar to wfh transition. Much like we had to have COVID to wfh, we may need another similar event like that for part time to get accepted.
- layer8 4y agoOTOH, worker shortage means that employees have greater leverage. Better have someone work part-time for you than for a different employer.
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago>worker shortage Which industries? Not software, right? Because then I'll read about some 300+ applications per job vacancy, 8 flaming hoops to jump through if the Lady Fortuna grants you an interview, and an absence of courtesy because of how many other grunts are lined up - who has the time to email back an applicant anyway? My head is spinning, I don't know what to make of it all.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoFor an opening at a FAANG paying $300k, sure. For, say, a senior Android developer position in a smaller city, you can look for months to get a decent applicant. (You'll get some "sure, I can code in Android" people with 3 months cranking out a little app for someone, but solid people with experience are rare.)
- tra3 4y agoI don’t disagree with what you’re saying, but it’s a different problem. The labour shortage is not constrained to just IT — it’s a global trend. This is one of those things that reasonably easy to verify. Check out the population pyramid in US 0. It’s relatively balanced, but other countries look much worse, see China for example. What this means is that we are not replacing folks that are retiring with new workers, and this process only accelerating. The long term trend seems pretty clear. 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
- jimbob45 4y agoAs much as no one wants to admit it, most software engineers (that I know at least) aren't full-time as much as they are on-call. You work when the work comes down the pipeline. Sometimes that means a lot of OT. Sometimes that means you coast for the afternoon. The only important part is that the work gets done as fast as you can manage when it gets to you. Of course, at a good company, managers should be refining backlogs and assigning work when queues run low but most companies I've been at don't really care about work beyond what is assigned for the iteration. As long as the final shipping deadline remains on track, they're not going to put in the extra refining effort to move that deadline up, particularly if they're not on the critical path.
- layer8 4y agoMost software engineers I know have always so much work in the pipeline that there’s no way they could habitually just coast for whole afternoons.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adam_arthur 4y agoDepends on the structure of the org/process. It's true there's almost always more to do, but it's not true that every manager will push their team to do as much as they can. In fact in most cases they don't. Also even when "fully" allocated, most people don't actually fill 100% of their time with work.
- rhacker 4y agoIt looks like preppers didn't have to be scared of an asteroid, a pandemic, a solar flare, a nuclear war. Instead society fell from something totally unexpected: No one wants to work anymore.
- lijogdfljk 4y ago> Instead society fell from something totally unexpected: No one wants to work anymore. I can't tell if you're joking or not
- zach_garwood 4y agoI'm not entirely convinced anyone ever wanted to work.
- agumonkey 4y agoThere's work and work. I don't like being idle. Many people enjoy sitting around sipping drinks. I'd rather climb hills, create stuff and fix houses. My problem with work is the toxic ingredients: - bad management - no leadership - stupid sociopolitical games - therefore too much fakeness (toxic diplomacy) - not enough perfectionism - side effects of obligations (being paid means you are responsible, means you have to make something happen even if you have no clue what or how)
- protonbob 4y agoAs a young developer trying to navigate the political aspects of software development, What is toxic diplomacy?
- conductr 4y agoI've not heard the term, yet I feel like I know exactly what that GP means by it. And, it's hard to summarize, it has less/nothing to do with software development and more so just the politics involved in corporate culture. It's like the real ethos of the company (not the projected version) and how to be successful within it, the merits of your work as a software developer will not always be the most important deciding factor and you need to be aware of the various politics within the company. It differs by company but with enough experience you see common themes.
- seydor 4y agoRemote, asynchronous and part time. Looks like everyone will be a freelancer
- baby 4y agoIt's definitely not part time, if anything I'm seeing people work more and more and more.
- boredemployee 4y agoWorking in IT is: * 3h/day of work * 2h/day pretending you're working * 3h/day of bs meetings
- yrgulation 4y ago2 days a week in standups, retros, planning sessions and despite all that answering to questions like “are we there yet”.
- k8si 4y agoSeems like accepting lots of part time work would be a great way help employers pay us less and take away benefits/working hours flexibility. I don't wanna be a gig worker. I want a salary, benefits, and a 4 day work week.
- ernestipark 4y agoI think that's not entirely false, but this is a small subset of what part-time work can really look like today and in the future. There are 4-day work week companies that work 40 hours or 32 hours and still provide benefits (including big cos), you can start your own business, consult (which in and of itself is a very wide range), there is an increasing legitimacy and income path to being a creator, etc. My thesis is that the current cultural, technological, societal winds are going to enable a lot more of this work than ever before. It's still nascent, but I would bet a good chunk of tech employees will be part-time in some capacity over the next few years. And getting that employment from a 'traditional' W2 employer will just be one portion of it.
- waboremo 4y agoIn the example listed, the only difference is a pay cut and the cut isn't that large. Which is also a far cry from usual gig workers which definitely do not get paid anywhere near FANG salaries. I do think if this transition were to happen, there would have to be far more regulations and standard benefits when it comes to part time workers. Which is also very unlikely, at that point it's far more likely universal basic income becomes a thing than part time workers being treated anywhere near as nicely as your L5 FANG (again example from the article).
- bowsamic 4y agoThe future of work is consuming exactly the amount of value that you produce and not having your production removed from you
- antisthenes 4y agoA lot of people in rich western societies produce negative value. I'm not really sure people with < 75 IQ or so can really produce enough value in order to be able to give back to society more than they receive in various forms of welfare. They just don't have enough skills to be productive in a digital knowledge society. I guess your future plan is for them to starve?
- bowsamic 4y agoThe only reason so many consume more than they produce is that the distribution of labour is very uneven Though, it is actually the bourgeoisie class with IQs above 100 that are not producing value
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agoIs it the future. We already have zero-hour contracts. The cynic in me just sees larges swathes of white-collar work increasingly falling under zero-hour type capitalistic revenue models, to spin a euphemism. I don't really buy the idyllic spend half you time raising chickens and the other half coding picture, at least not for 95% of people. UBI, and to pay "essential workers" more than a "living" wage would be a good start.
- ernestipark 4y agoI literally just grabbed 60 eggs from my chicken coop, came back to my computer and saw this hit the front page :D. Certainly agree it's not going to work for most people and it's a privileged position, but trends usually start from a small subset of the population and spread. I think the perception of working in IT is a great example of this... think of the movie Office Space, and then how companies like Google completely changed how we think about tech company culture in the early 2000s. Certainly Google was a well-funded golden startup, but eventually this ethos spread to much of tech.
- rhacker 4y agoBut as soon as you create UBI, you create new inflation, which causes us to increase the UBI. I don't understand the benefit of telling people that don't want to work that they don't have to. Work fights inflation, free flowing money in society creates it. Of course this will be downvoted because something that has worked for thousands of years is obviously wrong.
- wan23 4y agoThe current system isn't even 100 years old. In 1920 a large percentage of people were farmers and women generally didn't have jobs. Things can and do change.
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoI would definitely take a pay cut if I could keep my benefits and work 3 days a week. As it is my company lets us buy extra time off, but it's only 5 days a year. If they gave us the option I would pay for 100
- awestroke 4y agoYou pay your employer for days off. That's the most American thing I've ever heard. How about Americans start demanding tens of days of paid time off like in developed countries
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoWell I get 23 days off already, I paid extra to get 28, but yeah I hear you.
- Crusoe123 4y agoSounds to me like a convoluted way to say - unpaid time off.
- tharkun__ 4y agoHow about going on strike, unionizing etc. to get the 30 days off that are normal in tech in (parts of) Europe? I know for sure for example that 30 days is the usual everyone gets in most tech companies in Germany. Heck the minimum by law that even a cashier at the supermarket gets is 21 days. I know, very un-American to even think of that. It's so funny (actually, mind-boggling) when you first hear about how time off works in lots of North American companies. You get 10 days and then with tenure you get one more day per year. If you're working for a "good" company, you might start with 15 and get 1 per year. But always only up to a max, e.g. after 5 years of tenure, that's it, no more extra days. And the excuses and explanations employees make for this are mind-boggling. Like "yeah this makes total sense, you wouldn't want to give a recent-grad the same time off as someone with more experience" and such. To which I can just only reply: Why not?
- 4y ago
- synergy20 4y agoWait, what about medical insurance etc. You typically do not have those benefits if you do part-time? Many work for the sake of medical insurance. I have seen 4 software engineers un-retired recently(all in their early 70s), some of them felt retirement boring, some just need either benefit or more money, the latter one bothered me, supposedly software engineers are paid relatively well and shall retire with nice financials.
- rco8786 4y agoThey still have to manage that money properly. Lifestyle creep can be really difficult to combat.
- dfeehrer 4y agoThis was one of my biggest fears before quitting my job. It's turned out to be complete non-issue. Took me all of 2 hours to sign up for a plan (healthcare.gov or your state's ACA marketplace). It's obviously more expensive than if my employer paid (costs me low hundreds / month) and you may not get exactly the same tier of plan, but you have plenty of options. It's not 100% ideal, but in my experience it was not nearly as dire as people make it out to be. Your mileage will obviously vary by state, age and family size.
- synergy20 4y agosingle might be fine,family with kids could be quite different
- tgv 4y agoIf part-time means $320k, hell yes, Sign me up. That's 5x my income (before taxes). But that's not the future. The future is full-time and more. The age structure of the population pyramid doesn't leave much choice. That's in most of the Western world, of course. There are parts in the world where it looks different, but in those parts $320k is enough to retire.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoAgreed, population in the U.S. is shrinking if you take out immigration which I have little hope of reform for, add in the number of older people who retired during Covid and aren't coming back and there are going to be a lot of skilled jobs empty with gaps needing to be filled by existing workers.
- coffee_beqn 4y agoIsn’t that good for us worker bees? You can set more boundaries because employers have to fight for you
- falcolas 4y agoIf you have openings you can't fill, doesn't it make sense to open those up to people with the right skills who can't hold FT jobs?
- californical 4y agoIt sounds like we’ll need to improve worker efficiency then, while at the same time workers are able to demand better working conditions and fewer hours because of competition for them. Company A wants you to work 40 hours, but Company B has better processes and efficiency and can get the same productivity out of 32 hours of work. Because of shrinking/stagnant workforce, this doesn’t cause unemployment to spike, and they still need you for those 32 hours so they’re willing to offer a competitive salary. Maybe this is a bit over-optimistic, but I think that assuming everyone will just work more hours is equally over-pessimistic! Realistically we’ll likely get something in the middle. But hopefully leaning more towards the optimistic side :)
- 4y ago
- duncanc4 4y agoIt’s already common to work part time as a software engineer here in Germany. I work 30 hours a week (6 hours a day) and have 75% of a full time salary. I actually get the same amount of vacation as full time since the vacation is based on working five days a week and not working 40 hours a week. There is no loss of benefits.
- ernestipark 4y agoVery cool. When you say common, can you quantify this at all or are there job boards or listings where people to go find these types of jobs?
- duncanc4 4y agoI don’t have any numbers, but some job postings will say full time, part time, or will have a minimum number of hours they offer. Some will also give a percentage range of hours they offer of part time to full time. If the posting doesn’t say, I just brought it up during the initial call so we were on the same page before continuing the interview process. Most German companies didn’t have a problem with it, but I found that UK and US companies did. Keep in mind working hours are fixed in your contract and it’s not unspecified like in the US.
- dekleinewolf 4y agoIn the Netherlands, the right to work part time (at companies >= 10 employees) is mandated by law. So every single job is this type of job. At the Engineering firm I work at I would say roughly 30% of employees work part time.
- ernestipark 4y agoIs it just pro-rated comp based on time? How do benefits work in the Netherlands?
- Buttons840 4y agoThis seems like an ok time to plug a policy idea I have. I think an alternative to raising minimum wage is to require all companies to offer a lot of paid vacation, like 3 or 4 months of paid vacation every year. If people need more money, they can use their paid vacation time to work a second job. They'd be working the same 40-hours a week, but would receive double pay, thus increasing their income. It would also increase their security and market mobility because they have 2 jobs. If one job is treating them shitty, then they at least have a second job and more opportunity to get out. It would create more competition among employers to hold onto employees. People will put up with a lot when you're their sole source of food, but if you provide only a portion of their income, you will have to treat workers better. It would also have a lot of mental health and family benefits throughout all rungs of society, except for the most well off, who already have unlimited PTO. This idea has received more downvotes overall (which is simply to say it's unpopular), but I've never had anyone explain what they don't like about it.
- georgewsinger 4y agoSo your proposal is: if one consenting adult wants to pay another consenting adult for working more than 8-9 months out of the year, then one (or both) of them should be kidnapped and sent to prison?[1] Yeah, that sounds insane. [1] The logical consequence of breaking your proposal, were it codified into law.
- Buttons840 4y agoYour point seems to be that regulating employers is insane. Do you oppose all employer regulations then? What do you think should happen if two consenting adults, one of which is desperate for food, agree to an arrangement where one is paid 3 dollars per hour in exchange for hard work?
- georgewsinger 4y ago> Do you oppose all employer regulations then? Yes. > What do you think should happen if two consenting adults, one of which is desperate for food, agree to an arrangement where one is paid 3 dollars per hour in exchange for work? I think this should be legal, for if it were illegal, then someone would be getting paid $0/hour (which is less than $3/hour) for no work being done at all. To cut to the chase: you should just ask me what should happen if someone has exhausted all avenues for sustenance, and failed. Then what should they do? Should they starve? My answer is: no, it would be morally justified for them to steal resources (i.e. food) from other non-consenting adults in order for them not to die under extreme circumstances like this. But notice that we'd still deem it as "justified theft" (where the theft is still intrinsically wrong, but justified under the extreme circumstances). Fortunately, "extreme circumstances" are not the conditions we're living under in developed Western countries, where even the poorest people live fabulously wealthy in comparison to almost everyone in human history. In particular, there doesn't seem to be any need to mandate (under literal threat of kidnap & imprisonment) that people not work more than 9 months per year. That sounds totally insane, especially since no one is forcing anyone to work 12 months per year anyway.
- topkai22 4y agoThe big flaw here is the assumption that pay scales directly with hours worked. It doesn't and generally shouldn't. To start with some data, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/a-comparison-of-hourly-wage-rates-for-fulland-part-time-workers-by-occupation-2007.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/a-comparison-of-hourly-wage... states that out of 324 occupations analyzed, 182 showed statistically significant lower hourly wages while only 12 showed an increase. It appears that doesn't include the loss of benefits, which makes the difference even starker. So why do part-time jobs consistently pay less then full-time? Part of it may be the type of worker- employers hire less skilled/able workers into part-time rolls and then convert to full-time if they are good, or part time workers are concentrated in groups that have historically and currently experienced wage discrimination (women are massively overrepresented in part-time work). However, the explanation I find most viable is simple that part-time workers take longer (calendar time) to do everything. If it takes 500 hours of work to get competent at a job, then a FT worker doing 40s will be operating at competency in about 3 months, while a PT employee at 20 hours a week will take 6 months. But it gets worse- every project or task will take longer, and we know the longer things take (calendar time) the more likely they are to be irrelevant when finished. The lead times and slower skilling introduced by working less hours have a real impact on business. That's not to say doing PT work or having PT workers can't be valuable. They won't even always be paid less- Workers that are already highly skilled (such as PT consultants) can command higher hourly rates (because they only work in highly skilled specialized environments). But generally speaking, we shouldn't expect pay to increase or decrease linearly with hours worked.
- jerojero 4y agoYes, you're absolutely right. There's definitely a cost associated to part time workers. But that doesn't mean the current 40 or so hours a week (in Australia it's 37.5) is the optimal amount of hours that a worker is productive. If the worker is actually working 20 to 25 of those hours and the rest is made up work then you're not really getting things done any faster. So I think your analysis rests on the assumption that every hour of those full time hours is actually a productive hour. I think anyone that has worked can probably vouch for the contrary. But I reckon there's a kind of "the emperor is naked and everyone can tell but says nothing" situation, where we want to pretend we are all much more efficient and productive than we actually are. Part of it probably comes from the need that everything needs to be sort of standardised otherwise it'll be too much overhead for management. So it's a very difficult problem, but I think smaller firms (20 to 100 people) should probably experiment much more. And they kind of are with 4 day weeks and so on.
- hashishen 4y agolemme get the 400k first, and then I'll start thinking about part time
- nradov 4y agoPart time work isn't very practical for most professional / technical / managerial positions. The problem is that there's a certain fixed overhead for training, team meetings, and administration which doesn't depend on hours worked. If you spend 5 hours per week on that stuff then it's only ⅛ of a 40-hour work week but rises to ¼ of a 20-hour work week, leaving only 15 hours of productive time. Plus there's also fixed corporate charge back expenses which are the same per month regardless of hours worked. Everyone needs a computer, email, phone, software licenses, HR support, etc.
- euroderf 4y agoNot immediately dropping the standard work week to at or under 32-35 hours is a crime against modernity.