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Although it is common thinking in the business world, teamwork is not a panacea you think it is. Maybe if you are working on rote J2EE or .Net software you can

Although it is common thinking in the business world, teamwork is not a panacea you think it is. Maybe if you are working on rote J2EE or .Net software you can do four hours a day of work and know exactly the time it will take to complete, but you aren't going to be working on the same project with full timers. Someone working full time is going to complete the same work in two days that a part timer is going to do in seven. Full time workers are not going to wait an additional five days for dependencies the part time guy is working on. And they're not going put dependencies in place, then wait for the part timer guy to add 150% to the schedule finishing their part. This is not bad teamwork. This is scheduling. I know you are not suggesting this, but I should point out that the idea that the team does tasks as a group around one computer is the amateur's view of software development. In this instance, one might think that part time is feasible because they will just join in on whatever the ONE task that the group happens to be engaged in. I see this a lot in inexperienced managers who think software development is like a meeting except with a computer to type on. Part timers by definition are not fully invested. Their work is defined by time constraints rather than project delivery. What will you do if four hours is not enough, work four more hours?

jarofgreen 14y ago
No, its bad scheduling. In your example you seem to be assigning the same amount of work to part-timers and full-timers then complaining that the part timers take twice as long and make the full-timers wait. Well Duh! It's perfectly possible in big teams/projects to schedule tasks to part-timers, because you assign them shorter tasks or tasks that full-timers won't be waiting for immediately. I've been there several times. (The fact that sometimes task times are hard to estimate in advance cuts both ways; sometimes a part-timer could be waiting for a full timer to finish work because the full-timer got a task that turned out to take longer than estimated.) I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying in big projects where you divide tasks among a team it should be possible for a good manager to deal in part-timers. The smaller the team/project the harder it gets, but it's still possible. Why do you assume full-timers are "fully-invested", eg defined by project constraints and not time constraints? Balls. I've known plenty of full-timers who were out the door at 5pm. If a company wants workers to work over-time it has to agree a system before-hand and agree compensation, money and/or time off in lieu. Its the same for part-timers and full-timers, no difference. If a company is just rocking up to it's full timers and saying "oh the projects not finished so you have to work this weekend kthxbai" it's a bad company.

jarofgreen 14y ago

No, its bad scheduling. In your example you seem to be assigning the same amount of work to part-timers and full-timers then complaining that the part timers take twice as long and make the full-timers wait. Well Duh! It's perfectly possible in big teams/projects to schedule tasks to part-timers, because you assign them shorter tasks or tasks that full-timers won't be waiting for immediately. I've been there several times. (The fact that sometimes task times are hard to estimate in advance cuts both ways; sometimes a part-timer could be waiting for a full timer to finish work because the full-timer got a task that turned out to take longer than estimated.) I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying in big projects where you divide tasks among a team it should be possible for a good manager to deal in part-timers. The smaller the team/project the harder it gets, but it's still possible. Why do you assume full-timers are "fully-invested", eg defined by project constraints and not time constraints? Balls. I've known plenty of full-timers who were out the door at 5pm. If a company wants workers to work over-time it has to agree a system before-hand and agree compensation, money and/or time off in lieu. Its the same for part-timers and full-timers, no difference. If a company is just rocking up to it's full timers and saying "oh the projects not finished so you have to work this weekend kthxbai" it's a bad company.