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.

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.

In other professions where the shared state isn't as big, such as medicine or therapy, you see way more part time style work happen actively in the industry. Be it working for 2-4 clinics part time or just doing half hours so they can focus more on other things in their lives.

Another kind of role that I think works well part time is an advisor / consultant expert role where your hired to verify things are being done correctly in your sub field and are used to train others design wise as a 3rd party. Which is another sr / experienced type of role.

Another type of part time that might work is working on your own project as a solo dev in maintenance mode once your established. But also only lasts so long as competitors get ahead of you.

Part time not working well is something inherent to the job itself unfortunately.

This sentiment is what GP points out is cultural, not practical or factual. If you compensate them well for the hours they work, many part time devs will have superior per-hour output to FTEs and also be grateful for the added flexibility you afford them.

We hired a stellar part time dev recently (contract hire to start, we just increased his rate and verbally stated we are interested in continuing the relationship long-term if he is, and offered written agreement if he is interested), and he has been working out great. The option is open to him to work full-time whenever if/when he wants by planning it ahead of time with us, but our default expectation will remain being part-time so he can pursue his game development on the side.

Finding a great part-time team member is no different than a great FTE, once you and the employee are both free of the cultural negative baggage associated wtih part-timing.

There's your problem.

It sounds like you just amortize the "meetings" differently. Having to answer lots of async emails / slacks can waste just as much time as scheduled meetings.

Sounds like you work at startup rather than corporate. My current job is basically building on something somebody else has already prototyped. I hate it, it makes my days dull. But then one day I realized, that if I could do it as a part time job then I'd have no qualms of not wasting my mental energy, I'd gladly do what is required, clock out and spend my creative energy outside of work or with other part time gigs.

    That don’t need to spend lots of 
    time getting context. They can figure 
    out how to solve problems matching 
    your team’s coding style without 
    extra meetings.

Coding bits of functionality for an existing business is not a matter of "matching the team's coding style."

Heck, there are often not even engineering "problems" to "solve." It's a matter of figuring out integration with existing systems and processes, understanding the business itself, etc. That's why part-timers don't make sense. They can't just walk in, sit down, and code.

And if you could tee things up for them, to the point where they could just sit down and code, then 90% of the work is already done. And your part-time coder will take longer to deliver... why would management want to wait 2 weeks for a part time person to complete 40 hours of pure coding work, versus 1 week for a fulltimer?

Yeah, I think you could step back from that at some point and be a heck of a part-time asset.

1. Your knowledge of the app and organization would likely decay over time.

2. I'm not sure the the organization would love this move. It would be better than losing you entirely, but probably not as valuable as having you fulltime. From your perspective, 50% of your time is better than 100% of nothing. From their perspective, they're probably going to take the "glass half empty" view.

It might be more work to develop a specification that requires no context to complete than to do it myself.

I too would crave a part time programming job, mind you, but I think that only works on a team that is completely part time.

Doing it in a meeting where everyone has different questions, tangents and other cruft that you have to sit through is extremely inefficient.

Additionally, everyone can focus on producing and consuming information in the downtime between focus-work sessions, without interrupting flow at someone else's convenience.

In all cases, quality documentation is more likely to produce accurate information transfer with less time wasted by everyone involved.

Fix your management and you'll be able to hire part time easily.

It depends more on the personalities, values and organization of the workplace and the team — for any size, if more than 20% of people involved need to spend more than 2 hrs/week in meetings — it is an organizational/ops issue, not an inherent feature of the work.

> more foreign the domain the more time is needed to coordinate work

More foreign to who? If it is foreign to individual team members, then it is a problem of insufficient onboarding/training material and process, poor documentation, or under-qualified hire.

The only way I see real value is if you’re the sold dev/architect or if you can come in and confidently pick up tickets and they’re properly scoped and documented.

If you need developers to spend so much time ideating and figuring out how and what to build, you’re mismanaging those developers imo.

I have successfully gotten 80% four-day-week at a string of engagements... but I work in the non-profit academic sector, and get paid quite a bit less than that $200K+ salary.

I think a four-day-week, or even a three-day-week, makes a lot more sense than tha 4-hours-a-day 5-day-week the OP was suggesting.

Because, yeah, one (or certainly two) meetings could pretty much blow a 4-hour-day. But at the 4-eight-hour-day schedule I've been doing, I feel like there is still plenty of time for meetings and overhead, and I am pretty confident I end up 95% as productive working a four-day 32 hours as I would be working 40 hours. I feel like it would still work pretty well at 3-eight-hour-days too.

Below that -- or trying to work four-hour days instead of fewer eight-hour days, I could definitely see problems with "overhead" or lack of commitment.

I can only speak from my experience working 80% time in several different jobs, in nonprofit/academic environments. As above.

(I enjoy writing code, if writing code was "barely" part of the work I wouldn't still be here. It seems like it would be impossible to get anyone who was good at writing code in a development/engineering job where coding was barely part of the work! But I'm not sure what this has to do with the feasibility of less than full time work as an engineer/developer).

Remote-first, multi-time-zone companies simply don't do meetings. All communication is async and written down. Work gets done without a lot of hemming and hawing and meetings-with-no-agenda-to-talk-about-setting-an-agenda-for-a-future-meeting. It's much more efficient to come to a decision over 7 asynchronous back-and-forths, and people have the opportunity to do some research during the conversation so their decision is better informed. The whole Open Source world [when development is not done within a corporation] works this way.

I think the problem is corporations are obsessed with a definition of productivity as "the person is constantly productive". If you're not in a meeting, or have a ticket in progress, or are doing training, clearly you are just wasting time. You can't be allowed to just ruminate, or research, or play around with an idea, or talk to other teams. They'd rather you be writing code now that will be obsolete in 6 months and take a year to replace, rather than take 2 months to come up with a plan for your code that will take 3 months to write and last for 3 years. We rush into things because we have to have something to show for our work every day, and as a result the quality is poor, and that costs more in the long run.

Having worked for such companies, this is not true, at least in my expreience. Plenty of meetings. Very long ones sometimes, 2 hours is not unusual; 3, 4 hours sometimes on Zoom or Hangouts.

> [non-remote-first companies would] rather you be writing code now that will be obsolete in 6 months and take a year to replace, rather than take 2 months to come up with a plan for your code that will take 3 months to write and last for 3 years.

Hmm. I can assure you some remote-first, multi-time-zone companies would also rather you be writing code now that will be obsolete soon than take substantial time to come up with a plan for code that will last years and serve the product well.

Visibility counts for a lot in some remote-first environments. Depending on the management, they may regard the best form of visibility to be regular code updates, PRs, issues filed etc, rather than taking your time over deeper design and research. If they pay more attention to quantity than effectiveness, that can mean shipping code and iterating every few days is something they are looking to see, and a high priority if you want to keep your job. Async written communication on design is sometimes seen as too much talking, not enough doing.

As a full time senior engineer I’m responsible for oversight and guidance on three separate work-streams, so I have to go to all their meetings. If I were part time then I could be involved in just one of them, and go to only those meetings.

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.

I think you're mistaken about that. If you can persuade candidates that it really is 4h a day at 1/2 of a normal salary, you will get candidates who are excited by the job because it opens up their time for other opportunities for hobbies, home life, side projects, open source projects, looking after family, other consulting gigs, education, etc.

However, for developer roles you might find that potential candidates don't entirely believe the ad. I think they'd imagine the employer having unrealistic expectations of what 4h reasonable output looks like, so that they'd feel pressure to work overtime, resulting in closer to 8h anyway while pretending to get it done in less, for 1/2 of a normal salary.

It would be much easier if I get someone CV and he writes cover letter explaining that he would like to try such an arrangement.

I tried to get part time dev for Kibana/Elastic needs like 4 hours - anyone I approached was not even willing to discuss "why" they just said no. People also don't have time to listen to your persuasion, most of the time it is clear cut and goodbye.

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.

Another factor is that often the cost of developers is not the most significant factor. If a company can get say $100m of value out of $10m of salary cost on engineers, it doesn’t really make sense to instead spend $6m to get $80m of value.

And just adding more people isn’t easy as each person increases communication overhead.

That some people live in houses they couldn't pay for on $150K doesn't mean that $150K isn't possibly a "full time salary". $150K is definitely in the category of "a full time salary", many people make this much or less working full time.

That a skilled engineer could possibly make $150K for working 50% time -- is a choice not available to most people, most people don't even have the choice to make $150K working full time! So a skilled engineer has that option, make would be a (healthy) full-time salary for most of the USA, working only half-time. Or anyway would, if employers would hire like this. That's the point I meant to be making.

Income distribution in the US does continue to get more uneven every year.

However, I'm not "there" yet as a developer. Maybe in a few years after I've proven myself.

Have you considered older workers that are nearing retirement? They're probably looking to lean-out, and a part-time job could give them activity in their lives, while getting you someone who is highly experienced in getting things done. You wouldn't be paying benefits, but probably a higher hourly rate (for less than 40 hours) to compensate.

Or job sharing, where you bring on two part-time workers. My sister did this for many years - it gave her time to raise her children while being able to pay a nanny + daycare. She worked Mon-Wed, and her job partner worked Wed-Fri. The overlap allowed them to coordinate, and they were able to call and send texts to each other at other times.

Who cares if they have 6 jobs, that’s not for you to worry about.

If they get good work done on your project and skip the extra meetings, they’re worth keeping around.

Well yeah. There’s your problem.

I've worked part time for a startup remotely across timezones. I personally credit the technical lead for the most part for its success. Then, the chemistry within the team was really good. When someone says something others tend to get it. And the planning. The tech lead sets up the goals for the quarter and push back on distractions from the business side except on rare occasions. The management was also very competent, they seemed to listen to the engineers.

In theory hiring freelancers part-time should be a great solution for everyone involved, in practice the issue is flakiness

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.

You can have actual employees working only 24 hours a week.

Daily meetings kill flow

> 15 minute standup.

It's literally called a "standup" to enforce the most important rule: it should be much shorter than 15 minutes.

Thanks, I'm familiar with why it's called a stand-up. On my teams the go-through-the-kanban-board phase of the meeting is generally faster than that. But that phase also tends to spark post-standup discussions. "Oh, you want to work on that subsystem too? Let's talk a bit about where we want to take it." I think it's better if people allocate time for that, which is why, especially in places like this, I'll talk about it as I did.

If they want to change the hours then renegotiate time and salary.

If not what's the difference, do you think?

I'd say it would probably be important to have a set schedule for the less-than-full-time workers. Or at least as set as the full-timers.

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.

It's kinda either/or

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.

And even for issues that are "cultural", I think one needs particular strategies for managing them. Stakeholders for the important projects that are being delayed will generally not be excited about that. And given that most companies have competitors, those stakeholders might have legitimate reason to want things to go 25% faster. So I'd be curious to see what strategies people have for solving the cultural problems.

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.

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.

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.

OK

> Garbage.

Hmm...

Good luck negotiating that with a FANG, smaller companies won't give a damn (unless they have a dumb HR department who doesn't understand how hard hiring devs is)

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.

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.

Salaries (even full-time) are crap though.

I've had managers/POs/PMs/... work 90% and simply take every Friday afternoon off.

But if you're a dev then yes, taking half a day off is pretty meaningless. I see it as a way to force yourself to take 22-23 additional days of vacation, and at least two of these every month.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Working becomes so much more relaxing.

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.

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.

What does this mean?

- 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.

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.

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.

I think that makes part time workers unattractive.

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.

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.

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.

You know how I work my full time job? Like your part time job. Only 50% of the time.

> 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 mean the prison that is my own home? Remote job and a laptop eliminate this problem. If I run errands I bring my laptop in case someone needs me to jump on a terminal real quick, but when I’m not actively working I’m just living my life, not stuck in an office prison.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Tracking depends on the client and project, but usually I input my work on HourStack.

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.

If you aren’t adding value to your employer by performing those tasks, ask your manager to abstain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581125

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!

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.

I'm also looking for a part-time dev role in the Netherlands and having some trouble finding anything under 32 hours. I could've signed several jobs already if I were willing to go full time.

So I mostly had upwards of 24 and at most 32 hour employment contracts.

Maybe someone can confirm.

I don't think "want" is the correct term here. "are forced to get" fits better IMO.

And men with the same wish.

How about "parent" instead of "women"?

This is both a serious problem and a solution to social imbalance. Again and again, polls show many of the women would stop working alltogether¹ if their only option is fulltime.

This does give men some unfair advantage in career options or pay raises, though. It is cited as an important reason for payment inequality between men and women.

¹ The irony is that this would change the parttime ratio: one reason why it is this high in the Netherlands, is because those mothers in many other European countries, simply don't have a job at all. The Nordics being a positive, exception, by the way.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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"

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm is the longer one.

The other option is contract work. There you set your own hours.

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.

It was "extra paperwork associated with the extra staff".

As in, adding X% more staff means X% more staff-related paperwork.

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.

How many part-time devs do you think I'm suggesting you need? Is hiring one person for 20-30 hours a week really so much more difficult?

Most web stuff can be done with a few devs, and by the time that becomes a problem you should be rolling in money anyway.

It's not like I'm saying it's wrong to hire full-time devs, most people are fine with that and if they want to let them at it. But a candidate doesn't need to be discounted just because they're only available part-time; they could be a huge boon to the team regardless.

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.

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.)

Zappos is a shoe store. Uber is a taxi company.

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.

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.

The chain of responsibility for that goes up to the investors who put millions in a company and pressured the founders to "SCALE FAST"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This I think explains a large part of why it feels like there’s a status quo inertia in the job market.

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?

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.