How to become a part-time programmer | Hacker News Reader

How to become a part-time programmer

codewithoutrules.com

I've done this for a number of years. This would be my current advice:

- Don't try it on-site (unless they specifically were seeking a consultant beforehand). It'll just create resent.

- Therefore go for remote jobs. Which don't need to be advertised as such - strong applicants can negotiate a remote arrangement.

- Don't bill by the hour, but daily. Leaving your earnings aside, this approach puts the focus in work days, not hours (duh), therefore you aren't framed as a 'part-time' contributor.

- When asked how many hours your work day takes, reply "as much as needed". This would be in fact a honest response. Some days (especially as you join a team) you'll need 6-8h/d to perform acceptably. Gradually you'll be able to deliver the same in 3-5h/d.

- The key part is, employer/client is only aware (in principle) of days and results (tickets closed, commits pushed, meetings attended, etc). Again this is not hiding the truth - it is focusing on the results.

- Do keep track internally of your time spent per day, and have some way to graph your productivity vs. the time spent. That graph can eventually save your ass!

- Be aware that (at least IME), even if spending as little as 3 effective hours per day, a large chunk of your day can revolve around work, especially if you interact with a typical team. This includes being available in Slack, for meetings etc.

I've done it on site, as have other people I know, with no resentment by anyone. Depends on organization, maybe.

It can take just one frustrated peer (who may join the company after you do) for 'situations' to arise.

For me it is a risk too big and prefer to keep a healthy distance from those who engage in more traditional settings.

Admittedly certain countries/cities have a more consultant-centric culture, but mine definitely doesn't!

> When asked how many hours your work day takes, reply "as much as needed".

TBH that seems like a BS answer to me. With most programming projects there is always more work to be done, so "as much as needed" could mean 24 hours a day if you're being honest.

Let me complete my phrase then (although the intent seemed pretty obvious to me):

"as many hours needed for me to complete a reasonable day of work".

I realise that this is kind of self-referential, but in practice both sides know what to expect from "1 man-day" in terms of deliverables/progress.

Similarly in a remote engagement typically there's the implicit assumption that you are a reputable, seasoned, productive coder.

This still doesn't make sense at all to me. If you mean "as many hours needed for me to complete a reasonable day of work", then, by your own definition, if you're only putting in 4-5 hours every day why wouldn't I reasonably ask you to work 3 hours more?

"A day's worth of work" is a chunk of results - not physically spending 8h in those results.

It's well-known (and documented) that remote workers are more productive, so on a good day you can call it a day at hour 4. YMMV

Working more hours would pay a toll on one's ability to keep delivering tasks with the same focus and quality.

> It's well-known (and documented) that remote workers are more productive

Can you please provide a link or evidence of this?

You can just google "remote workers are more productive"

Doesn't work much these day I believe.

I think the only time there was a road for a true part-time in software development was during the time around 2005-2008 when first mainstream businesses just got hit with web 2.0 bug and began to think of having something other than a static website.

Back then, a good profile on any freelancing website would be scoring you $50-$100 per hour any time you want. And if you were already living in some cheap country in global south, that was a recipe for carefree life for a few years.

Yeah it's getting harder, IMO one has to level up his game accordingly.

Worth noting that high-profile teams rarely seek 'remote web freelancers', that kind of niche has kind of become synonymous with cheap/low-quality work.

Better to frame yourself under a different lens.

Especially in terms of resentment, it seems risky to conflate "remote" and "part time", especially without very clear boundaries. This is exactly the fear many managers have about remote work: that it gradually slides into part time work. It's not at all generally accepted that if you can do "a days work" in three hours, you get to take the rest of the day off.

If you want to decouple hours spent from your earnings without risking resentment, you need to find a way to bill firm fixed price for well-defined deliverables. This is very difficult and risky, to say the least (but very valuable if you can pull it off).

I don't agree with the assertion that a negotiated part time agreement with clearly defined boundaries ("John works Tuesdays, Thursday and Friday and isn't expected to be available on email or Slack, except under the same kinds of emergencies when we'd call people on weekends") necessarily created resentment outside of how other workplace status dynamics might create resentment -- meaning, something your boss should manage, and if they can't, that person shouldn't be your boss.

> it gradually slides into part time work.

I would reword it as "the remote worker is getting more productive". As long as the measured outcome (which I recommend keeping track of) remains constant, invested hours don't matter that much.

Of course, if you repeatedly ask to the employer "is it OK to work less hours", he will hesitate. Just don't ask, while at the same time ensure you deliver constant meaningful work and document that activity.

Personally I'm serious about crafting meaningful git commits and logging my daily activity.

Also important to be willing to work a longer day when you've wasted time in improductive situations (e.g. discarded code, silly bug hunts). Employer shouldn't necessarily pay for our blunders (which is why sometimes daily rate is more 'honest' than hourly).

Also note that I specifically point that you cannot just sit 3 consecutive hours and disappear the rest of the day. I doubt many can do focused high-quality work without periods of rest. Also important to interact with the team.

> As long as the measured outcome (which I recommend keeping track of) remains constant, invested hours don't matter that much.

I don't think most employers would agree with that. If I'm a "normal" full-time, salaried employee, I'm expected to work 5 days a week, usually for at least 8 hours a day. If I'm able to become more efficient or automate parts of my job away, my employer would expect me to take on more work or responsibility, not work fewer hours a day. (You're free to argue that this isn't fair, but I'm just talking about reality here.)

If I were to work a reduced schedule of 3 or 4 days a week, the same thing would apply.

Of course, if the negotiation resulted in more of a contracting role, as in being paid for milestones and project delivery, then time-spent-in-chair shouldn't matter.

The grandparent post seemed to be talking of a sort of a hybrid of FTE/salaried and consulting, so perhaps your advice might apply to that sort of thing, but I don't think what you're saying would apply to a traditional salaried position, even after negotiating a reduced work-week.

I think it's pretty normal for remote employees (not contractors) to not be expected to work 8 solid hours per day at home.

Have specifically asked so in quite a few job interviews worldwide. Most common reply is literally "we don't care as you do what you have to do"

Most folks who have participated in remote workflows for long enough know that a lot of 'waste' is elliminated by working interruption- and meeting-free, so 8h/d becomes an exhausting workload.

I'm an SRE at Google. I switched to 3 days/week (Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday) on January 1, 2018, and it's been insanely great. Every weekend is now a 4-day weekend. I now have the time and energy to make meaningful progress on personal projects on which I was previously stuck for a long time.

As expected, my annual vacation time (along with my salary, bonus, stock grants, and stock vesting) is 60% of what it was when I was full-time. However, holidays that fall on Monday or Friday (of which there are about 8 per year for U.S. Googlers) now generate comp time for me to take whenever I want. Furthermore, about once per quarter I have a week-long oncall shift which requires me to be in the office for 8 hours on Monday and Friday; each of these oncall shifts generates 2 comp days for me to use later (a total of 8 comp days per year).

Working only Tue/Wed/Thu means I can go away for 11 consecutive days by taking only 3 days off. So far this year I have:

- taken a 10-day trip to Japan,

- taken a 10-day trip to Iceland and the UK, and

- done a 10-day silent meditation retreat.

Google has HR policies that support flexible work schedules. I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case at most of the larger tech companies.

Hmm, interesting. How can one find such openings at Google? Is it common for regular engineering positions as well?

> How can one find such openings at Google?

I don't understand the question. Maybe it will help if I explain how I initiated my switch to part-time. What I did was talk with my manager about it. My manager was supportive and helped me fill out the requisite HR forms.

Other than being part-time, my job description is the same as it was before.

> Is it common for regular engineering positions as well?

Being part-time is not common for SREs (site reliability engineers; what I am). It's not common for SWEs (software engineers; what you might be referring to as "regular engineer[s]") either.

Google's flexible work policies (internal link: go/flexibility) are company-wide. The policies don't distinguish between the SRE and SWE roles.

That really does sound insanely great...I need to get to a situation like that.

What about compensation?

Do you get 60% of previous salary? Do you work 24 hours (8h/day)?

> Do you get 60% of previous salary?

Yes. I already said that.

Importantly, my healthcare benefits didn't change (i.e. they are 100% of what they were previously).

> Do you work 24 hours [per week] (8h/day)?

Yes.

Is it possible to get hired directly into a flexible work schedule? This sounds really nice!

I don't know, but I guess the answer is "yes". Can't hurt to ask during the application process.

Last fall, after having been laid off from a high-pressure, 90-hours-a-week job, I joined a company that has a liberal remote work culture. At first I went to the office every day. Then I skipped the commute each time I saw that the NYC subway was having a sh_t day. After two months I was down to two days a week, and after three months I stopped coming in altogether unless I felt like it, which happens to be once every couple of weeks.

The amount of time I spend working is anywhere between 4 and 6 hours per day, sometimes less. There are days when I arrive at the 3-hour mark and feel that I won't make progress that day due to needing time to meditate on a problem. Other days I'll code straight through dinner without so much as a toilet break. Ultimately, I determine my own schedule on a tactical basis, and am more productive as a result.

I joke that I do 8 hours of work in a 4-hour workday, but this isn't really a joke: it's an understatement. I get more done than ever before in my career.

Are you hiring?

Yep. Again and again, I hear this from people who work less hours: they get more productive.

I hope this can be extended to other places. This is one of the major issues in my life. I can't stand the absurd pressure to "produce" solutions. I need time to make things right, when I reach that point I will go 300%.

Antirez just posted this relevant thread:

"I don't want to claim I've accomplished a lot in my life, but somewhat I was able to work in Security for N years, create two startups, write some OSS, and later focus on Redis. I've never worked more than 40 hours, and I struggle to reach 40:"

https://twitter.com/antirez/status/999199204680577025

I only spend huge amounts of time working with other people's code (with greater-than-linear growth depending on how bad it is)

But I almost never work 40 hours when I'm only working on my code.

One important argument I always use is (I also work 30h/w):

"You get my most productive 30 hours per week. You know those hours where you somehow don't feel productive and you end up doing stuff that wasn't really worth it ? I don't work those hours."

I don't find 40 hours / week to be any trouble at all for me, but I always take a 3 day weekend. Flexible work hours is the key.

I found working 4 10s was not good at all, but working 2 12s and 2 8s works out great. I'm a morning person, so I get to work early, before rush. The 12 hour days, I leave after rush. The 8 hour days I leave before rush. So, I pretty much skip rush hour, which is life changing.

I started doing this after working a year or two of 60 hour weeks. I found I could do 12 hour days pretty well, but had no desire to work 12 hours every day. I've got relatives who are farmers and a 12 hour day seems normal to them. Only working 8 hours in a day seems incomprehensible to them.

I'm happy working full time, 40 or so hours a week.

What I would really like is more leave, even the option to take more unpaid leave. I get 20 days leave a year, plus 10 days of public holidays. I wish I could just have 30 days of leave, plus the option to take more unpaid days off if I wanted to. I'm amazed that the standard for the USA is closer to 10 days, with no legal minimum. I'd go stark raving mad with only 10 days of annual leave.

Flexi time would be nice, the ability to work longer weeks in exchange for that extra time being converted into annual leave. Work an extra 5 hours a week for 6 months and that's an extra 16 days of annual leave.

Have you considered Europe? Legal minimum in the EU is 28 including public holidays, but only my first job and my university industrial experience year were that low, and even then they added an extra day to your annual allowance for every year you worked there. Most are 24-26, and I’ve seen one place in Cambridge that offered 25 +/- 5 as standard flexibility, buying unused holiday or selling more holiday as you needed it.

I have considered it, yes. I'm thinking of moving next year, having an EU passport certainly makes it easy.

What I really want, which is not what most companies want, is to be able to pick up a 6-8 month contract, then spend 3-6 months traveling and doing my own thing, and then picking up another contract. Unfortunately, I'm short a few years of experiences to do that.

As with a shorter workweek, it's possible to negotiate that, with basically same techniques.

Hi, author of the post here. If you enjoyed this interview, want to become a part-time programmer (or even just work 40 hours a week), but still don't think you can do it, I wrote a book—The Programmer's Guide to a Sane Workweek—that will how help you:

1. Become more valuable as an employee.

2. Improve your negotiating skills.

3. Negotiate the specifics of what you want from your job.

You can read more about it here: https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/

I work from home, and 40 hours is a LOT - I don't remember when I've worked (for others) 40 hours per week last time.

Now, when I get to visit a client office, work there full-time for a week or two - it seems quite easy - a LOT of time is spent on quick talks, drinking coffee, eating snacks, etc... the actual work I do there is around 3-4 hours per day (but I get paid for 8) - and this is a small company, where everyone knows everyone and also it is transparent to what's everybody is doing or working during the day. And at 18:00 the office is closed no matter what you're doing - I remember I wanted to finish one "if" statement but I had to left at "if (...) { " - continued the rest of the block next day. And I've actually found that to be quite nice - people really do have a life outside the work.

I find it really interesting that he said only one interviewer turned him down flatly. In my experience there’s been almost no willingness to negotiate - it messes with HR systems a lot is a frequent answer I get. Truthfully, I feel like if you’re not at a consulting or contract gig you need to be very specialized to pull this off.

Most larger organizations (>50 technical staff) seem to avoid anyone that doesn’t fit the mold.

I have the expectation that this works if you do it remotely. I imagine your other colleagues would find it weird or unfair if you were the first to leave office every day. Especially since they won't know you're getting paid less, unless you make a public announcement.

You are also likely still getting paid more. 80% of an offer for someone who can negotiate 20% of the year off is still likely to be more enticing pay than anyone working a tonne of free overtime.

Oh, definitely. I find the time off more valuable than the extra money.

Of course there's the other way (it's easier to get forgiveness than permission): do more work than expected in less than 40 hours in the office, and see if anyone notices. One of the most productive stretches of my career was spent in this mode.

Definitely this one, and this is what a lot of people do at bigger companies BTW. I know a couple of those people myself.

They "Work from home" on Mondays and/or Fridays and do very easy work, or commit//send stuff that they managed to do beforehand to generate some easy activities.

If you are performing and producing what you should, this shouldn't matter, but here we are anyways...

If you have a manager checking how much units of work you do, you should look for something else.

Asking for a friend here ;-) What if you can't do what's expected, even in 40+ hours? Sometimes the next ticket is "fix something that is unfixable" and until you've spent a long time on it, had your soul sucked out and stomped on, you aren't moving on to anything else. The only thing that counts is "hours wasted on the task". As in "welp, you've spent 60 hours on this, I guess it is unfixable".

My friend worries that if they weren't warming the seat for ages, they would be seen as useless because there are weeks where they just seem to get nothing done.

You should tell your friend to look around for a better job. It’s amazing to me how work hours are relative. 25 at a terrible place is worse than 50 at an awesome one.

Yes, you just "know" when you've entered an unhealthy employee/employer relationship. It bleeds over into your personal life, and makes it difficult to focus on the actual work.

Exit these relationships.

It's such a shame that often the only/primary axis companies are used to negotiating over is pay. As a young person without children, I've been at a point where pay has been more than double the amount I spend (without even cutting down on spending, though I'm not a big spender), so free time is so much more valuable to me than pay is.

Turn your money into time like this guy did. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

(After only scanning that article:) Unfortunately, my time now is also more valuable to me than my time later. I'd much prefer working half weeks for 40 years over working full weeks for 20.

Once you understand and are persuaded of how everything hinges on your savings rate, this gives greater confidence to take sabbaticals, or explore other options including self-employment. Temporarily dropping your spend rate is both a useful exercise and a way to extend things even farther.

According to that article, if your savings rate is 50% of your take-home pay, you're done in 16 years. If your savings rate is 64%, you're done in 11 years. Both of these assume you're starting from zero.

I'm still working, but I've found the mindset change from that article (and many others on his site) to be extremely useful when choosing how to spend my time and money now. Think of it as just another tool in your toolkit for making the most of life, both now and in the future.

Right, I think that's absolutely the right approach: try to think carefully about what amount of money you really care about spending, and exchange the rest for free time (or at least: time spent the way you'd prefer to spend it) - now if you can, later if not.

The best part-time gig I had was working 4 hours a workday remotely. I'd start at 5 and finish by 9, which left the rest of the day to do anything I wanted. I got as much done as the other (mobile) developer who worked full-time.

I find 40 hours a week to be tolerable if I'm working remotely. Unfortunately I have a 2.5 hour commute for my current gig, and it's sucking up all my personal time.

This is what I'm doing right now; I work four days a week. It is amazing and I don't think I will go back to full-time unless there is an extraordinarily compelling opportunity (and that doesn't mean FANG).

One benefit is I'm able to shift my off-days to Fridays and the next Monday to get a 4 day weekend, every once in a while. For example, I have a friend overseas visiting me this weekend; and that's what I'm doing.

There are a couple others here who are on non-FT contracts, so it hasn't been that odd.

I'm curious how 75% time works. Would you work 4 days a week, with one of the days being a quarter shorter?

The person I interviewed in that link who has been doing this for 15 years has seen many different arrangements depending on the company's needs, HR rules, and the like:

1. X hours per week, spread out however.

2. Specific day off per week (so I guess you could do 1.5 days off?)

3. Lots of extra guaranteed unpaid leave/vacation that he could use as he wanted.

I've done 35 hours a week, and I just have longer and shorter days, based on personal needs, when I have meetings, the weather, etc. :)

I worked part-time during almost all of my programming career, maybe 17 years. One job was 3 days a week, another 9 months out of 15, currently it's two weeks out of three.

If you want to do something like that, my only advice is to stubbornly refuse to work more. I always make that clear before the first interview.

I like this idea, but for me the challenge with being a part-time employee is that from my experience you become a part-time 'person' in management's eyes and that can be difficult in terms of promotion.

With a previous manager when I worked as a Part-Time Engineer, I wrestled (internally and externally) with the fact that my contributions were viewed as less because of the total hours spent but the quality and complexity of the tasks I completed were no different to that of many of my peers that were promoted before I managed to receive the same recognition.

Going the other way (excess hours), in many teams that I have worked, I have observed that those with more outside commitments or interests seem to do less well in a team than those that choose to spend their time on work tasks outside of normal office hours no matter how effective/brilliant/capable they are.

I've not made up my mind if this is a small or massive problem. I guess if you REALLY want a promotion you will be prepared to put the hours in, but what about if you can't do this due to your given situation? (eg: a single parent?) What about burn out? What about people who are succeeding with dumb work practices?

Part-timing on a contract type position rather than salary would be a pretty good fit in my mind and I have seen this work well based on the huge grand total of two examples I have seen in 10 years of work.

Going self-employed is always an option if you can't find an employer that is able to offer you a not-40-hour-a-week job, although often enough companies expect their consultants to also work an X amount of hours a week.

I'm half-time (18.75 hours per week) but got my job by originally being full-time and putting in a flexible working request - which you have a legal right to do in the UK if you have children under a certain age and have worked there a certain period of time. No right to have flexible working granted but if they refuse the reason has to fall into one of a certain set of categories. Obviously not a good way to get a part-time from scratch though!

The requirement is just that you have to have worked there for a certain period of time - no need to be a parent [0]. Employers are allowed to reject a request on the grounds of a sound business reason [1] which is pretty broad.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/flexible-working

[1] http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1616

This is the most common way for people to get part-time work. Don't even need legal right to do so, though it helps, e.g. I know people who have done this in US where your rights as an employee are... not as good.

Here's why: you've been at company for a while. You know the code, you know the dependencies, you know the business logic, you know who to talk to, you know the mindset, you know the priorities. Replacing you is expensive. Even if they can hire someone with same skills on paper, there's a long and costly organization-specific ramp-up for most companies.

Thus, a good rational manager (not all of them are, obviously) will prefer to have you part-time than to have you leave. Which gives you negotiating leverage.

The longer you've been at a job, the more valuable you are, the better this goes. Even better if it's a tight hiring market, like now.

(I write about this at length in my book, Programmer's Guide to a Sane Workweek: https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/.)

Hi guys

I think that this is actually my first posting in here. I have though been reading a lot of posts in here and love the forum. However, I do not know, if there are any "rules" about spam, please do tell me as I do not consider this as spam.

The reason why I choose to post now on this thread is, that this thread really leans up at what we are trying to do at Worklified, a startup trying to solve work-life balance for developers.

I have written a Medium post, goo.gl/89moUC, where I go into dept what Worklified is at this point.

If you are interested in the idea about a better work-life balance please do sign up here https://www.worklified.com/, so we can get a feeling about the interest for this subject.

Thanks

/Joachim

I have just signed a contract to do this. 32 hours a week. I will still need to hash with HR out how this will work with i.e. bank holidays and such, but I am looking forward to that :-)

I really want to switch to part time work and this article is really motivating to take the leap. My skill set is in desktop support and I want to free up time for studying programming. Right now the job I have is fairly intense with a weekly ticket count regualarly reaching over 100 at times.

I'm nervous about asking my boss for less time at work, but at this point I'm prepared to quit just to get some of my sanity back.

I've had luck seperating the hours of work needed to be completed and the amount of work needing to be completed. If you start to automate aspects of your job you can be more productive than most folks in the office while working a fraction of the time.

So, one of our talented employees was telling me that he asked to be switched from fulltime to parttime, the previous company let him switch but kept the compensation fulltime. He was moved remote to not cause resentment among existing employees. Guess who wants to see others leaving early that too with full compensation? New VP came and axed his position after 6 months.

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