Ask HN: Is it possible to work part time?

Yes, I work part-time essentially all the time these days. (I run a small software business and consult on the side, average 20 hours or so a week, and take off pretty much any day I feel like.) If I wanted to, I could sustain this lifestyle indefinitely.

I'm told that many consultants do something like this. If full-utilization for a consultant is $200,000 (and that is by no means a ceiling), then 50% still puts your household in a pretty decent place to be. There exist some consulting opportunities where you can schedule arbitrary amounts of work over long time scales -- I have one client relationship where, if I wanted to bill four hours on Monday and four hours on Tuesday and then never touch the keyboard again, he'd be thrilled by that. There are other opportunities if you want to parachute in, work for two weeks, and then get back to living.

I think consulting + contracting is definitely the way to go.

When I consult through MetaOptimize, part of my goal is to work with smart people that I couldn't get otherwise, who work with me because they can set their own hours and work from where they want. This means that I have access, for example, to smart engineers + scientists in academia who want to keep doing research for pleasure but make spare cash on the side. (p.s. we're hiring people for part-time, remote work arrangements: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748833)

It's sad to see in the Who's Hiring post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1748045) that so few employers offer flexible work arrangements. I think a lot of top talent is lost this way.

How do you find your clients, and is your consulting/contracting work something a mere mortal could pull off too?

If I'm not too busy tonight with Business of Software prep work and dinner, I'll write something on my blog about it. I'm a mere mortal whose skillset is very, very difficult to hire for. That describes lots of people on HN, although the skillsets are probably different.

Cool. It would be interesting to hear more about this.

This is definitely possible. When I was consulting, I used to take off between Thanksgiving and New Years Day every year to do nothing but decompress and dick around with whatever new technology had caught my eye.

I had a day job for a little while when I had gotten tired of the constant sales cycle of consulting. They were more than happy to let me go part time because I brought a good plan to the table - I worked 20% less and took a 12% pay cut - they got the benefit of the fact that I was learning new stuff on the day that I wasn't in the office.

Anything is possible, all you have to do is make a plan.

Most people work part time anyway by procrastinating like mad :) It's not a bad a idea to put some structure to it. Protip: read The 4-hour Work Week.

Look at university jobs. They even have a special term for it: 50% FTE (Full-Time Equivalent)

I'm 100% FTE at a university right now doing sysadmin/programming/network stuff for a small team and will be moving far away and telecommuting at 50% FTE in a few months.

Like patio11 says, everything is negotiable. Additionally, I did a LOT of networking (the human kind) and it paid off. The guy who hooked me up with this isn't even a tech guy -- he knew people who needed one, though.

EDIT: 50% FTE includes full retirement and health benefits, too, in my situation.

Have you considered jumping on the app-store/mobile market bandwagon? It's working wonderfully for me, but it may take you a "full time" effort to find your sweet spot and start making a real living.

Can you share a little what your apps are about and how long it took to become sustainable? Not expecting vivid details, just some food for thought if that's ok.

Any tips on how to make money with this? Maybe You could email me if you don't want to broadcast your strategies?

Almost 50% of the people here in the Netherlands work part time, so I'd definitely say it's possible :)

I've done this quite a lot throughout my career as I attempted to bootstrap various businesses. there are, really, two ways of going about it:

1. scrounge for several short-term contracts.

The problem with this approach is that the life of the independent contractor is very feast or famine. My biggest problem was that I'd put effort into selling and then I'd end up with more hours of work than I wanted; then I'd pull back and I'd end up with not enough.

The advantage is that you can often charge higher hourly rates, and it doesn't require establishing yourself as difficult to replace at your current job.

You can pull it off, but there is a lot of sales and financial planning you need to do. I've personally supported myself this way for almost a year, but it was pretty difficult.

2. talk your current employer into letting you do the same work, only two or three days a week.

(this usually involves losing your health insurance and most other benefits)

If you want to work 20 hours a week for the same employer steady-like (as opposed to scrounging for work all the time) you will have to take the job full time and make yourself hard to replace, first; then you explain the situation to the boss. I've had pretty good luck doing this... better luck, in fact, than the aforementioned 'scrounging for several small contracts' strategy. I've probably done this for a total of two years of my career (while working on prgmr.com) and they were relatively easy years (vs. my year doing #1, which was really difficult, and involved eating a lot of tuna.) This strategy results in a steadier (and for me, larger) income, and because I'm really not that good at selling 'premium products' it usually results in me earning more per hour, if you count sales effort. Someone who is better at sales might have the opposite result, just 'cause part time catch as catch can gigs often can give you better hourly rates.

There are part-time gigs out there, but ime they're pretty rare, and afforded to people who've been with a company a while and 'earned' the right to the flexible working situation. Everyone else if f/t or contract.

I think you do need to move to freelance/contract work, and be firm in how you structure your work agreements. If it's MTW, with Th-Sun off, be up front about that. You'll be able to find gigs where they just need you 5-10 hours per week. Get 2-3 of those, work your time, then take time off - you should be good to go.

Most of those part-time gigs may not pay as well as f/t work, but you're looking for the time freedom, not maximized revenue anyway, right?

http://indieconf.com might be useful for you to attend, with respect to getting started in freelancing. We don't specifically have anything on 'going part time', but I'm sure some of the sessions can address that.

I tried a couple of times to get startups that were actively recruiting me to pay me 3/5 the salary in exchange for working 3 days a week. I wanted to devote some more time to some side projects and to just generally do whatever I wanted with my time. Sounds similar to your situation.

Nobody was interested in this. They would offer me very, very generous packages, but only for full time work. This part time idea was a no-go.

Startups have this dream that every employee is in ALL THE WAY. They think it will be bad for morale if the other employees are working their asses off and you don't show up now and then.

In my opinion, this is silly. Either my services are valuable or they're not. If they are, then they are also valuable in part. But, perhaps not.

I did it. My ecommerce company is doing well enough to comfortably support two people (ramen profitable --> pizza profitable --> casual dining profitable... we're just short of casual fine dining profitable, but if linear growth continues we'll be there in 6 months).

I'm not sure that I have very many useful lessons for other people, other than that it is possible to make money by selling stuff online while doing your own supply chain/order fulfillment. It took more than three years of SEO growth for us to hit critical mass.

Start by floating the idea by the people paying you. Your situation and the people in your life (clients, partners, etc) are not going to be the same as everyone else so it's not going to be very relevant to your specific situation. Try transitioning rather than starting from scratch. Perhaps it's better that instead of working 2 to 3 days a week, you're working 6 months out of the year. Try going down to 4 days a week, then 3, then 2, etc. The less drastic the change the more receptive people will be to it. It's also going to be better for you as you'll adjust to the new work schedule and income over a longer period of time. You mentioned cutting expenses, just do that, you don't have to ask anyone, less expenses will make the transition easier and is never a bad idea.

You should be prepared with the concessions you're willing to make to make this happen and this will likely be asked when you float the idea.

Also, consider that you've moved up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and re-evaluate a lot of things in your life that may no longer be relevant. I'd bet you're transitioning from esteem to self-actualization. This could make cutting expenses much easier than you think it is because you no longer derive much happiness from materialism.

I'm not sure if this is an option for you but if you average out my hours over the year, i work part time. I'm a contractor, I work 6-8 months of the year full time, and the rest of the time i do what i like.

It does mean i have to be financially disciplined, which thankfully (after learning the hard way) does now come easy to me. It also allows me the flexibility to not be tied down to one location throughout the entire year, which working 2-3 days a week does.

I have done what you suggest and having been living the "ideal life" for over 10 years. The biggest challenge was to our cost of living to about 30% of what it was on F/T work. First time I attempted the change, I got broke fast and had to get some contract work to pay off the bills and credit cards.

Once we established the required habits, we ended up with a small nest egg which has come into handy.

Although I do have to take on short consulting gigs to top up the fund, they are becoming less frequent as I we get better at managing.

The only difference is that P/T work for employers hasn't worked out as expected. Instead, I take on project oriented work which lets me bill for completed work and have deliverables and milestones that fit with the other activities. Sometimes it is tough to say No to work that has deadlines that would require working F/T or more to deliver on time.

I work full-time for an avionics company building simulation software. A couple of my co-workers are part-time.

I also work part-time for a startup. In this case, I'm more of a consultant; some weeks I'm very busy, other weeks I might do nothing at all.

Part-time work is out there, but it's not always floating on the top.

Yes, it's called 'contracting'.

No employer is going to let you work part time. There's a lot of time and expense involved in finding and maintaining programmers, and they'd rather have a full-timer instead.

As for starting your own company, those always take more time than a full-time job if you want to make any money.

No employer is going to let you work part time.

Stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a lawyer: this, like everything else in your contract and HR handbook, is ultimately negotiable. I mean, heck, my day job put it on the table while trying to prevent me from leaving, and I was a Japanese salaryman. (They had a couple of offers -- another one involved more work and less pay.)

Any particular company may be more committed to full time employment than a Japanese megacorp, but I strongly doubt (and have personal knowledge that it is not the case) that all companies are totally committed to full-time only.

"They had a couple of offers -- another one involved more work and less pay"

Just out of curiosity, what was the reasoning behind that? Was it something that could have ended up being a good position, or was it a hand-wavy type thing?

He heard my concerns about work/life balance and family issues, and thought "10 months on, 2 months off to go see family; you won't be a salaryman anymore, so material conditions will worsen as a matter of course" would be among the better alternatives to the company losing me.

I had more compelling options.

I'd just leave it at everything is negotiable. Agree with your sentiments 100%. Also, if something like that isn't negotiable then it's probably not a place you'd want to work anyway. It's very indicative of a "seat in chair = productivity" mentality.

I've definitely seen part time developer jobs when I worked at a university, they just don't pay very much.

Its certainly available. I'm working part time right now doing Java and JavaScript development. My employer has stated that they'd be happy to have me full time any time I'm avaliable, but they're also happy to have me at 20 hours per week. I work at a ten-person company which probably makes some of the difference. One of my previous jobs had similar circumstances.