Show HN: Side Quest – An aggregator for not full-time tech jobs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Side Quest – An aggregator for not full-time tech jobs

sidequestjobs.com

401 pointsryry105 comments

Hey all!

I recently had some personal stuff which made it necessary for me to cut back on the hourly commitment I could make to work, but found it difficult to find contract, part-time, freelance (anything not full-time) jobs through traditional means, so I built sidequestjobs.

It's an aggregator, so it gets jobs from various sources and curates them into part time, freelance, or contract based positions. I'm hoping to add more sources over the next coming weeks, but I wanted to post it to get some feedback now.

Thanks for checking it out!

I worked for a company once that was very remote friendly. You could disappear for a month and then pop into Slack and ask, what’s next in the issues queue? Then work on issues for however long you wanted, billed hourly at a generous rate. Several times I disappeared for weeks to travel and climb and was always welcomed back.

That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was structured this way.

Wow that sounds great. Were you be able to charge overtime?

And since you said "worked", what made you decide to stop popping back to the issues queue at this particular org?

I never hit 40 hours a week. Thirty seemed like a good balance between work/life. Eventually, working on a CRUD app didn't peak my interest anymore and I moved onto some other projects. Company was sold a few years later.

How did you track your time? I kind of love this idea but time tracking is a pain in the ass. Seems like maybe you could use "day" or "half day" granularity?

You need to get used to it.

Use a kitchen timer, then every time you finish something input the time precisely.

There's an app and site called Toggl that makes this easier.

It actually complicates things in my experience. Nothing beats a physical item with a stop/start button

I used RescueTime when I was freelancing. It's an app you install and it tracks what you're working on down to the second. It works by reading the titlebar of your current app, so it works well for development, and you can set up filters in the web dashboard to divide by projects and so on. Of course there's a privacy trade-off to consider as it's a SaaS.

TimingApp is a similar alternative with a local-only option. If I recall correctly, the syncing feature is opt-in and only required if you’d like to sync activity from multiple computers.

I typically use 15 or 30 minute granularity, and I remember to log stuff multiple times per day (not every few minutes, but at least a couple) Time trackers that watch what you're doing are handy, sometimes, until you take a call away from the computer. You just had a 30 minute meeting about something - you're not at a computer. Did it not happen because it wasn't logged by an app tracking your screen/windows? Of course it did - you just have to get used to doing it. Tracking down to a minute is generally pointless for some (most?) situations - people generally care about the results/outcome, and allocating time to various buckets shouldn't be overly important.

I HAVE been in situations where logging 19 minutes to project X and 37 minutes to project Y was 'crucial' because 'accuracy was vital' but... damnit - I don't stop thinking about your project just because I'm not sitting in front of some time tracking app. I avoid those situations wherever possible now (and it's quite possible).

> tracking is a pain in the ass

It becomes a lot easier when you need to do it to get paid.

I loathe time tracking for internal metrics, but if I need to do it to get paid the motivations change and it just becomes part of the workflow.

I use org-mode. I have a .org file for each company, then TODO bullets for whatever task, usually copied directly from Jira or etc. Org-clock-in when I start my day, org-clock-out when I finish, estimate an extra hourish for whatever slack messages I answer throughout the day.

I used to be super granular about it until I realized I was billing the equivalent of 8 hours of work as a full time engineer, as 2.5 hrs or whatever, due to the nature of granular billing. Turns out I'm hella unproductive when I spend all day at the office. So I switched to more like dedicating some chunk of my day to work, then billing that chunk, even if some of the time I was making coffee or like, going on a quick walk break.

In all honesty with how much more productive I am as a contractor I could probably justify billing flat 8 hours a day but I'm just too honest or something.

What was the company?

It was a crypto exchange during a BTC boom period (2016-2017)

Oh good lord, just when I think I've found the perfect job, you have to go and shatter my comfortable illusions!

There is greener grass to be found everywhere. It tends to wilt once you find it.

I had an analogous arrangement. I would pop in and out, identifying/building high impact projects, in a mix of web dev, PM, and analyzing data.

I was usually available for brainstorming/chats during my sometimes months of off cycle, including at non-regular hours. I'm hopelessly neural atypical with on/off cycles of productivity and haven't found a way to make myself more regular.

I was paid as a full time employee despite my schedule, with a mutually agreed upon below-market offer in exchange for that freedom. USD 130k/y with full benefits and a much smaller than normal equity grant.

That arrangement lasted 7 years before moving on to new opportunities.

Wow, this offhand comment reminds me that there's a vast gulf between US compensation and elsewhere... 130k/y as a "below market" offer...

I doubled my salary between last year and this one and I'm still not even halfway to 130k/y (and I'm happy because it's remote).. .and I live in the most expensive city in South America (more expensive than US midwest & Texas, cheaper than NY / SF of course).

I thought USD 130k/year was a good offer even in the US, I think it's roughly what the Texas-based developers I work with make.

130k is a good non-FAANG offer for typical developer roles, as far as I’m aware.

But if you go FAANG and/or atypical role, the limit is much higher.

This is pretty much my current arrangement and it really is a great way to work. Just today I popped into Slack after a week-long break, completed some low-hanging fruit issues and assigned myself a big one to work on for the rest of the week. Our boss occasionally sends us priority updates and of course there are high-priority issues that need to be dealt with immediately by someone, but for the most part, it really doesn't matter if I work full days for a week straight or if I spend two or three days working "overtime" and enjoy a 4-day weekend.

Besides being generally nice, it's also a total godsend when you have other things going on - I'm currently working towards a CS degree and there's no way I could've balanced the two if I had a "regular" job.

We're one of the few industries where we are not only able to work like this, but also have the tools to do it efficiently (because we built them!). Yet, inexplicably, the majority of companies still insist on cubicles, strict working times and constant synchronous communication.

To be clear, there are definitely disadvantages to this and we need to be very careful to not let this idea turn into a gig economy type situation where if the company doesn't have work for us, we don't get paid (stable pay is often far more important than how high it is), where an individual's slice is too small to live off of and where people turn into expendable "work processors", but if done correctly, this really does seem like the way forward.

Any chance you might be willing to share the business domain or your role?

I’m at the half way mark of a MS in CS and trying to get a feel for the commonality of flexible positions in the industry, particularly for non-senior roles.

I’ve slowly come to realise that:

1. There’s a large latent pool of talent that can only do part time/flexible jobs but aren’t even looking because so few are available.

2. The total economic loss from such jobs being rarely offered is massive.

Consider women who stop working for a year or two due to having a child or children. Many are only able to return part time at first. There’s so few part time jobs in software that many choose not to return to the industry. By the time they can return full time they feel so out of touch, from just a few years away, that they never return at all.

Same happens with people who are injured, temporarily disabled etc. The demand of full time only (and often more hours on top again) means that the industry misses out on retaining a lot of skilled talent.

And yes chronic conditions and disabilities are also very disadvantaged by the requirement of full-time only work.

But as cool as the name sidequest is - I don’t think it’s quite right. Because for most people of the scenarios listed above this would not be a sidequest but a main quest.

Awesome work though. And good luck!

+1 Just for the name. Side quest is exactly what such a thing should be called.

Thanks! I play a little too much wow during the pandemic.

Hmm.. It'a already the name of quite a popular side-loading app/store for VR games. https://sidequestvr.com/

It's a pretty generic term, though.

Yeah. It's also used in some RPG games to denote quests which are done independently of the main quest.

Pretty sure that's the origin.

I saw this, but not until after I had purchased the domain. I always get too excited and commit before researching.

Foremost, congratulations on the launch; I am a fan of more diverse ways of working, and more diverse ways of upending the recruiting mess in use today

I wanted to mention two things for your consideration:

1. it would be stellar to have Atom/RSS instead of mailing list subscription. I don't need more email in my life to ignore :-)

1. related to that, it appears there are job tags but one cannot click on them in order to find more jobs tagged in that way. I said "related to that" because it would also be stellar to be able to subscribe to just the tags of interest, versus the firehose of all jobs (extra bonus points for `/feed/java+spring+whatever.atom` style multi-tag feed subscription)

Congratulations, I love it! To me it would be very valuable to have a filter on location requirements - if you have such information available of course. Like, who needs office presence (and where), who is okay part-time, who is offering full remote... but once again, great thing!

Great idea. I'll get on this. Thanks!

One of my predictions/hopes is that part-time work becomes far more prevalent. In addition to the benefits already mentioned here, it would be great for people who want to be e.g. entrepreneurs or independent researchers. Wrote a bit about this here: https://jacobobryant.com/p/what-im-trying-to-do/#1-help-buil...

Also relevant: https://sahillavingia.com/work. I'd like to make a collection of part-time success stories like this.

This is also good for people with disabilities, such as chronic fatigue, chronic pain, or any others that limit how many hours per week you can work.

These sort of people deserve a good chance at happiness in getting to work a fulfilling well paying remote job.

So much work could be structured this way. My company had a regular motley of random tech work that could support a queue of grab em in the next month tasks.

For example, there is a need to add code coverage calculation to a bunch of repos. That is my work. I know nothing about it. Any developer is as equally qualified to do it as I am.

Yet I will be pulled off an actual project when we already have a dev shortage to do this. We could benefit from outsourcing it instead.

I wish recruitment platforms would start classifying the level of remoteness instead of a blanket remote allowed statement.

These days remote often means work from home due to COVID in the time zone of the physical office. Presumably won't be remote forever.

Remote used to mean people would be working asynchronously, and it didn't matter where you were physically situated and what hours of the day you were online. Obviously this only tends to work for places that are results driven as opposed to ones that care about the number of hours you put in.

Good point. I imagine there must be ongoing research to define the most relevant (frequent, desirable) "classes" of remote work.

If there's isn't, then large moderated communities like HN and Stackoverflow are in an unique position to survey folks and help define these classes. If the "Who's Hiring" threads here adopted a "remote work classification" catalogue, I think it'd catch on easily

This type of site is what always has me considering moving “up” in the stack.

Remote work on either hardware or systems level programming (embedded) is almost non existent. Remote and not full-time is even rarer.

SaaS could be a good transition, there are quite a few SaaS shops using C++ for example. Or possibly backend if you're willing to do some cloud based side projects.

Embedded is a lot of fun but IMHO there is more opportunity and compensation up the stack.

> there are quite a few SaaS shops using C++...

Which one?

> Remote work on either hardware or systems level programming (embedded) is almost non existent. Remote and not full-time is even rarer.

The trick is to do such things as your own business, i.e. freelancing or consulting (t's all in how you present it), doing projects for clients.

This can definitely work for hardware and systems level programming.

Then you set your own schedule and your own rules, and clients don't even expect you to come to their office. They expect you to have your own, and the "home office" engineering consultant is quite common.

Yes, I've started doing this, but living in Barcelona it's quite a challenge. There's not that many local opportunities and getting leads out of the country so far has yielded very little for me.

Big hardware companies provide "work from home" option. I use to work for a company many of whose employees worked remotely.

Companies like Google, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft etc provide work from home option. And they do work on systems level programming.

I know, but in most places "remote" actually means "somewhere in US". I'd be willing to take a significant paycut to work at some of those companies remotely.

Always thought that someone should do something like this but for part-time marketing/comms/content jobs. I'm sure there are men in the following position too, but in my circles there are loads of 30-40yo women returning to work after maternity leave and looking for 2-3 days/week, often in marketing and related jobs.

On the other side of the coin, there'd be a lot of small businesses sick of paying an agency but unable to justify a full-time role. Great match, IMO.

This rarely works in fields where they hire full time salary employees. The reason being that the part time employee is still very expensive in a lot of fixed ‘per employee’ cost areas like hardware and licenses combined with the fact that the full time salary person is supposed to be available to get the job done even it that involves some overtime or just off hours work, things part time people are notorious for being unable to do (the reason they wanted part time in the first place, they are unavailable).

This really narrows the scope of what employers are willing to hire part time for. Contractors are usually called instead.

I'm talking small business. Hardware would be employee's own laptop. Software in those fields would be a pittance.

If I was a bastard who wanted value for money, I'd hire those part-time mums. From what I've seen, they end up feeling obliged to work out of hours, so you'd effectively get 0.8 FTE while paying for 0.4-0.6. Roles like social media or content writing with scheduling involved instantly creeps into days off. Horrible approach from an employer, but like I said, if I was a bastard.

On the flip side, if you want the best part-time moms, pay well, supply the hardware, and be very flexible with when work hours happen.

I think hardware and licenses are minimal costs in most businesses. Desk space is probably more. But I think even that isn't the real reason businesses like full time. It's probably cultural, not wanting to have to hire loads of people, and the difficulty of splitting some jobs between multiple people.

It's worked for me for the past 10 years, part-time in engineering at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health. Not wanting or being able to work a lot of hours doesn't necessarily mean not being flexible on hours. I've known a number of other part-time people at e.g. Google, and they were generally people I'd trust to get stuff done. Often they're time-management masters, due to necessity.

Sure, there's more overhead per working hour. But there's also more mulling-things-over-in-the-shower time per working hour, so for creative work, one can be a lot more effective than you'd think. I also get more sleep and do all my appointments and errands in non-working hours, which improves my duty cycle and performance.

Were you working at an hourly rate at those companies? A salary at reduced hours/pay?

Salary at all of them. Alphabet has a standard mechanism to scale down your salary/bonus/vesting by your duty cycle, and you get full benefits if you're at at least 50%. For Elemeno it was a more custom arrangement.

I suspect a fair few of the short to long-term contract positions I see advertised are to cover someone's parental leave.

Content though definitely. I tend to see more short-term/part-time content creation positions than I do eng ones.

Great idea!

I feel like there is a gap in the market for experiences engineers who want to work for good rates on well defined projects and occasionally (less than 1 month) and don't bother with client management.

I've seen some people charge good hourly rates on Upwork but from talking to them there is a lot of friction / time spent in managing clients, chasing payments, filtering out all the low paid jobs.

It would be nice to have a platform that does product / client management for you and just use you for your coding skills.

Yeah I actually built this after having a bit of frustration trying out freelancing platforms. What surprised me is as a freelancer, on some of them, I have to pay to apply to gigs. I mean I get it, but it still doesn't seem right.

The toggles filters are driving me nuts, as it stands, it unclear what the checked state is. One would assume that when the "handle" is on the right side, however, the color coding suggest otherwise. Congrats on your launch.

Looks like it's all-on by default and you're toggling items off .. which means the colour coding is ok but the ux may be counter-intuitive for some? Not to mention the white highlighting looks like text inputs (the subtitle could easily be mistaken for a search bar).

Personally, I'd have gone with an "all on" toggle that gets deactivated if you activate any of the individual categories. Not a deal breaker.

Love this idea. I just went through a painful search for someone and finally found a good match (I think), but it would’ve been fantastic to have this a few weeks ago. I look forward to trying it out sometime

This is a wonderful idea! (I like the name too BTW.)

Unfortunately for me, I've never been able to do freelance or part-time work because I've always needed healthcare coverage...and living in the U.S, it is much cheaper (but definitely *NOT* cheap) to get it through full-time employment. But, hot damn, if i lived in a country that provided healthcare, man, would i jump at the chances to do this kind of work!

Regardless, for those that can take advantage of this type of work, this is a great move! Kudos and best of luck!!

I wish the posts quantified their compensation.

I have spare time for side gigs, but I'm not cheap, and I don't want to put my information out there (by applying) only to get a lousy offer.

Love the concept. I'm fresh out of college, so I'm more than happy with full time work at the moment, but I'm definitely hoping to FIRE (or more like FIPT) within 10 or so years if things go well. Working 20 hours a week sounds fantastic. Enough to give me something to do on a regular basis, but also enough to let me do whatever I want to do, whether that be freelance development, or a new hobby.

Best of luck! I spent most of my twenties using all the cash I had on travelling. I don't regret it at all, but some of my friends showed me their retirement accounts recently and I'm definitely a little concerned.

I'd love if North America would get behind the 4 day work week. I might even make a category for employers offering that.

Interesting, I didn’t know big companies like eBay would actually consider a part time employee. Do they really mean that, or are they signaling they seek an intern/student?

The availability of part time work always felt like a package that included a tiny shop, cheap clients, and insane amount of cheap international labor competition, and only available through platforms that promote all three things (upwork, etc).

I've got a feeling some of the posts that do mention "part-time" are just signalling, which is why I have a ton of them marked "part-time possible" instead of just part-time.

If you have any better classification ideas I'm open to hearing them too!

I wish you the best of luck and will be keeping a bookmark to check back frequently. I would love some part time work but having done the consultant grind for a long time I’m just exhausted by the process of finding it. I would love a marketplace I could keep tabs on and pick things up when they make since.

Thanks! And I feel you. Occasionally I've wanted to pick up some stuff part-time for some extra cash and finding it is few and far between.

I created a mail-chimp subscription which I'll get up and running as soon as I figure out how, but anyone can sign up now.

I'm hoping to get a ton more filters though so people can only get notified about positions that actually interest them.

This is off to a great start!

Being able to filter by things like industry or type of role would make a huge difference too, or even search by keyword. I know that's additional layers of complexity, but it makes a huge difference when trying to find the right fit!

I really like the name. It immediately reminded of the side quests in RPG games to get more experience. And this is exactly that. Good job.

This is very timely for me so thanks for making it. Looking to cut back on my work hours and would like to find something part-time.

I think there's a fair few of us looking to do the same. The pandemic caused a huge shift in how I approach everything in life.

I had assumed this would be remote-friendly, but some postings don't have any info about remote-friendliness.

Thanks for making this! Would you mind sharing what sources this looks at, or are you keeping that proprietary?

A few I'd like to keep to myself, but if you poke around it's obviously no secret that stack overflow contributes a fair bit.

The code is some frankenstein monster of a few failed projects I've created over the years, but so far it's doing its job!

If you're using HN Who Is Hiring threads as a source at all, we ask people to link back to the original posts when they do that.

I feel like that's a good and fair practice in general when copying content on the web, but obviously what you do with other sources is between you and them.

Are you using HN? Just posted a part time / contract job there/here for our non-profit ... could do with some network effect :)

Looks pretty cool.

Also looks like a lot of companies are using it to find FT employees.

If so, you are saving them a lot of money on recruiter fees.

Good job!

Makes sense. Interviewing is a dumpsterfire. The only reliable way I've ever seen hiring work is to actually work with somebody on a project while paying them a fair market rate. Anything that faciliates that type of relationship, like for example having a bunch of developers working non-full time is the closest thing to an answer for hiring there is.

Is that front page all the jobs that are available? Is that why there's no search?

Full-time remote jobs don't require a full-time commitment

A lot of us have integrity. We would like part time work but are not willing to lie and steal from our employer to get it.

Employers are generally paying for your output not the hours spent.

I doubt that this is true.

And I'm not sure workers would want it to be true.

We know about the warehouse bots hounding humans into subservience/defeat.

I'm guessing the other bots are right behind -- just not quite as popular yet.

Definitely. It's a minor annoyance, but there's already slack bots pestering people for daily status / scrum updates, retros, and such.

Depends on the job. If you are in customer support, I don't want you to be working for another company and switch back and forth if you are full time employee. I want you focussed 100% on my company and hence you are paid as a full time employee.

Also, legally you are bound to work for a company according to contracts. I don't want you working for another company on the company's time. It introduces potential liability and risks especially if you are remote.

This is HN. It's a bunch of entitled mediocre programmers copy-pasting from stack overflow or automating the process via copilot. We're not talking about your average wage slave.

> Also, legally you are bound to work for a company according to contracts. I don't want you working for another company on the company's time. It introduces potential liability and risks especially if you are remote.

Just on this point, what you say is common but it's not universal. A lot depends on the type of contract.

I'm working full time at the moment. Yet my contract is structured to allow me to work on other companies' work if I want. And I control my time. It's quite explicit.

That clarity has a real positive payoff for both me and the company I'm working for. I'm more enthusiastic about the work in large part because this arrangement is compatible with me keeping open several research projects on ths side, and I'm confident if they lead anywhere, there isn't a conflict - and that the company people recognise this.

They wouldn't want me not working on the company's projects or not acting as a responsible person. But the whole attitude is to assume I am and support that in an adult-to-adult way. I really like that I feel we could talk freely about outside business interests at work.

It helps a lot that this is a mission-oriented open source company.

TL;DR it does depend on the job, but it's not an inevitable fact that remote work contracts bind a person's time exclusively, even during hours worked.

That would be awful considering how hard it is to measure a developer's output.

True enough, but a fair few require at least some commitment every day. For some that's not as easy of a commitment to make, but I totally see your point.

Sure they do - even if the workload does not demand that I sit in my chair in front of my screen all day, I do need to be committed to be available. If a project hits a crunch, or some crisis arises, and I say that I'm too busy with other commitments to do my job, that is a major problem.

They shouldn't, but it's clear we're not at that stage of societal development quite yet.

I could quite easily do 2 full time jobs simultaneously except that it would be impossible to get them not to schedule overlapping meetings. Wish I had a reliable way around that because I’d love to get paid twice as much for working maybe 50% more since I typically have a decent amount of idle time within a 9-5

Lol I thought that this was a spinoff of the sidequest app for the oculus quest (which is kind of an app store - really the main none for unofficial content).

Even though the name is very well chosen, expect this confusion to come up more...

Yep definitely. I'm thinking I'll brand it specifically as "Side Quest Jobs", and hopefully that'll create enough differentiation.

I'll definitely keep an eye on this! Much appreciated.

part-time tech work sounds like a good idea, but it seems to me most serious tech jobs can't be done part time

It's definitely not the norm, but I'm willing to bet it'll become more common especially after the pandemic.

That said - it's not just part-time jobs I'm curating, but full-time contract positions too!

Great idea mate! Kudos for building this!

Useful. Bookmarking to watch.

This is such a great idea.

Thanks! If you have any feedback on what to change/add/remove I'm happy to hear it!

I'd probably add geographic filters to the front page if you can - I'm guessing a bulk of the positions are remote, but not everyone may have the ability to hire or manage intercontinentally even in that case.

Fantastic name

Site is down

Not to be confused with 1st google result for "side quest": https://sidequestvr.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com