> Meetings and collaboration to figure out what to build, discuss issues etc. if these take up 10 hours a week [...]
There's your problem.
There's your problem.
If my experience is anything to go by, this sort of self-directed collaboration—think "design discussions" rather than "meetings" or "ceremonies"—will end up far more productive for everyone involved.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
If you need developers to spend so much time ideating and figuring out how and what to build, you’re mismanaging those developers imo.
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.
Fix your management and you'll be able to hire part time easily.