Ask HN: Would it help to have an extra senior developer for just an hour a day?

I came up with two potential roles. One focused on management and one focused on assisting the boss/executive at a technical level.

1. "Ultra-low hours part-time senior developer" - This role is pretty straightforward. The idea is you have a talented, motivated, and flexible senior dev that you can plug in anywhere. I would assume that anyone who has been in management long enough knows of an employee who they would still want to keep on the team even if you only had them for one hour a day.

  - Work Mon-Fri, one hour a day.
  - Leverage experience and expertise where it matters most without paying a full salary with benefits.
  - Outside of the company bonus/incentive structure. It is clear to everyone that this is and will remain an ultra-low hours part-time position.
  - Imagine always having a smart competent employee who can hop on anything you need without derailing what the other employees are working on.
  - Potential ideas for work,
   - Manage these three developers for one hour a day for the next six months and work on this moonshot project.
   - Hop in on code reviews during this sprint.
   - Create and manage the company's social media/Github account.
   - Find me the best consultant for this upcoming project.
   - Create a new process for our CI/CD.
   - Take a look at this business process from a different perspective.

2. "Ultra-low hours part-time technical assistant" - This is a hybrid position that is a bit more difficult to define. This role could fill all the same responsibilities as the one listed above. It could also be part personal assistant and part subject matter expert. Think of it like Chat-GPT5 with no token limit. (I know GPT5 does not exist yet, but a senior dev with GPT4 should be just as good if not better than GPT5 whenever it is released)

  - Work Mon-Fri, one hour a day.
  - Loyalty, discretion, and protection of reputation are the most important requirements.
  - Potential ideas for work,
   - All of the items listed in the above position.
   - My nephew is failing his freshman computer science course, tutor him one hour a day for the next few weeks.
   - Improve/clean my online reputation.
   - Build me a script to scrape data from xyz site, analyze it, and email me the updates each morning.
   - Go through the top 100 HN posts each morning and send me everything that I would likely be interested in.
   - Research the next new thing and let me know what the deal is.
   - Come up with ideas to earn money for me on the side that will pay for your hourly fee.
   - I volunteer at a local non-profit and I told them I would find a new venue for the next banquet, set this up for me.

"But wait! The second role sounds just like a personal assistant." - A personal assistant/executive assistant is often a very important and vital member of the team. They are usually generalists and in the case of an executive assistant, they are usually full-time. The idea for the positions listed above is to pair the boss/executive with someone who aligns on a technical level.

Things to consider,

  - The hour-long block should be the same time every day. It may be hard to find a time that works for both parties but most of this work would be async.

  - After discussing with some friends that are also senior developers, 3/5 (myself included) said they would be interested in something like this if the money was right and they could count on it being long-term. There exists a supply of senior developers that would like the novelty and extra cash that would come with a role like this. They have an hour a day to spare but for whatever reason they are not ready to jump into something like starting their own company or finding and taking on regular freelance projects.