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Comment by rickcarlino | Hacker News Reader

I tried finding such roles when I was younger and cared more about flexibility than pay. My assessment back then was that most people who hire a part-time dev are hilariously underfunded and insanely price sensitive. Offering a part-time role is a sign that they don’t actually have enough money to be in the software industry, rather than an indication that they have less than 40 hours a week of work to outsource.

Disclaimer: I am American living in the US. These sorts of arrangements might be more palatable to people living in places with lower costs of living.

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A company might want/need a dev without being in the software industry.

Maybe they have/want a little internal portal for their employees to use. After the initial build, ongoing maintenance wouldn’t take much time. Maybe they need someone to write some VBS for some stuff thy do in Excel. Or any countless number of general office tasks on the computer that would be made easier with a little code.

I had one of these once and I know of couple others. The thing is you get these jobs by having a full time job there for a few years, and then saying "hey like, can I just do the maintenance part time or at an hourly rate" and they either fire you for asking or let you do it.

These arrangements are 100% custom, highly dependent on relationships & office politics, and are never ever posted publicly. You are also just putting a big ass "please lay me off" sign on your head so even if you wrangle one of these you can't expect to keep it for more than a year or two.

Lol. Why would they fire you for asking?

Because you just inadvertently labeled yourself as a potential flight risk. Bad managers don’t know how to handle that, and will assume you’re going to leave if you don’t get what you want. The “firing” probably won’t be immediate, but bad managers will passive aggressively manage you out.

When I was in this situation it was perceived as me looking for another job. I didn't get directly fired immediately was I was moved to a more demanding role on a less prestigious project outside of my competency and then eventually let go.

If you're a critical internal expert your boss really has your back or something it might be different for you. Like I said it has a lot to do with relationships & politics. Even just asking draws attention to yourself and scrutiny to your position in a way that I don't think is usually to your benefit.

The way I did it, I never really asked, but I also didn't go to part time. I just started spending more and more of my time helping people learn how to do the job better, and then building tools to help when it seemed like no amount of training would help them get better with the tools we had.

Over time the boss saw the value and made that my job without me asking. Of course, that requires a decent boss, and it also happened slowly over several years. I'm pretty sure he would have let me go part time if I asked, since he saw me as more productive in 1 hour than most people are in a week. At one point he told me to go to Amsterdam and work from coffee shops for a few months. I didn't do it, but in hindsight, I kind of wish I had.

I have a different boss now and things are drastically different. A boss can make a world of difference.

> These arrangements are 100% custom, highly dependent on relationships

This is what the very best jobs are like

Yeah, I've heard a good tip is finding local non-tech companies that have various pain points that cost too much to have an enterprise solution, but that would be easy and cheap enough to pay part-time.

MOST development jobs aren't in the software industry, even those that build out enterprise level systems. For example, my employer is a logistics optimization company. Software drives our business, but the truth is it's just scaling an operation that COULD be done by hand. Software isn't our product, our product is really domain knowledge. That said, we spend a substantial amount on development and AWS. (including part time or contract hires when the situation required it)

This is exactly the kind of gig I would love to find. But everywhere I've looked online is just filled with race-to-the-bottom 3rd world devs.

> Offering a part-time role is a sign that they don’t actually have enough money to be in the software industry, rather than an indication that they have less than 40 hours a week of work to outsource.

Kind of. I work full time for a big company, but also have a software-heavy side business which used to make thousands a month in revenue. I have enough money to be in the software industry with my side business - when I worked on it alone, my expenses were very, very low, unless you count the spare time I have spent on it.

My full-time job keeps me busy and working on my side business eats up time. For example, an API upgrade we were kind of forced into swallowed up a massive amount of my spare time. That doesn't even cover other work I wanted to do in my side business, never mind everything else in life. As luck would have it, I know an experienced programmer who is not working a full time job right now, and I have paid him about $7000 so far this year to do work on my side business. He gets some cash in his pocket and I get some of my spare time back.

In terms of finding jobs like this - I have known this person for over a decade, and he just started doing some work this year.

On another tangent - someone I used to work with on my team left for another company, and started his own side business of a consultancy. He started getting so much business he reached out and a lot of programmers including myself started moonlighting, doing those projects after work. He did so well he left his full-time job to work on his business full-time. Then he started releasing his own projects as well. Me and others I know did work (actually, I recommended the guy who is currently doing work for me to do work for him, and he did some features for a project).

So with regards to my business and this other business - you work with people, some of the more energetic types start their own side businesses, and some of those side businesses grow. I think the parent poster is right, people hiring part-time might tend to be smaller, underfunded businesses.

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