I'm a full-timer and I have to admit that I find it frustrating to work with part-time colleagues. Sometimes you need them, and they're not around until the next day. Not saying they shouldn't be allowed to do it, but there's definitely a cost.

I don't think there's anything special about eight hours a day. It's more about just having everyone keep the same hours, so that you can get a quick turnaround on questions/requests. So I think it'd work if companies built entire teams that were part-time, working on the same subset of the week.

Those sound like exactly the same issues as working from home, all-remote teams, flex hours, etc., all of which are becoming fairly popular with employers. If companies are OK with having half my team on a different continent, they should be able to deal with me being offline in the afternoons.

I feel like there's a difference between being available 5 days a week 9-5 and actually working those hours, and it seems like you would value the former.

It feels like there could be some sort of compromise between the two, where employees are contactable during full-time hours, but only to organise actual work hours, which are limited and flexible.

Of course, this would be less convenient for managers than simply having full-time hours, but it would save money spent on wages/salaries and result in more productive happy workers. I also feel there should be some way to reduce the administration burden, perhaps a combination of allowing employees to arrange working hours directly with each other and technology to facilitate this.

This is called being on call. Sysadmims and doctors do it.

Yeah sort of - although I kind of meant less about being available to drop everything and work on something immediately vs. just being around to answer questions perhaps that may or may not be urgent.

That's still on call, though. If I'm expected to answer the phone and answer work questions, I can't be hiking in an area with bad cell coverage. I can't be drunk. I can't be in a theater. Perhaps I can't be on a bike ride if I need to have a laptop nearby. On and on - if it's a restriction on my life during non work hours, it's on call.

i think it's still different. being on call means i must be able to work during that time.

being reachable means that you can pass on your problem, and i'll acknowledge it so that we can together decide what the best next step. sometimes we can solve the problem, sometimes we can find someone else who can also help, and sometimes we need to delay working on the problem and reschedule it for another time. but at least then it's scheduled. on a few occasions i am not reachable at all. but that doesn't happen often.

in other words being on call means always to solve the problem immideately, whereas being reachable means i have the option to say no.

That is still work, and an intrusion on what should be free time but no longer is.

but it's different from being on-call. i understand that in many places, on-call requires the same payment as regular work hours for the whole period, not just for the hours worked.

and i don't feel it's an intrusion if being available is optional and not required.

it's essentially how every freelancer works. they are available during business hours. but they don't get paid if they don't get called for work by a client.

If it's after hours then you're on call and you should be paid to be on call.

when i am coding and i am in the zone you are not going get an answer out of me until the day is over either. so i don't think that's the issue here. if everyone needs to be available for quick questions then maybe there is an issue with how the work is structured, and how knowledge is shared.

What sort of questions do you find your self wishing the part timers were around to answer?

When there is a separation of responsibilities and not enough knowledge overlap or documentation, then people are more likely to feel stranded when their colleagues go offline.

That team has created something with a dangerously low bus factor (especially the poor docs), and is lucky to be getting a warning early enough to resolve it. Turnover does happen sooner or later.

I work with offshore developers and the general idea is that you're reachable by phone/slack/email off-hours -- both them and myself. Obviously with delay.. but for simple questions/statuses it's not concerning.

But if it was actually blackout, it'd be untenable.

As an employer, I can give you some color.

1) Hiring is a pain, and there's ton of friction. 2) Ideally you want to get max efficiency out of roles that serve "business critical" functions. 3) More people on payroll (parttime or not) = more time wasted for me on management

These two factors incentivize me to avoid having too many part-timers, if I could

Also an employer.

Add health insurance and office space as costs which don't scale down.

Lack of availability / presence creating difficulties for the rest of the org for meetings / getting questions answered / answering questions / etc.

The employer requirement for health insurance is only for full-time employees. That scales down great. Two half-time employees should be much cheaper than one full-time.

And then I have an employee without health insurance.

That's a hard no both ethically and because I don't want a sick employee.

Or you have an employee who buys their health insurance on your state's ACA exchange.

There's even a decent chance that they can get an ACA subsidy. To get a subsidy they need to get their MAGI below about $49k (I'm assuming they are single...someone else can do the numbers for families). MAGI is for most people income - HSA contribution - retirement plan contribution.

With an HSA and an IRA they can knock up to almost $10k off their MAGI, which means they can take a part time job paying up to $59k/year and still get a sweet ACA subsidy.

If your company has a 401k, and they work enough hours to qualify to contribute to that (1000 hours/year, I believe), using that instead of an IRA would let them knock around $24k off MAGI, meaning they can take a part time job paying up to $72k/year and still get a subsidy.

The way ACA subsidies work is that even if you barely come in under the MAGI limit, it is usually pretty substantial. You might expect that as you get closer to the limit, the subsidy decreases--and you would be right--but it isn't the kind of gradual decrease to 0 that you would probably expect. No, it is a slow decrease right up to the cutoff then it drops to $0.

1. Perhaps employees would be more likely to stick around if they were happier in general with part-time hours, so less hiring would happen in the long run?

2. I think working full-time hours is not actually the same as max efficiency.

3. Understandable, but I do feel like there are ways/techonologies to reduce this friction.

I don't actually have data with me atm to back this up though, just my thoughts.

In my experience part employees have more “context switching” to deal with obviously, so it really is case by case whether or not someone’s more efficient as a part timer

I think that depends somewhat on what the rest of the time is spent on.

When I worked about half-time and studied half-time, I found that it was difficult to get switched from one to the other after already having spent time and energy on either during the same day. Dedicating full days for one activity helped with that, but having a longer break of potentially several days between working days may of course also require more time for getting back to speed.

On the other hand, at some point I worked ~30-hour weeks (also because of attempting to study at the same time, but I dropped that once I found the attempt unproductive), about 6 hours a day, Monday to Friday. I had more energy both for work and other (non-mandatory) stuff I liked to do. I'm pretty sure I was just as productive as when working 8-hour days on the same job, if not more, because I was able to focus better and more intensively. The added hours in the longer days were just empty space.

My 30-hour scenario of course differed from what might be a more typical part-time arrangement in that mentally I was pretty much considering it a full-time job and not just a side gig, or as one half of something.

Nevertheless, that experience (among some other, somewhat similar ones) has made me seriously question whether the 8-hour days unconditionally make sense from an efficiency point of view.

In my experience, context switching is more a problem in the short-term, where you're working on two problems at once and switching between them constantly. Or, when you're working on one thing and you're interrupted by a question from someone else in the office.

Also, here's one source that suggests increased productivity with a 4-day workweek (Microsoft Japan): https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...

More here: https://30hourjobs.com/4-day-work-week/

I don’t have any hard evidence for this, but my intuition is that it’s about the trade off between the cost of hiring and training workers versus the work output you get from each one versus the workers desire to earn income.

For the employer, it would be better (in theory) to have fewer people working for more hours, because then training costs less and the workers become more and more expert.

For the worker, the desire to earn more is most easily accomplished by working more.

Both of those are offset by the decrease in productivity and increase in fatigue and burnout as you work too many hours.

Right now, most workers and employers have landed on about 40 hours a week as a good balance between these concerns.

However this has changed over time and will change in the future. For example there’s recently been an increase in so-called “30 hour jobs.” For example: https://30hourjobs.com/

Are you saying that you would only have one 50% job? Why not just take it as a 100% and find other ways to make best use of your non-productive side.

I would rather hire one person working 100% than two people working 50%, because there is less communication overhead.

Not the original poster -- I'm presently trying to arrange my life to accommodate 50% work and 50% family. I know a number of people who would love to do 50% work and 50% life.

Life is too short to give 100% to a job unless it is a job you love or it underwrites either love or necessity.

Serious question, what hours do you consider to be 100% of your time?

I ask because the current 40-hour schedule was fought for in the early 20th century specifically because it worked out to 50/50: 8 hours for work and 8 hours for “what we may,” each day (allowing the final 8 hours for sleep).

Considering Saturdays and Sundays off, that means a 40-hour schedule is only 5/14 of the waking hours per week.

> I ask because the current 40-hour schedule was fought for in the early 20th century specifically because it worked out to 50/50: 8 hours for work and 8 hours for “what we may,” each day (allowing the final 8 hours for sleep).

The employer is getting a hell of a deal with that arrangement.

They'll get their 8 hours a day. Sure, some might be chatter with fellow employees, a little screwing around on a phone, or using the restroom, but by and large it's 8 hours of being at work.

We all need 8 hours of sleep, most of us don't get it. If we wanted to actually get 8 hours of good sleep, we need to start getting to bed about an hour before we plan on falling asleep. So let's conservatively call that 9 hours needed for 8 hours of sleep.

Going to and from work isn't really "what we may" unless you're telling me I could or should consciously decide to live across the street from my workplace to maximize my me-time. So there's another hour stolen every day.

So what are we at - 9 hours requisite for sleep, an hour of commute - leaves us 14 hours split between work and "play," knowing that for most of us who can't afford to hire laborers to take care of our domiciles, much of that "play" becomes "chores."

In this scenario, even splitting the difference and affording capital 7 hours of your time each day is theft. We'd all be better off around 4.

No, I haven't overlooked that, it's just not really relevant. You'd still be paid if the norm for a salaried position were a 16-hour workday, it wouldn't make it any less exploitative.

In that scenario, you couldn't "choose" to go work for 8 hours instead and take a loss in pay - no firm is hiring "full-time" at 8 hours - which actually rounds right back to the issue brought up by this thread: you'd be looking for part-time work that doesn't exist.

This is my own personal experience.

1. Commuting is exhausting and can easily add between 2-4 hours a day for long commuters (10-20 hours a week).

2. Work can be exhausting, it can feel like you just wake up to go back to sleep. Those 8 hours not sleeping I’ve felt a ghost of my self.

3. There is almost always some expectation of availability to work outside of those hours.

I moved to part time / freelance and it has been an enormous quality of life improvement.

Not everyone has the skills and leverage to negotiate a schedule that actually suits them best. In most employee/employer relationships, the employer has far more leverage to dictate work schedules and conditions. Being in this situation is caused neither by a lack of self control, or by spinelessness.

If you’re in a tech role, it’s insane. Unless you’re getting paid some crazy premium amount or have other handcuffs like a contract or defined benefit pension, there is no reason to stay.

A lot of the decisions humans make aren't reasonable, as in there is no reason behind them, they are emotional.

#1 Not all choices lead to valid solutions given a set of constraints, this can lead to non-optimal solutions.

#3 I personally see the reality that knowledge work and life blend a bit more at the edges than traditional factory work and can accept the need for work outside of the standard hours . It's the existence of this adaptation in working time alongside the other issues I highlighted that makes it a problem. We're in the middle of changing work and these are teething issues.

I find your reply overly simple, inconsiderate and from a place of privilege.

My personal time, then, includes such activities as commuting, doing my taxes, going to the doctor/dentist/therapist, updating my licenses/certifications, eating lunch (often at work, by requirement), buying tools/clothes needed for work, and so on.

It's hardly the case that I can spend "my" 8 hours with family or friends, or even doing something of my choosing. Come tax day, I can deduct the purchase cost of tools I needed to buy for work, but there's no way to deduct all the hours spent every day on the unpaid activities which are also required for work.

It's great that we got our hours of labor down to only 8, but why stop there? I would consider a 50/50 split to be one where I have as much time to make art as I spend at work for someone else. (Or substitute "family" or whatever else your priority is.) Working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that's not even physically possible. Maybe at 6 hours.

Good serious question.

To me, it means the work-week. It is in my nature to work ~10 hour days on whatever I'm working on (a habit I see across physicists), and it blurs into the weekend.

I'm shifting my focus to half-time on physics, a quarter of my time helping aging parents while they're still functional, and a quarter of the time assisting with the family business.

I have worked both part-time and full-time and honestly I prefer working full time as it feels less stressful. When I am working part-time I have to coordinate heaps more with other staff if they are taking over my role during the times I am not at work (eating into my work hours leaving me with less for actual work). It takes longer to coordinate meetings especially if they involve other part-timers (sometimes to the point when we have meetings about when to have meetings—which wouldn't be needed if we all worked full time). When I have heaps of work on I feel guilty leaving part-way—whereas if I am full time I can confidently say I've done all I can during the time I have available. The times I have been able to work full time on the same role has really improved my mental well-being, reduced my overall workload (as I'm not having to coordinate solutions for issues caused by not being available—I am working 100% on my actual work) and getting a full pay check is just icing on the cake. I am currently working part time (due to studying part-time) and I absolutely hate it but it has to be done to gain qualifications for my current role. Looking forward to going back to full-time work! YMMV of course.

There's the difference: You're studying the other part of the time. As someone who has done every combination except for "study part-time", I can tell that there is a big, big difference between "only working part-time" and "studying and working part-time".

You are right that if you study and work, there's a lot of context switching, competing requirements, and lack of real downtime. If you just work part-time, you have control over the other time.

I find that part time seekers want the part time to be their schedule,not the schedule I need them

Me: 20 hours a week is perfect

Candidate: Cool, I'll do Monday 8 to 3, tuesday noon to 5, and thursday and friday 1 to 5.

Me: well, really I need help 11-3 five days a week.

Candidate: that's not the schedule I'm after.

someone's part time schedule is often defined by outside constraints. eg i am able to work only while my kids are in school. i have no choice in the matter. if the school lets out early, or is closed, like right now because of the virus, then i have to change my schedule accordingly, and none of your business needs can override that. being able to accomodate that is the difference that makes for a family friendly workplace.

Totally agree - my business needs don't override that. But it does mean we may not end up working together.

(for the sake of argument, let's assume that except for work hours, i am the perfect candidate and you are my favourite choice as employer)

choosing not to work together is ok if the constraints are a lifestyle choice. you may like to have your work done at that time, and i may prefer to work certain hours. if that's more important to either of us than other factors, then fine.

what bothers me is when there is no choice. i can't choose my work hours, they are dictated to me and outside of my control.

yet you insist on workhours that are incompatible. now your hours may not be by choice either, but something or someone has to give here, because it's not good for society if we exclude a whole category of people from working just because of constraints they have.

you have to realize that most business will act like you and are not flexible on their hours. but at the same time, i can't change school hours either. so i can't find a job.

there are discussions about how early school hours are bad for children but starting late will cost many parents their jobs.

if your work hours are a preference, then i'd ask you to reconsider that. if they are not by choice either then i'd like to explore what the problem is and see if we can work around those constraints.

we won't be able to solve every problem. maybe you actually are accomodating other parents already, and now you need someone to fill in for the remaining time. that would be unfortunate for this particular situation, but if more companies work like that then there would be enough other opportunities.

the problem i see is that right now most companies seem to have the attitude that they get to decide and employees need to adjust and fit in. and that i think, needs to change.

It's very common here in Switzerland. I could reduce my work hours to 80% without even needing approval from my manager. Many parents do some combination of 80% + 60% or even less.

I would love to read a little about the culture and laws that afford this! Do you know of anything I could read that might be available in English?

It isn’t uncommon for union jobs with good benefits. No laws are required, although most companies would only do it for some executives.

When I worked for the public sector, it was possible go 80% without a lot of red tape, and as low as 20% with approvals. The people going 20% had more expenses, and were usually sick with cancer or something, and that allowed them to stay on payroll to maximize their leave and insurance. You could work 5 days a week and “bank” a certain amount of leave for up to a year.

They are excellent questions.

Trading, economies were meant to serve peoples' wants and needs, but people serve "the economy", with no thought given to what the actual quality of working peoples' lives are like. As if the economy is the important thing, not human lives. There is extreme attention on "economic efficiency", no attention at all on the quality of the lives involved. We don't know where we're going, don't care whether the journey is pleasant or not, but focus on getting there as quickly/cheaply as possible. I guess that's easier to measure.

Also, modern economies rely on there being a pool of unemployed. If everyone could do 1, 2 or 3 part-time jobs, balanced how they like it, that would mess up the system. Anyway, the whole thing is designed to make the rich richer, whether underlings enjoy that process is not really relevant.

I frequently use part-time people through Upwork. My highest-paid dev makss $125/hr, has no other contracts right now, and works 10 hrs/wk. He spends the rest of his time on his own projects.

I do the same thing. I find tremendous value in skills and code familiarity overlap. It provides a lot of flexibility. I can focus on growing junior folks, and I get a lot of satisfaction in finding these folks other projects, and supporting the lifestyles they value. It requires a different set of values and management style which is why it’s less common.

I didn’t know you could make that much on up work. Do you monitor his screen though? I heard up work makes you install something like that?

> I didn’t know you could make that much on up work.

Our contractors range from $20/hr for something like content migration to $150/hr for someone who has built multiple products from scratch, been the CTO of startups, and has years of experience in coding, team management, architecture/system design, and infrastructure.

I've observed other people under-paying someone hourly and ending up spending a lot more in the long run. The most cost-effective strategy is to find the right person and pay them what they're worth. If you don't have the money to do that, you don't have the money to be in business.

> Do you monitor his screen though?

No. That's an insane practice, and it's shameful that Upwork promotes it. Anyone who needs to do that is incompetent at assessing talent and/or managing it.

> I heard up work makes you install something like that?

It does not force you, as far as I know. Our contractors log their time manually, and we trust them.

I prefer fixed-fee, but the way we run hourly work is similar in practice. We guarantee a minimum number of hours, and we expect a certain amount to get done.

As long as it gets done, what do I care if they finished it 2 hours faster? Whatever money I recovered by micromanaging, I'd end up losing again because micromanaging takes up my time (and drives talent away).

the challenge with upwork is how much effort and work is required to reach a point where i can find great clients like you.

do you have any advice for someone who can't afford to start at the bottom and work their way up? how do i screen clients and avoid the bad ones?

Unfortunately I have no idea how to help you. There really should be an Upwork competitor with only high-quality employers (agree to certain policies, like no screen monitoring) and contractors. Perhaps there is one and I just don't know about it.

That's optional and up to the employer to decide on using.

I would refuse to work for an employer if they wanted me to use that.

There are many people in Germany who work 4/5 or 3/5 jobs. I was previously 3/5 and moved to 4/5, but it's nice to have the extra time.

For the employers here, the only downside is if they are being measured by head-count (but even then, I count as 4/5 of a headcount...)

In my experience it's not generally so easy, depending on your employer though. Some allow blanket 80%/75%/50% jobs for others it's hard work to persuade them to let you scale down your hours.

Can't say how common it is, I obv. have a limited set of past employers to look at. Some friends have said their company doesn't do it, and when I talked to Swiss people it seems a lot more common there.

I have a theory about why this is. There’s this economic concept called signaling - it’s the ways the economic choices we make also communicate information to other agents in the economy.

If you apply for a part time position, what do you communicate to your potential employer? Namely, that work is not your #1 priority. I think that employers want employees who are as obsessed with work as possible. It’s not that they don’t want part time employee, it’s that they don’t want the sort of person who would apply for a part time job.

As a manager, here are my reasons:

1. Biggest one: transfer of knowledge between people is lower bandwidth than going to one person. If I have Jill and Jane doing work function A, I can assign primary responsibility to some sub-parts A1 and A2 to Jill and A3 and A4 to Jane. If I need A2 on Tuesday when Jill is off, sure Jane can do it (and as a manager I should make sure of that) but it would take her more time while her othe things slip.

2. Overhead per employee: I have to do one on ones, regular reviews, and various other per-employee bureaucracy.

3. All team update meetings and other get togethers requiring non-trivial subset of the team get exponentially harder to organize.

- Synchronous vs asynchronous communication -- if we're all full-timers and you're not then you're hard to communicate with

- Security and access -- I know and trust my full-timers, be they contractors or direct hires. They get to see my codebase, have access to my servers, and get insights as to what my roadmaps are because they own them. If we already knew you, like you were a full-timer who scaled back hours for a while, that might be a different story, but I'm not going to give some rando 20-hour-a-week person access to things.

- IT contracting firms / headhunters already do much of this.

- Hiring is a pain. Why interview for 2 positions when I can just hire one person?

Note: I'm in Canada so some of the healthcare and overhead-related questions are different from the US.

I have been pushing to go 1/2 time or 3/4s time for a while* with a large state agency and the primary reason I was given that I could not is because part-time jobs are more difficult to fill in the future. Which makes sense to me: in my field, and a lot of professional fields, most people have large student debt (I don’t) a family (I don’t) and barely manageable mortgages to boot (I don’t) and, therefore, they need a full-time paycheck. I am on my phone so I could not search all the comments to see if this had been said.

* I am hoping the unavoidable budget shortfalls following this pandemic make this possible.

I am being incredibly reductive in terms of how much effort is needed to position yourself for this successfully and sustainably, but: your friend can get that schedule by going freelance and moving towards a consultancy model. Consulting clients don’t have to worry about the same overhead per employee as a proper employment arrangement entails (onboarding, legal, benefits, etc.) and tend to be more focused on what will be done and by when.

DevOps has some nice potential niches for this sort of arrangement, like one-time projects to move between platforms.

I think most of the people who are full-time are more dedicated to the projects. They are more focused to think on how to solve a problem better, sometimes even when they are off shift.

I do flexible part time hours. As in, I'm flexible. I'm on Slack if people need me. I work when there are hours for me. I get to pay rent, take a trip whenever I want, work on side projects, and work on interesting work.

I agree completely that it's crazy that it is not not common. We make an insane rate compared to the average salary, might as well take advantage of that and enjoy some extra time.

Interesting that no one has mentioned the real reason. It's because you need butts in seats. In an office. A real office. Preferably within a half hour drive of Sand Hill Road or Silicon Alley. Then you have visual and social proof for future investment. Moreover, FTEs are assets. Salable assets. Not one by one, but as a collective. Assets for an exit.

What about pay. Do you expect to get paid as much as someone doing the full eight hours?

If not then how much 80%, 50%, even less? Answering that already just makes me want to avoid opening up part time positions.

Unless you just change the whole work day to 4 hours (gl with that), having some employees work double what others are just sounds like a headache to me.

It's not necessarily an impossible idea to live okay with 80% of a salary, especially a tech one. (Unless you live someplace really expensive, perhaps, but Silicon Valley isn't the only place with tech jobs.)

I don't really know what would be so uncomfortable about that that you'd want to avoid it altogether.

As to whether it should be the same as someone else doing either hours... that shouldn't depend on the number of hours but on how much and how valuable work they get done. You probably don't pay exactly the same to everyone even at 100%.

Seriously, I used to do ~30-hour weeks for a while. Got paid accordingly. Of course I'd like the total salary to reflect the fact that I was still fairly productive, but I still don't see what the problem there would be as long as I was happy and the employer was happy. Both apparently were.

Nobody wants to deal with the drama. It’s 2 o’clock and I need something from you, but whoops, I’m stuck waiting until tomorrow, or I call you in and lose you for a day at the end of the pay period.

It’s the same thing with contractors. I used to get stuck on call over Christmas all of the time because contract staff are out of hours.

Maybe have them start with an MSP, as they demonstrate ability, rigor, decision making, etc., they may be able to pull back on hours and get to service a few choice clients, as they get known they may be able to go on a 1099, if that’s what they’re after.

Beware that some companies demand full-time effort for an advertised part-time job. It’a better to join a company full-time that offers flexible work routine that can fit your friend’s routine/lifestyle.

It s relative. You can work 40 hrs for a 24hr job, or 60 hrs for a 40hr job. The former is still part time.

From the employee side, I’m not really sure there’s any benefit to being part time vs. going full free lance. You might think you have additional job security, but the part timer is the first one to go.

Let's say I have a part time guy, and a full time guy. I can give the a task that takes 5 days. The full time guy gets it done in a week, the part time guy takes 3 weeks.

Run a company.

Rather hire 3 full time devs than 6 half time devs.

Lots of work to train and keep people updated.

Life’s too short to increase my complexity for people to have a more relaxed life.

Theres a lot to be said in favour of a shorter working day. Not many people can deliver value after 9 hours of concentration!