That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was structured this way.
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.
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.
And since you said "worked", what made you decide to stop popping back to the issues queue at this particular org?
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.
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.
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.
Companies like Google, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft etc provide work from home option. And they do work on systems level programming.
Embedded is a lot of fun but IMHO there is more opportunity and compensation up the stack.
Which one?
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 really narrows the scope of what employers are willing to hire part time for. Contractors are usually called instead.
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.
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.
Content though definitely. I tend to see more short-term/part-time content creation positions than I do eng ones.
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!
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.
These sort of people deserve a good chance at happiness in getting to work a fulfilling well paying remote job.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'd love if North America would get behind the 4 day work week. I might even make a category for employers offering that.
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).
If you have any better classification ideas I'm open to hearing them too!
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.
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!
Even though the name is very well chosen, expect this confusion to come up more...
That said - it's not just part-time jobs I'm curating, but full-time contract positions too!
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!
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!
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)
Also relevant: https://sahillavingia.com/work. I'd like to make a collection of part-time success stories like this.
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 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.
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!
