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Ask HN: Part-time Developers

11 points by craigkilgo ↗ HN
Why do you rarely see companies looking for part-time developers? It seems like if you hired a developer for 20 hours a week, you might be able to get the 20 most efficient hours from that developer but still only pay half the going wage. Additionally, you wouldn't incur the benefits costs of a full-time employee. Are there any good examples of this being attempted?

5 comments

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taprun
It would be harder to extract unpaid overtime, coordinate meeting and facilitate cross training. Not only that, but it's more difficult to manage and allocate folks when there are four 1/2 time workers instead of 2 full timers.
meric
You have a team of 4, 2 of them work Monday, Tuesdays, 2 of them work Thursdays, Fridays. How to manage?
OtterCoder
Why would you ever need full week coverage? Just tell hires that Monday Tuesday is the schedule. It's not like factory work where the machines need to run constantly.
jetti
"Why would you ever need full week coverage?"

Because critical issues happen and typically businesses want them solved ASAP rather than waiting a week til people come in again.

OtterCoder
This is development we're talking about, not ops. Make sure your deployment plan includes rollback capability, then let ops do what ops does. Almost never should you encounter a dev issue that needs emergency code pushed in less time than it takes to make a phone call and get someone to remote in.