Ask HN: First hire offered to work part-time – what should I do?
We raised money and are looking for core hires. Given our personal bond, we would like the core team (first 3-4 hires) to share our passion to some degree. Perhaps naively we'd like them to become pillars of our company and help us inspire future employees.
A former colleague of mine came forward, very bright and capable guy. Exactly the technical talent we need. He likes the project, but he offered to work three days a week for us because he would like to continue working on personal projects in parallel. While I appreciate his honesty, I cannot easily decide if he is the right kind of first hire. Had he joined us a year later, I would hire him in a heartbeat. But right now I feel like lack of commitment from him could possibly influence our culture in a negative way. Is this a right way to think about first hires? What would you do?
105 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadI am a big supporter of reducing working hours in general. 40 hour work-week is not a law of nature. It's about time we rethink what full-time means.
Go for it. Work less yourself. Heck, make "part-time" a standard at your company. You will get super motivated employees and you'll have much easier time attracting talent. It's one of the best perks one can have. And one of you could spend more time with the twins.
However reading the description, I can't tell whether the potential hire fits this category.
Are they looking to have 2 jobs in parallel? What would their side thing be, is it different enough that they wouldn't be working on both concurrently?
If they want to be away from writing software 2 days a week to fulfill a hobby (e.g restore a boat, paint or whatever) then it makes a lot of sense. They will be happy, grateful, and the culture will be great.
If they are seeking part time in order to work for 2 startups or setup their own side business, then I'm not so sure.
I -- and I'm not the only founder I know who has had this experience -- had to compromise technically on early hires because they were what we could get.
Hire the guy (or gal), scale their compensation to match the amount of work they actually do and call it good. If you're worried about them leaving too soon if their side project takes off, you can always try some "golden handcuffs" in the form of some perk that disappears if they leave before X months. And who knows, maybe that would make them decline the offer. In which case, honestly, everybody probably wins in the end.
Generally, I've never worried about that being called passion.
So for me it's not what word I'd use instead of "passionate," but what word they're using "passionate" instead of. The most likely candidates I'd put forth: Naive, positivist, perfectionist, agreeable, friendly, excitable.
I think teams with too many "passionate" (in their use) people run into serious problems.
I guess that when you state that, you assume relevant compensation.
But often companies put that in job description when they search for „people who want to do high quality work wherever they are”, literally.
In worst cases they end up exploiting more naive or less experienced workers.
Name three.
I'm yet to see a single company expecting "passion" that would be doing something worthwhile, or even something one can actually be passionate about.
Depends a bit on what you enjoy doing and how you want to fill your day I guess.
Some people actually need this from work, in particular those who have very little interests outside work. That's why it works best for the young and restless.
We have a word that literally translates as "professional pride." Now I'm not sure it has the right vibe in English, but it captures the idea that you do high quality work and you wouldn't do a sloppy job, even if the job sucks.
For example, I would like such a plumber, because I know they will be careful not to make a mess, and they will clean up after them, and they are careful and will double check their work to make sure it's fully done and solid and not going to leak.
I don't expect them to be passionate about working with clogged pipes full of literal shit. I'm OK with them not wanting to spend 16 hours a day doing plumbing; if they only do three days a week but perform a respectful job, that is perfectly fine. In fact I'd be a little concerned if they said they're passionate about plumbing..
> What do you all call the feeling around enjoying the work
Enjoying the work. That's it.
To me, passion is something much deeper and even intimate. If you devote your life to something and you'd do it even when it doesn't pay the bills, I could accept it as passion. Otherwise, it's just a job that you enjoy.
Where are you from and what is the word?
The way I see it, I bring a lot of experience to the table as well as my passion to solve problems. But it's extremely hard to be passionate for the "vision" of the 20th company trying to revolutionize log processing(when the founders never even did their due diligence) for example. I get that the founders may have had some personal experience that led them to be passionate about a certain problem.
But when they ask me to help them in a specific topic they lack experience in and then ask me to be passionate about working the next 2 years doing mundane work I personally think it's incredibly disrespectful towards me or anyone in my position.
I used to try to explain why I thought like that, but nowadays I mostly agree with the other people here and treat it as a red flag WRT how complicated it will be to get work done around these kinds of founders.
I'm passionate about the project I currently work for, but it's probably the first professional project ever (in 20 years) where I feel this way. And I feel this way because I was involved right from the very early start, I've got tons of context, and saw this develop from the very first prototype that I wrote to its current state. I did the job interviews for most of the rest of the team. I may only be a freelancer working for a major bank, but man do I feel a lot of ownership for this project. I love this project, but I notice not all of my team mates do. You clearly can't force or demand this kind of passion. Certainly not up-front.
I still work only 4 days a week, by the way.
I do not think passion and part time work are at odds at all.
Pay people if you need them to work overtime. In hard cash, not vague promises. And if you've burned through your VC money already, don't try and push through on debts; cut your losses, give your employees plenty of heads-up, and pay them before your money runs out.
I mean if you don't want to hire them part-time, someone else will.
So, passion is a a good thing, assuming it doesn't (negatively) interfere with compensation. If you want passion, pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't want passion - you want leverage.
As someone who has this - I have a dedication to solving what I think the business's needs are over what my management thinks the business's needs are. It's sometimes actually quite useful and sometimes not.
I have a lot of passion for the small startup business I’m working for... I have a vision for their product, the ability to execute that vision, and a strong sense of ownership and desire to put out a great, premium product.
Problem is, my vision and the owner’s vision are not the same. He likes quick fixes and focusing on the daily grind, I want to work out big, longer term things. For as much as the owner wants people to share his passion in what he’s building, I know for certain he wants that passion to be “blindly working for whatever he says is important at the moment and not being too passionate beyond that”.
That kind of passion, IMO, is unrealistic and unfair, but I suspect it’s what most employers really want.
That's passion.
> "Or, the feeling of wanting to do high quality work wherever you are?"
That's professionalism, although one might also describe it as being passionate about behaving professionally.
Seems to me the obvious choice here would be to give him equity that vests over time. Have it scale with how much he works. That rewards his "passion", if he has it or develops it over the course of the project, and it might tempt him to commit more. Vesting over time discourages him from leaving early.
Ugh, they’re called people. “Hire the person” or “hire them” works fine. The way you’re saying this makes it sound like you expect that the candidate will most likely be male, and that a girl (never mind someone who is gender fluid or genderqueer: doesn’t exist in your sentence) is a secondary choice, relegated to a secondary option in parenthesis.
I can understand if you think that I’m reading too far into this, but our use of language is part of this problem. It’s no better to assume a teacher or nurse is a “she.”
I sympathize with your position but you come across as looking for things to be offended about when you criticize reasonable language choice.
Guy or gal is fine.
You might get lucky and find a first hire who really is excited and passionate about the project, truly believes in it, and will go "above and beyond" (which, frankly, is what it sounds like you're looking for) but if that's one of your core requirements to fill the position, well, good luck.
Your friend made an offer that balances his level of "passion" for your project with his passion for his own projects and it sounds like (to me, a completely outside observer, obviously) he was trying to be unselfish and attempting to help you and your startup out.
Now, it's up to you, of course, to decide whether he would be beneficial to your startup -- but, to simply dismiss him altogether because he doesn't share your level of passion? Well, as I said, good luck finding someone who does.
In your case, the fact that you are already questioning this person's commitment is a big warning sign to me. Skip it and circle back later once you have a few people working there and see if you feel differently.
Culture - If you are going to build a culture around working differently than the current norms it could make sense though.
PT - I think long term as you build a structure and get to around 15 to 20 people PT is a great way to find amazing people.
Businesses are always selling products that claim to do be better and do more than their competitors. I’m sure the same is true for employees!
If so then let him work the 3.
But even in the US, I know people at big companies that take one or two months of unpaid leave. Would it be a problem to take every Friday off as unpaid leave?
I think it's inevitable that the more formal your options and protections are, the more people work around that, so in a country like yours I would expect it to be an unspoken minefield.
I've worked part time for several companies and I'd argue strongly against the idea that part timers can't be committed and have an impact on the company.
In my last job, I worked part time and lead a project to migrate the whole company to Git and Ansible for deploys. I then lead another whole project to migrate all the developers from an old dev server with issues to a new shiny dev server using Docker. Actually, that project we took slowly, we migrated a handful of developers and let them try it first, work out any teething problems. Then I was away for a long weekend, I came back, turned out the old dev server had spectacularly fallen over and rather than try and fix it, they had just migrated all the developers straight away without me. It was fine.
With that in mind, another point: having part time workers is great for making sure things are well documented and you don't develop dependencies on key employees.
And I'd agree fully that "passion" is often a red flag. I'd think carefully before joining a company that went on about that. Employees will have a different relation to your company than founders will. You have to acknowledge that.
Also, have you ever complained that's it hard to find good talent? A lot of companies do. They complain bitterly that they can't find the tech staff they need, yet when asked what they do to try and solve this they basically have no answer. Don't be like them.
Start thinking about how you can attract talent now - and supporting those that for whatever reason need flexible and part time work is a great way to attract people. Your current hires reasons are personal projects, but that won't always be the reason. At my current company we have several great workers who are part time - because they have child care needs. They are fantastic workers and contribute a lot. Do you really want to cut all those people out?
Please edit nasty swipes out of your comments here. Perhaps you didn't mean it that way, but that's the way it lands on the internet, and it evokes worse from others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: misunderstood that the colleague actually isn’t currently working for OP. Still, I stand by that if he was good before and you trust him to do a good job, then he’d make a good hire.
Think of it this way: you cannot, in a million years, think that an employee is ever going to be as passionate about _your_ project as you are. It’ll never happen.
So deal with it. Remember that if push comes to shove and you lose money, you’d be firing him due to not being able to pay him. And the same would happen to you if the roles were reversed. You’ll never be part of a “family” in a company, despite what everyone out there says. Business is not family, it’s money.
If he’s putting in good work while part time, then that’s all you need from him.
No employee is going to drink the Kool-Aid like the founders until the project proves itself. If it's going well, he'll come on full-time. If not, he doesn't have a hole in his resume and his bank account.
If this person has the chops you need, do the deal and prove your worth by landing customers and investors.
Why would the candidate hedge their bets on risky propositions by working part-time on TWO startups? Wouldn't it be more likely they need a side-gig (backup plan)?
I've had this be very successful one time with a senior developer who was working in roughly the same stack across side projects as well as what I had hired him for. He was able to time-slice very well. He could come in and in a fraction of the time of the rest of the team make a meaningful impact in both pushing his own features as well as reviewing others' code/architecture.
I've found in running a consulting practice that if people need to split their time across projects that they generally do their best work when they can devote a consistent set of days to specifics projects/team (Project A on Mon-Wed, Project B on Thu, Project C on Fri). Trying to time-slice throughout the day of 4hr with Project A and 2hr with Project B and 2hr with Project C becomes too much context switching for most people.
One other thing to keep in mind: if people do not work enough on a single project, they will not achieve enough momentum to do great things. Or if the rest of the team is working full-time, it may be too much effort to keep them in the loop of everything that has changed since it is moving at a faster pace than what their time allows. You can try to overcome this by not working on critical parts of the product or having their features not be depended upon by others.
Are they good? Then hire them.
Are they not good? Don’t hire them.
Everything else is a distraction at this stage.
N days of good people is better than 0 days of no one.
Also, you’re the leader, you live the culture, others will follow your lead.
In your case, I think the issue is not about part time, but the commitment itself. If it's your first hire, you need them to be on-board, and contrary to what most people say, have more expectations than people would for a "normal" employee. The truth is, that person is not a normal employee, it's the first hire in a very early stage business. If you treat that hire as a regular employee, you will build expectations and won't be able to live up to it, and it will backfire for both of you 6-8 months down the road. That will hurt your ability to build a core team, and you will have to start from scratch.
Do not give up on that, no matter what the popular opinion tells you. Most people are not founders, and you should trust the guts that you have about building your core team.
Passion is important, and there's a huge spectrum between "passion as an excuse to get people to work many hours without compensating them" and the bill-by-the-hour contractor attitude. You don't want your first employees to be anywhere near the right of that spectrum. Basically, you want them to proudly wear the company logo t-shirt. But this is perfectly possible without driving yourself into a burnout.
While I agree with many commenters here that way too many startups work their team too hard for absolutely no benefit to anybody, I do think that employees of small startups can be expected to have said startup at top thing on their minds, bordering family etc.
This information is missing from the OP's question. There's a world of difference between an applicant going "oh, hm yeah I can do some work for you but only 3 days a week because I'm actually focused on my side project and I hope it becomes a proper startup someday" and "woa that sounds awesome, I'm all in! but I don't want to work more than 3 days because I've a couple of hobbies / open source projects / whatever that I like to keep time for". In the first scenario, the engineer might be writing hours for you, but actually thinking about their other thing at the same time. They won't be super productive, and they'd especially not be all too creative.
Like you, I'd never recommend that a startup hire someone who doesn't have the success of said startup at top of their mind (again, possibly bordering family matters). But I disagree with your suggestion that the amount of hours/days committed is a good indicator of that. Part-time is the future, folks, accept it, embrace it.
In this case, the author might feel that the person is not committed, and might attribute it to the part time as way to reason/explain that feeling that the other person isn't committed. Chances are, they would most likely feel the same if the person was full time. If the person was highly committed, they wouldn't even start to rationalize this way about part time, and it'd be a no-brainer decision to hire them and make it work.
I don't have problems with having part-time employees, but quite difficult to see it being "the future". There are some people who want part-time possibilities, but in my experience majority prefer full-time employment. Also usually full-time employment is also desirable for employer.
However often those who want part-time deals, are quite talented etc, so it makes sense to make arrangements with them. Also sometimes part-time is good match for the employer as well, if the workload matches that for some reason.
They won't be credited like founders, compensated at-the-time remotely near market, will be overworked to the bone if they don't actively fight it, and in the event of success will be hilariously undercompensated, if not actively screwed.
So--why?
Says who? Srsly stop working for shitty startups.
And stop assuming all founders are exploitative psychopaths. We're not. Many of us just want to build an awesome company that's an awesome place to work at.
You don't need to overwork the team for that. But you also won't get there with a bunch of disinterested contractors who just do their assigned tasks.
Contractor here who was a first tech hire for a startup once. I've seen more disinterested employees than contractors in the UK. Employees tend to leave at 1700 sharp, while contractors often the last one who shuts the lights off. You can't let go employees with a 2-week notice, so guess who's going to work around the clock when the project is behind schedule?
I don't work for "shitty startups"--it's rare that I work for "startups" at all. But, then again, my skillset is in demand in a way that accentuates the seller's market, and so I also don't have to. I'm very fortunate.
> And stop assuming all founders are exploitative psychopaths. We're not. ... You don't need to overwork the team for that.
You don't have to. But, as a matter of course, it happens. Even to those with the best of intentions.
Causes and passions are charity work or open-source work. Tying your day job--and by extension your health and your well-being--to them is not wise. As a founder, you both have an incentive to tie your own to such--but you have an even stronger incentive to tie others' to it, and so you literally can't be trusted.
It's nothing personal to state that founders are not to be trusted. It is, in a very real and literal sense, just business. Cash on the barrelhead and an absolute intolerance for fuckery are the only ways an employee has to protect themselves from exploitation.
That's one point of view. Personally, I'd say I'm passionate about technology itself and I only choose employers who work with technologies I find interesting (generally nothing that involves web stuff) whenever I can. I'm sure I'd probably have been paid better if I weren't as particular but I'd also almost certainly have quit the profession long before now as well.
We'd probably agree, though, that being passionate about one's employer itself being unwise.
(And even those pure-hearted, kind founders can lose control of their company after a bad raise.)
I guess 99.9% of all startups are "shitty" then.
> we would like the core team (first 3-4 hires) to share our passion to some degree. Perhaps naively we'd like them to become pillars of our company and help us inspire future employees.
It sound like they don't want workers, so much as worshipers. Call me pessimistic.
If that's true, then I hope that person gets compensation that is consistent with that status. I wouldn't have a problem with that... what gets me is when people want somebody to basically act like a founder in terms of commitment, but the compensation is just "regular employee". F that.
What an employee does outside of work should not matter in your decision (tons of people have side gigs, for example).
What should matter is the expectations and the output of the employee. If you feel that its important to have someone working full-time, in the office 5 days a week, then I think that's perfectly OK (in the same way that its OK if an organization cannot handle remote teams). This is a decision you would be making. If you wanted 5 days a week, that would disqualify this candidate (at least for now).
IMO (and experience), the lack of commitment is the `three days a week` instead of full-time.
It's very unlikely that you find someone who is intrinsically interested of the same things as you. Or has as deep intuitive understanding of all the business variables. But it does not mean he can't provide great value.
Id's say it's a red flag if you hire for "passion" instead of "professionalism". True professionals want to do a good job and ship on time. You don't need "passion" for that.
At this point I realized that this post is appropriate for Reddit's AITA[0].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole
It's a big green flag from my perspective.
Now I could give you all sorts of reasons why this guy will be an excellent hire. My personal gut feeling is that some people deliver more value in 3 days than others deliver in 3 years, so "bum in seat time" can be misleading in terms of the contribution someone will make. Engineers with side projects are often more goal-focused, because they purge their need to over-engineer and try new things outside your core production project. You hire employees for their talent, not their passion. But these are _my_ gut feelings, not _yours_, and you need to pay attention to _your_ gut feelings when you make such a critical hire because it's _your_ startup. Presumably, your gut feelings are pretty good which is how you're in a position to be running a startup in the first place.
Over the next few months, you will inevitably have problems. Things will be harder and take longer than you think. Then you'll be saying "it's because they're not committed enough, I should have listened to my gut feeling when we hired them".
I would express my thoughts fully and transparently to this guy. Perhaps you can explore a middle-ground - here's some ideas:
1. More hours with more pay in the short-term to help you scaffold things, scaling back once you're up and running.
2. Work part-time as an engineer, still be available for operational stuff outside those hours (with pay).
3. Help you hire somebody else ASAP, so you don't need the original guy full time.
Great developers (like the one you mentioned) have significant opportunity costs.
Unrelated:- I am looking for opportunities in this space.
[Resume] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzQHjxMlAi_LOrQwccnQUskjzjr...
If not, but the person is fairly senior and has excellent skills, I'd still consider hiring them but make it clear that's a different role and not the pillar shaping the company but rather a person laying a good technical foundation. That way you can hire another person that is more committed to the company but could benefit from that technical foundation.
But otherwise, I'd pass.
I've been working at startups for 10+ years and while I understand the negative association with 'passion' and saw that as excuse for bad compensation as well, I'm gonna assume you're not just looking for cheap labor but truly people who can grow with the company and and benefit from it success. In that case it would be a shame to hire a person for which it's just another job. (There are plenty of jobs if that's what one is looking for.)
Edit: someone once told me: hire slowly, fire quickly.
If you're afraid of this affecting your culture, don't treat him as a full timer. Instead, treat him as a contractor, with the option of going full time if you do well.
This is IMO the only sweet spot for contractors, when someone is brilliant but outside your budget. I'm not a fan of part-timers, but 3 days is a good commitment, as opposed to someone who only works nights. Depending on the type of person, a developer might even end up achieving as much in 3 days as they would in 5 days.