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.
If you're using HN Who Is Hiring threads as a source at all, we ask people to link back to the original posts when they do that.
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.
Always thought that someone should do something like this but for part-time marketing/comms/content jobs. I'm sure there are men in the following position too, but in my circles there are loads of 30-40yo women returning to work after maternity leave and looking for 2-3 days/week, often in marketing and related jobs.
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 rarely works in fields where they hire full time salary employees. The reason being that the part time employee is still very expensive in a lot of fixed ‘per employee’ cost areas like hardware and licenses combined with the fact that the full time salary person is supposed to be available to get the job done even it that involves some overtime or just off hours work, things part time people are notorious for being unable to do (the reason they wanted part time in the first place, they are unavailable).
This really narrows the scope of what employers are willing to hire part time for. Contractors are usually called instead.
I'm talking small business. Hardware would be employee's own laptop. Software in those fields would be a pittance.
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.
I think hardware and licenses are minimal costs in most businesses. Desk space is probably more. But I think even that isn't the real reason businesses like full time. It's probably cultural, not wanting to have to hire loads of people, and the difficulty of splitting some jobs between multiple people.
It's worked for me for the past 10 years, part-time in engineering at Google, Makani, and Elemeno Health. Not wanting or being able to work a lot of hours doesn't necessarily mean not being flexible on hours. I've known a number of other part-time people at e.g. Google, and they were generally people I'd trust to get stuff done. Often they're time-management masters, due to necessity.
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.
Salary at all of them. Alphabet has a standard mechanism to scale down your salary/bonus/vesting by your duty cycle, and you get full benefits if you're at at least 50%. For Elemeno it was a more custom arrangement.
I'd probably add geographic filters to the front page if you can - I'm guessing a bulk of the positions are remote, but not everyone may have the ability to hire or manage intercontinentally even in that case.
Depends on the job. If you are in customer support, I don't want you to be working for another company and switch back and forth if you are full time employee. I want you focussed 100% on my company and hence you are paid as a full time employee.
Also, legally you are bound to work for a company according to contracts. I don't want you working for another company on the company's time. It introduces potential liability and risks especially if you are remote.
This is HN. It's a bunch of entitled mediocre programmers copy-pasting from stack overflow or automating the process via copilot. We're not talking about your average wage slave.
> Also, legally you are bound to work for a company according to contracts. I don't want you working for another company on the company's time. It introduces potential liability and risks especially if you are remote.
Just on this point, what you say is common but it's not universal. A lot depends on the type of contract.
I'm working full time at the moment. Yet my contract is structured to allow me to work on other companies' work if I want. And I control my time. It's quite explicit.
That clarity has a real positive payoff for both me and the company I'm working for. I'm more enthusiastic about the work in large part because this arrangement is compatible with me keeping open several research projects on ths side, and I'm confident if they lead anywhere, there isn't a conflict - and that the company people recognise this.
They wouldn't want me not working on the company's projects or not acting as a responsible person. But the whole attitude is to assume I am and support that in an adult-to-adult way. I really like that I feel we could talk freely about outside business interests at work.
It helps a lot that this is a mission-oriented open source company.
TL;DR it does depend on the job, but it's not an inevitable fact that remote work contracts bind a person's time exclusively, even during hours worked.
True enough, but a fair few require at least some commitment every day. For some that's not as easy of a commitment to make, but I totally see your point.
Sure they do - even if the workload does not demand that I sit in my chair in front of my screen all day, I do need to be committed to be available. If a project hits a crunch, or some crisis arises, and I say that I'm too busy with other commitments to do my job, that is a major problem.
I could quite easily do 2 full time jobs simultaneously except that it would be impossible to get them not to schedule overlapping meetings. Wish I had a reliable way around that because I’d love to get paid twice as much for working maybe 50% more since I typically have a decent amount of idle time within a 9-5
Congratulations, I love it! To me it would be very valuable to have a filter on location requirements - if you have such information available of course. Like, who needs office presence (and where), who is okay part-time, who is offering full remote... but once again, great thing!
I wish you the best of luck and will be keeping a bookmark to check back frequently. I would love some part time work but having done the consultant grind for a long time I’m just exhausted by the process of finding it. I would love a marketplace I could keep tabs on and pick things up when they make since.
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.
Yeah I actually built this after having a bit of frustration trying out freelancing platforms. What surprised me is as a freelancer, on some of them, I have to pay to apply to gigs. I mean I get it, but it still doesn't seem right.
Interesting, I didn’t know big companies like eBay would actually consider a part time employee. Do they really mean that, or are they signaling they seek an intern/student?
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).
I've got a feeling some of the posts that do mention "part-time" are just signalling, which is why I have a ton of them marked "part-time possible" instead of just part-time.
If you have any better classification ideas I'm open to hearing them too!
Love the concept. I'm fresh out of college, so I'm more than happy with full time work at the moment, but I'm definitely hoping to FIRE (or more like FIPT) within 10 or so years if things go well. Working 20 hours a week sounds fantastic. Enough to give me something to do on a regular basis, but also enough to let me do whatever I want to do, whether that be freelance development, or a new hobby.
Best of luck! I spent most of my twenties using all the cash I had on travelling. I don't regret it at all, but some of my friends showed me their retirement accounts recently and I'm definitely a little concerned.
I'd love if North America would get behind the 4 day work week. I might even make a category for employers offering that.
Love this idea. I just went through a painful search for someone and finally found a good match (I think), but it would’ve been fantastic to have this a few weeks ago. I look forward to trying it out sometime
I worked for a company once that was very remote friendly. You could disappear for a month and then pop into Slack and ask, what’s next in the issues queue? Then work on issues for however long you wanted, billed hourly at a generous rate. Several times I disappeared for weeks to travel and climb and was always welcomed back.
That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was structured this way.
I never hit 40 hours a week. Thirty seemed like a good balance between work/life. Eventually, working on a CRUD app didn't peak my interest anymore and I moved onto some other projects. Company was sold a few years later.
How did you track your time? I kind of love this idea but time tracking is a pain in the ass. Seems like maybe you could use "day" or "half day" granularity?
I used RescueTime when I was freelancing. It's an app you install and it tracks what you're working on down to the second. It works by reading the titlebar of your current app, so it works well for development, and you can set up filters in the web dashboard to divide by projects and so on. Of course there's a privacy trade-off to consider as it's a SaaS.
TimingApp is a similar alternative with a local-only option. If I recall correctly, the syncing feature is opt-in and only required if you’d like to sync activity from multiple computers.
I typically use 15 or 30 minute granularity, and I remember to log stuff multiple times per day (not every few minutes, but at least a couple) Time trackers that watch what you're doing are handy, sometimes, until you take a call away from the computer. You just had a 30 minute meeting about something - you're not at a computer. Did it not happen because it wasn't logged by an app tracking your screen/windows? Of course it did - you just have to get used to doing it. Tracking down to a minute is generally pointless for some (most?) situations - people generally care about the results/outcome, and allocating time to various buckets shouldn't be overly important.
I HAVE been in situations where logging 19 minutes to project X and 37 minutes to project Y was 'crucial' because 'accuracy was vital' but... damnit - I don't stop thinking about your project just because I'm not sitting in front of some time tracking app. I avoid those situations wherever possible now (and it's quite possible).
I use org-mode. I have a .org file for each company, then TODO bullets for whatever task, usually copied directly from Jira or etc. Org-clock-in when I start my day, org-clock-out when I finish, estimate an extra hourish for whatever slack messages I answer throughout the day.
I used to be super granular about it until I realized I was billing the equivalent of 8 hours of work as a full time engineer, as 2.5 hrs or whatever, due to the nature of granular billing. Turns out I'm hella unproductive when I spend all day at the office. So I switched to more like dedicating some chunk of my day to work, then billing that chunk, even if some of the time I was making coffee or like, going on a quick walk break.
In all honesty with how much more productive I am as a contractor I could probably justify billing flat 8 hours a day but I'm just too honest or something.
I had an analogous arrangement. I would pop in and out, identifying/building high impact projects, in a mix of web dev, PM, and analyzing data.
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.
Wow, this offhand comment reminds me that there's a vast gulf between US compensation and elsewhere... 130k/y as a "below market" offer...
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.
This is pretty much my current arrangement and it really is a great way to work. Just today I popped into Slack after a week-long break, completed some low-hanging fruit issues and assigned myself a big one to work on for the rest of the week. Our boss occasionally sends us priority updates and of course there are high-priority issues that need to be dealt with immediately by someone, but for the most part, it really doesn't matter if I work full days for a week straight or if I spend two or three days working "overtime" and enjoy a 4-day weekend.
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.
Any chance you might be willing to share the business domain or your role?
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.
SaaS could be a good transition, there are quite a few SaaS shops using C++ for example. Or possibly backend if you're willing to do some cloud based side projects.
Embedded is a lot of fun but IMHO there is more opportunity and compensation up the stack.
> 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.
Yes, I've started doing this, but living in Barcelona it's quite a challenge. There's not that many local opportunities and getting leads out of the country so far has yielded very little for me.
I know, but in most places "remote" actually means "somewhere in US". I'd be willing to take a significant paycut to work at some of those companies remotely.
Lol I thought that this was a spinoff of the sidequest app for the oculus quest (which is kind of an app store - really the main none for unofficial content).
Even though the name is very well chosen, expect this confusion to come up more...
Makes sense. Interviewing is a dumpsterfire. The only reliable way I've ever seen hiring work is to actually work with somebody on a project while paying them a fair market rate. Anything that faciliates that type of relationship, like for example having a bunch of developers working non-full time is the closest thing to an answer for hiring there is.
I wish recruitment platforms would start classifying the level of remoteness instead of a blanket remote allowed statement.
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.
Good point. I imagine there must be ongoing research to define the most relevant (frequent, desirable) "classes" of remote work.
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
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[ 200 ms ] story [ 2693 ms ] threadI 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!
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.
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.
And I'm not sure workers would want it to be true.
We know about the warehouse bots hounding humans into subservience/defeat.
I'm guessing the other bots are right behind -- just not quite as popular yet.
Also, legally you are bound to work for a company according to contracts. I don't want you working for another company on the company's time. It introduces potential liability and risks especially if you are remote.
Just on this point, what you say is common but it's not universal. A lot depends on the type of contract.
I'm working full time at the moment. Yet my contract is structured to allow me to work on other companies' work if I want. And I control my time. It's quite explicit.
That clarity has a real positive payoff for both me and the company I'm working for. I'm more enthusiastic about the work in large part because this arrangement is compatible with me keeping open several research projects on ths side, and I'm confident if they lead anywhere, there isn't a conflict - and that the company people recognise this.
They wouldn't want me not working on the company's projects or not acting as a responsible person. But the whole attitude is to assume I am and support that in an adult-to-adult way. I really like that I feel we could talk freely about outside business interests at work.
It helps a lot that this is a mission-oriented open source company.
TL;DR it does depend on the job, but it's not an inevitable fact that remote work contracts bind a person's time exclusively, even during hours worked.
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.
That said - it's not just part-time jobs I'm curating, but full-time contract positions too!
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.
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'd love if North America would get behind the 4 day work week. I might even make a category for employers offering that.
That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was structured this way.
And since you said "worked", what made you decide to stop popping back to the issues queue at this particular org?
Use a kitchen timer, then every time you finish something input the time precisely.
I HAVE been in situations where logging 19 minutes to project X and 37 minutes to project Y was 'crucial' because 'accuracy was vital' but... damnit - I don't stop thinking about your project just because I'm not sitting in front of some time tracking app. I avoid those situations wherever possible now (and it's quite possible).
It becomes a lot easier when you need to do it to get paid.
I loathe time tracking for internal metrics, but if I need to do it to get paid the motivations change and it just becomes part of the workflow.
I used to be super granular about it until I realized I was billing the equivalent of 8 hours of work as a full time engineer, as 2.5 hrs or whatever, due to the nature of granular billing. Turns out I'm hella unproductive when I spend all day at the office. So I switched to more like dedicating some chunk of my day to work, then billing that chunk, even if some of the time I was making coffee or like, going on a quick walk break.
In all honesty with how much more productive I am as a contractor I could probably justify billing flat 8 hours a day but I'm just too honest or something.
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.
But if you go FAANG and/or atypical role, the limit is much higher.
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.
Embedded is a lot of fun but IMHO there is more opportunity and compensation up the stack.
Which one?
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.
Even though the name is very well chosen, expect this confusion to come up more...
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!
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