One thing that might explain this is how different the pressure is between different professions.
My best friend is a surgeon, I work in tech. We both experience pressure but in ver different ways:
1. If he is having a bad day, the impact on his patient life is immense. If I have a bad day, I can always fix it the next day
2. When he is done with his surgeries and comes home, he is "done" for the day. Aside from operating on one more patient - which is unrealistic - there is nothing "more" he can do. On my side, projects can lasts weeks or month. There is always one more bug to tackle, one more behaviour to implement, one more user story to consider.
As a consequence, it's quite easy for him to work part time: just operate on X days instead of Y days, the outcome of his work (Quality of Life for his patients) is not directly impacted by this choice (arguments could be made there).
On my side, moving part time definitely has a direct impact on the outcome of my work (Delivery speed of the project).
In other words, I think it is easier to work part time on jobs where the outcome consists of a lot of small independent tasks, while it's harder for jobs where the outcome is a single bigger unit.
Your example is an extreme example; one that’s hard to find patterns from.
I think lawyers/accountants would be a better examples. Independent units of work, but different levels of effort give different results as well. Very similar to programming and familiarity with the specifics matter.
There are a lot of opportunities for decoupling of tasks for software engineers that are ignored because of that line of thinking.
Yes, on boarding members to a team is time consuming, but the deadlines that are pushed rarely matter in any real sense. I can’t remember the last time anything I worked on would have had a material difference if we shipped two weeks later. (Cutting off scope creep isn’t a valid reason for deadlines.)
So I see it mostly as this is just how it works mentality.
As far as I know it’s impossible through normal hiring pipelines.
On the flip side establishing yourself as a contractor has a large upfront cost in terms of learning the ins and outs of 1099 work and finding clients. So doing all this just to work less seems like a terrible investment.
Seems very much like a catch-22 unless you’re already a contractor.
I can't speak to finding part-time gigs but outside the US, it is common for contractors to earn multiples in the order of 2-4x the equivalent employee salary. Monetarily, it's almost always worth it to make the jump to contracting if you have the ability and choice to.
I suspect there are many reasons, but probably employers for full time employees don't really benefit much from this. Your team overhead scales quite a bit by doing this (more hiring, more onboarding, more communication needed) with not much benefit to output. I'd assume that due to FTE benefits, the business would want more like a 60-70% decrease in wage to keep per-employee profitability at the same level.
On the flip side, those same businesses always have need for contractors, and those can often be negotiated as part time
Benefits are binary rather than scaling with the position. You can’t get 1/2 time healthcare coverage or the like.
I think the team overhead could be an issue, but I think it’s less than what it’s made out to be. Most people don’t want to work half time. (For many reasons. The largest being culture at this point.)
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] threadMy best friend is a surgeon, I work in tech. We both experience pressure but in ver different ways:
1. If he is having a bad day, the impact on his patient life is immense. If I have a bad day, I can always fix it the next day
2. When he is done with his surgeries and comes home, he is "done" for the day. Aside from operating on one more patient - which is unrealistic - there is nothing "more" he can do. On my side, projects can lasts weeks or month. There is always one more bug to tackle, one more behaviour to implement, one more user story to consider.
As a consequence, it's quite easy for him to work part time: just operate on X days instead of Y days, the outcome of his work (Quality of Life for his patients) is not directly impacted by this choice (arguments could be made there). On my side, moving part time definitely has a direct impact on the outcome of my work (Delivery speed of the project).
In other words, I think it is easier to work part time on jobs where the outcome consists of a lot of small independent tasks, while it's harder for jobs where the outcome is a single bigger unit.
I think lawyers/accountants would be a better examples. Independent units of work, but different levels of effort give different results as well. Very similar to programming and familiarity with the specifics matter.
There are a lot of opportunities for decoupling of tasks for software engineers that are ignored because of that line of thinking.
Yes, on boarding members to a team is time consuming, but the deadlines that are pushed rarely matter in any real sense. I can’t remember the last time anything I worked on would have had a material difference if we shipped two weeks later. (Cutting off scope creep isn’t a valid reason for deadlines.)
So I see it mostly as this is just how it works mentality.
As far as I know it’s impossible through normal hiring pipelines.
On the flip side establishing yourself as a contractor has a large upfront cost in terms of learning the ins and outs of 1099 work and finding clients. So doing all this just to work less seems like a terrible investment.
Seems very much like a catch-22 unless you’re already a contractor.
On the flip side, those same businesses always have need for contractors, and those can often be negotiated as part time
Benefits are binary rather than scaling with the position. You can’t get 1/2 time healthcare coverage or the like.
I think the team overhead could be an issue, but I think it’s less than what it’s made out to be. Most people don’t want to work half time. (For many reasons. The largest being culture at this point.)