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Ask HN: Moonlighting

13 points by outside1234 ↗ HN
I've noticed three things at our small startup and at other big companies that I've worked at:

1) The traditional interview process is broken: there is no way for a candidate or company to get a good feel for what working together would be like in in 4 hours of conversation.

2) We have lots of smaller projects in almost all areas that we need immediate help on.

3) I often want to do a real starter project in a language/framework just to get a taste for its strengths and weaknesses, but some companies restrict languages and frameworks to a canonical set. My usual course of action is to write some toy project that is eventually abandoned.

I've been thinking that a structured Moonlighting engagement with another company could be a good solution to these problems.

I'm posing this as sort of a lean startup experiment. If an exchange existed such that folks interested in moonlighting could be connected with companies interested in hiring or contracting domain expertise in this way, would you be interested in taking on 5-8 hour a week paid projects either with the aim to find the right new job or expand your technical horizons?

And if you are moonlighting now, how did you find a position that matched your interests?

8 comments

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jumper2111
I am currently moonlighting as a security lead for a small startup that can't yet hire me fulltime - I found the position through personal contacts. Totally recommend it. It both has kept me fresh with the latest technologies (which I bring back to my day job at bigco) and also is fun to work with a small company. I put in 4-5 hours a week.
bartonfink
I could be interested in such an arrangement. I'm not moonlighting right now, but I think it's a great opportunity to align my interests (verifiable experience with new skills, some extra income, opportunity to network) with those of a company that may not want to hire someone full-time but still needs work done.

What sort of projects do you see fitting this idea?

outside1234
I was thinking of primarily technical projects but I could see this applying to a wide range of disciplines (for small companies in particular) like law, graphic arts, etc.
lsc
From what I've seen, this is how most bootstrapped small-businesses hire. We find someone promising, we throw them a few smaller contracts, and then if we like them, we offer to hire them full time on a w2.

This is what I've been doing forever, and as far as I can tell, this is extremely common for businesses of my size with my ownership structure.

I think it's less common for large corporations because the definition of 'contractor' is, well, pretty unclear, so hiring someone direct on a 1099 is very risky, and hiring someone out of a body shop is usually quite expensive. (That, and most good people won't bother with you if you want them to go through a body shop.)

outside1234
And do these folks work part time in addition to a full time job?
lsc
I just hired (or rather, gave a contract task to) a guy that has a full-time non-technical job and a few technical (unpaid) positions. He's going to be part-time (as a paid technical person) for me.

But yeah, I see what you are saying; You have a really hard time hiring known good people this way; known good people, if they want full-time work can pretty much write their own tickets without working two jobs for a while first. Known good people who want to be contractors, generally speaking, want to be contractors and don't want to be employees.

Of course, most businesses of my revenue/in my market simply can't hire known good people; we can't afford their rates.

Businesses at my end of the market are betting that we can get good people that other people don't think are good; so really, an extended screening process is more important than if you can pay google rates to begin with.

None the less, there are many small businesses that operate like this; we do find good people; of course, we also end up kissing some frogs, and when we do find good people, they don't stick around forever; people with the ability to pay well eventually notice they are good.

I think it works out okay for all involved; most companies that can afford to pay the rates 'known good' people demand simply won't look at people who have been unemployed (or employed doing something non-technical) for a while, or people who don't have experience; that's where I get most of my people. And after working for me for a while? they have something technical to put on their resume, and people who can pay real money look at them seriously.

mzbridget
This is an excellent idea! I see this a lot more lately and I prefer to work on different projects to keep my talents fresh as someone else mentioned. I also like working in different environments because as you mentioned, it is difficult to get a feel for a team in just 4 hours. In the traditional job environment, you often find that the team isn't a fit until its too late. Your arrangement is great for all parties. However, the employer doesn't have a lot of incentive to invest in part-timers or moonlighters and there is less of an incentive on the employee to make the start up their life as is necessary in a lean and young company.