Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?
I dislike going through interviews and all the rituals that involve working for a company full time.
I don't like to stick to one project for a long time, which is visible on my resume, and recruiters don't like that.
I've been thinking of a way to work around these traits, and what I have come up with is - work part time, on B2B, with invoices instead of employment contracts. I'm hoping that with B2B it will be easier to find work, fast. It should be more flexible to employers.
But where do I find people to do work for?
Edit: I'm a full stack developer, mainly focused on Go and React.
148 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadAnd yes, there are many countries where a $1 an hour job would get a lot of applicants.
Despite the confusion, though, I think I can see now that there is a place for $1/hr jobs, too, since people are actually looking for these offers.
I don't think I'd ever put my information on their platform, and I'm also considering getting off linkedin for similar concerns.
You need to pay upwork continuously to be able to bid on jobs and you can pay even more to see other people's bids. It has become sort of pay to play scheme.
For example, they advertise and allow you to create a free agency account but you can't apply for jobs until you upgrade to agency plus.
There was also a recent case where upwork permanently suspended a freelancer's account without any recourse where the freelancer had $2000 in their account. I am sure that's not an isolated case knowing what Upwork has become.
My experience was that I got 100% scam and dangerously unhinged contacts. Not one single valid proposal ever came my way.
I have heard great things about Upwork, but always from people who wanted to hire, as opposed to be hired.
I'd really like to avoid all the bureaucracy of banks, government etc for my side projects.
Ty
How well does it work for rail Devs?
Since I launched in November I’ve placed 10+ Rails developers with gigs. About half for full-time roles with salaries ranging from $100k to $200k.
For context, cold messages on LinkedIn have a 5-20% response rate. Usually on the lower end.
railsdevs is currently sitting at 50%+. If you’re hiring a Rails developer everyone is already half qualified - so matching is much more likely.
In my experience as a python/full stack freelancer, you're best off starting with a full time and then reducing your hours per week after getting familiar with the project. I've done this several times, either because the project went in to more of a maintenance phase, or at my request (normally to spend more time on a side project).
I'm looking for a contractor at the moment: https://travelmap.net/jobs/fullstack-web-developer
This one accepts part time: https://www.zdigitalagency.com
Do you perhaps publish (or could publish) some statistics on earnings and the like?
Also, how often the jobs are available for non-USA candidates?
Because they were well-respected in the WP community, there wasn’t much interviewing needed other than discussing the specifics of the project.
I found them via the plugin GitHub.
It’s a weird prerequisite, but without it there generally isn’t enough context to do meaningful work sans a lot of hand holding.
I was #16 in clanbase globally for a brief period in CS1.6 way back when - I've always thought I was wasting my life at that point, but now I see I should have stuck with it :D
When you're freelancing you're essentially interviewing for your job every single minute you're in front of or have an active project with the client. Soft skills and doing work that has nothing to do with engineering is even more of a requirement.
There is one significant difference. In this perpetual interview, you have access to the internet and can find factual answers from there.
The problem solving part is what makes someone a good engineer/scientist. Not knowing particular algorithms, or knowing formulas (in case of DL jobs).
Interviews focus on the wrong things.
I am okay with the perpetual interview as long as I don't have to rote memorize a bunch of stuff like some poor middle-schoolers in 1970s communist country.
I threw away many recruiters who even mentioned technical interviews. I am doing more than okay financially and career-wise, btw.
This might change in the future just as a step to do something I want to do. I will hate all the interview, HR initiation, onboarding, etc. forever.
You can find recruiters that will clip a small fee and dump you through a contractor management platform. It's all automated. You're effectively a freelancer, still need to sell yourself a bit to get hired but the recruiter vets leads on both ends to streamline things.
Contracts are short and sweet so it's not like interviews are multiround or anything, 15 minute coffee with the client to check if you're aligned on stack / interest and off you go.
Early in my career I worked for a consulting firm as an employee, and I never found out exactly what I was billed at but I'm guessing it was around double what I was paid. We worked on site at our client's office, and people there called us "contractors," but we were employees of the consuting firm. We had benefits, training, overtime pay, etc. and we got paid our salary between jobs when we were not on a client project.
If I were an indepenedent contractor using an agency to find work, I'd expect them to take a much lower cut, as they have much lower overhead and risk.
Now soft skills are different and 2 of us are good at those and one of us is really bad; so we hire out based on the client, wishes and need for soft skills and a lot of communication overhead or not. And I agree that needs to be a match, however I cannot see how that requires 6-8 gruelling interviews spread over weeks instead of 15 minutes and a portfolio (which is how we get hired).
So yeah, I think OP would do better in a small collective of freelancers or even small consultancy company; I find it much easier to get into anywhere that way than the employee route.
In my experience, it is now about knowing how to do these things but when to reach for them when solving a problem.
They want to know if you have studied the fundamentals, so you at least have a chance of understanding whatever you are going to be copy-pasting from Stack Overflow.
I've gone the route of avoiding typical interviews altogether by leaning into my network for opportunities.
There are plenty of places where I think I'd like to work, where I'd be very motivated, and where I'd make an impact to the organization, but I'll never bother because their interview style is bad.
> have a chance of understanding whatever you are going to be copy-pasting from Stack Overflow.
And, frankly, I avoid all of this because what you've said here is exactly the sort of place where I don't want to work.
While their process might be arbitrary, it tries to ensure that entrants can comfortably think about and select appropriate data structures and algorithms for problems, on demand.
In most cases, prepping for this feels like rote memorization, but through that process you start to build an intuition that helps you be more efficient at pattern matching and isolating the constraints/bottlenecks. And you've proven that you can learn and apply the algos. It's not the most fun of interview styles, but it does work for them.
So what’s the 6 week interview for? To recognise talent? Sure I can see that in a junior a bit (but I doubt you find out more in the all those interviews than a 15 minute chat, at least that’s my experience; you will actually need to hire and try them on a project in the team to know their feel for it all) but in a senior that’s the portfolio again.
To me it feels that we are starting in a position where the interviewer assumes I lied about everything I sent in and this all is to prove myself (again and again). I am not in kindergarten; I have decades of experience in huge project; good luck finding a stooge who likes abusive relations.
It does feel like the balance of power in these interviews is way out of whack, but that's what you get when there's way more applicants than open roles. If you're a developer with a good reputation, sometimes you can skip most of the red tape [1]. That bar is extremely high, though.
[1] https://youtu.be/8Ia6FX-tqcE?t=4999
The most compelling argument I've heard is "we get so many applicants at $bigcompany that we need a fast and objective way to filter people out". And sure, that works, but think of the masses of great people you're turning off with that approach? Most great devs I know won't put up with that crap, including myself. Not a problem if you've optimized your company to build masses of code with early-career employees I suppose.
Knowing the tradeoffs we're making in data structures and having a broad understanding of different algorithms to throw at a problem is very handy. It's also almost completely unnecessary at the typical web shop (like you say). I use these things a bit in my work (not the typical web shop), but mostly indirectly via DBs and similar tools where I need to understand the tradeoffs. I'm certainly not implementing anything with red/black trees, making my custom bloom filters, etc. We have an ecosystem of tools for a reason, that would be silly to reinvent the wheel everywhere without a damn good reason.
BINGO.
I'm good at the job and good at normal interviews. I more-or-less enjoy both, even. I like talking to clients, and I'm good at it. I can sell myself. And I can do the work.
Specifically software developer interviews practically make me hyperventilate and break out in hives. Fuck that. A pop quiz over a huge potential space, probably over something I will never in my life actually use on the job, to be solved live while people watch and judge me? Oh my god, no. No. Why the shit that's considered acceptable in a world where we're so touchy-feely that projects are supposed to have Codes of Conduct is beyond me. It's straight-up abuse.
But rather that set of weird, contrived rituals (which pretend to measure soft and other skills, but basically don't really measure anything other than the candidate's ability to game up answers to questions they looked up on the internet) -- not to mention the frequently appalling lack of decency, common courtesy (and common sense) has come to stand to in for the interview process these days.
In interviews for full-time employment, this has rarely been the case.
I heard good things about them but haven't got in myself because they require leetcode puzzles which I suck at atm.
"How would you get X?" "How would you get all X who are not retired?" etc
After 3 questions, the guy stopped and said "no one has ever gotten this far this quickly before - I don't have any other prepared questions right now. Let's try one more..."
That one took another 10 minutes - I sort of 'knew' it but... doing 'live' pairing being on display adds a bit of nerves, and... I just need to hammer through multiple trials. Felt awkward, but got there after a bit of time.
Then... person 2. "Leetcode" exercise... I reviewed it again a bit later, and one of the things that tripped me up is that the description and the expected 'sample in/out' answers were in conflict. At best, the description was ambiguous, but to my reading was in contradiction to one of the expected answers.
I struggled 20 minutes in front of them... and we were out of time. The question was (to my reading) relatively abstract and doesn't map to any of the sorts of problems I've tackled over the past 20 years in development.
They thanked me and closed the interview. I wrestled with the leetcode for another 30 min or so later that evening and 'got it', but... annoying.
I reply with this partially to say "you may never get better at the leetcode stuff" but don't let that get you too down. :)
Someday if I'm desperate for work I might work on it and apply again.
Still, it's still better than begging around on upwork or fiverr like some people are doing.
I learned this the hard way... a couple times...
In the example above, I was, indeed, talking out loud to someone and we had some clarification and discussion, but it was still more contrived (imo). Working with the first person with real SQL and a set of real life tasks (write a query for a report to give number of active employees in each area, etc) was far more straightforward vs "find non-repeating chars in a string". I can do the second one, but I wouldn't work by starting off fresh pairing with someone. I would start off a problem on my own, document/test/trial things, then if/when I needed to pair, I'd be able to walk through things in a more measured process. Give me 10-15 min on my own to digest the problem first before I talk to someone.
Even writing this, I can hear people say "but that's how the real world works! You have to jump in to unknown problems immediately pairing with someone, and just ... ask away for clarification..." But even then... it's not how I work well in contrived online tests. In a business setting, the team is likely all 'new' to at least some of the problem. In the 'exam' setting, I'm still 'pairing' with someone who knows it all, and the 'hrm...' and 'do you need help?' interjections every few keystrokes is just not conducive to real work (for me), nor is it how I would ever work in real life.
But during the last technical call I couldn't finish one out of two puzzles in time because I initially went for a sub-optimal strategy, so I got told to practice leetcode and apply later.
With 16 years of professional experience, I shall do better with my time than getting good at solving timed Fizzbuzz-type puzzles.
To change your rates, you have to go to their support group and ask for the change. I'm not sure how hard it is to change I haven't needed to change it yet.
Yes, I would pay a recruiter to keep around so that I do not have to spend time sending resumes and searching job boards whenever a contract dries up.
Right now I am looking for work. If you're a recruiter (or another engineer for that matter) interested in such an arrangement, email is in my profile.
HOWEVER, and it's a big "however" -- I don't truly enjoy it. I don't mean that I don't like building a relationship with clients, putting thought into my communication, etc. In some way I do enjoy those facets of it a lot. But, I'm an introvert by nature and when managing clients, acquiring clients, etc... It feels like I'm putting on a persona that's not truly myself and it's very draining emotionally and intellectually which ends up actually impacting the quality of my work over time.
I would love to be able to find a "talent manager" who can do the job of "talking to the customer and bringing the specs to the engineers."/officespace I think to most people this sounds exactly like just "having a job." And people will ask what's the difference from simply having a manager?
I think this perspective is also why there's not a solid existing industry that fits the needs here.
As well, I don't know if this is necessarily true but having someone with at least some basic level of software knowledge I think is a huge plus to being a talent manager as you or I would think of them. That helps to ensure that the quality of working coming in meets at least some base level. The problem of course is that anyone with the right knowledge will either be a developer themselves or in some other role already. To make this work they might need to be able to manage multiple talents.. but then it runs the risk of turning into an agency of sorts, right?
And I don't off the top of my head know exactly what the qualitative differences are here between an agency managing multiple contractors and a "talent manager" but I think there are some and would love to hear thoughts on what those would be. I think it's all centered around how the relationship actually works. As you say you want to hire/pay a percentage and I would as well. That keeps the talent manager working for the engineer(s) versus the other way around.
I don't get why freelance software engineering can't be the same. I would pay a recruiter handsomely to do that exact service. I mean, we're not actors, but this is a rich sector, there's a ton of demand, it's a worldwide market, so where the heck are they?
I want to act^H^H^Hwrite code for a living, not getting real good at job hunting.
We were a lot less likely to be able to talk a company into doing that for a typical full stack dev.
That being said you will probably have to talk to a lot of recruiters to find someone who has the right relationships to do this. Like 2 out of the 80 recruiters at the company I worked for would have gotten you to me. The rest would have pressured you to interview for a full time role. That is just at one recruiting agency.
[0] https://10xmanagement.com/
Source: I launched my own software consulting business back in July 2022 and I work with a handful of customers "part-time" (e.g. project based work, 10 hours a week).
I like to do a lot of different things. I'm currently building basic web-apps for clients part-time and love it. Get to work on 2-3 different projects every month, since its usually coming down to basic CRUD apps.
I could build these apps in my sleep but finding the ppl that need them (or a good client) seems like a full time job.
We're always looking for experienced software developers who are personable and can go deep into a topic with learners, work through exercises, help them correct mistakes and so on. It's 1-2 hours of well-paid work per session:
https://apply.workable.com/skiller-whale/j/2D3E071FD5/
(Warning you do have to prepare each session quite well - it's much harder to teach something that you know as a working programmer than as a teacher, because you're probably not used to saying what you know out loud!)
But if you know the topic and like helping other software devs it might be exactly the kind of short-term you're looking for.
Happy to answer any questions here, and I'd probably be involved in an interview session too.
What other topics are you guys planning? I'm a part-time CS professor who is always looking to supplement his income..
(It certainly doesn't help that agents post jobs as part-time only to lure you to apply so they can start nagging you.)
The part-time roles that are available are usually either very simple, short-term tasks, Or companies with extremely limited budgets that will under-pay you, and try to squeeze the most out of you and give you trouble with payment and hours worked.
I suggest opening a company, adding some friends, and taking up multiple contracts simultaniously.