Ask HN: Where are the part-time remote coding jobs?
In years past, I supported my writing habit by taking on remote coding jobs, either as a part-time employee, or putting in part-time-like hours as a contractor. For almost a decade I coded in the mornings, and wrote in the afternoons. I tend to live inexpensively, so this approach was satisfactory.
My last such part-time position wrapped up in mid-2021, and since then I've not seen a single part-time opportunity that matches my skill set (LAMP back-end, everything front-end). After months of looking, I had to break down and take a full-time coding job just to keep the bills paid. As a consequence I have very little time and energy left for writing--weekends are mainly spent caring for my kindergarten-age kid. The deprivation is difficult.
Have part-time remote coding positions gone away? If so, I suppose I must despair for now. If not, where can one find them?
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I would say, though, that NGOs/non-profits can have very interesting employees, to put it kindly. They are usually very stressed, underpaid, and overworked, but also very committed to the cause. For those reasons, I'd recommend approaching them only on a contract basis.
Another option is Higher-ed. I've seen some absolute coast jobs in higher-ed related to archives and databases. You can easily be only working essentially part-time hours for full-time (modest) pay.
* By no means should you only think "charities" --- many NGOs/non-profits are arts and culture/legal related as well, for example.
Usually they either have NGO/charity specific sites (charityvillage in Canada, for instance, is a job aggregator site), or just go by word of mouth.
If you find one you're interested in, just sending them an email or directly to whomever is in charge of hiring might work. Arts and culture nonprofits also have a strong networking component - if there's a local event, introducing yourself and what you can offer, would also work.
Disclaimer: I am American living in the US. These sorts of arrangements might be more palatable to people living in places with lower costs of living.
Maybe they have/want a little internal portal for their employees to use. After the initial build, ongoing maintenance wouldn’t take much time. Maybe they need someone to write some VBS for some stuff thy do in Excel. Or any countless number of general office tasks on the computer that would be made easier with a little code.
These arrangements are 100% custom, highly dependent on relationships & office politics, and are never ever posted publicly. You are also just putting a big ass "please lay me off" sign on your head so even if you wrangle one of these you can't expect to keep it for more than a year or two.
If you're a critical internal expert your boss really has your back or something it might be different for you. Like I said it has a lot to do with relationships & politics. Even just asking draws attention to yourself and scrutiny to your position in a way that I don't think is usually to your benefit.
Over time the boss saw the value and made that my job without me asking. Of course, that requires a decent boss, and it also happened slowly over several years. I'm pretty sure he would have let me go part time if I asked, since he saw me as more productive in 1 hour than most people are in a week. At one point he told me to go to Amsterdam and work from coffee shops for a few months. I didn't do it, but in hindsight, I kind of wish I had.
I have a different boss now and things are drastically different. A boss can make a world of difference.
This is what the very best jobs are like
Kind of. I work full time for a big company, but also have a software-heavy side business which used to make thousands a month in revenue. I have enough money to be in the software industry with my side business - when I worked on it alone, my expenses were very, very low, unless you count the spare time I have spent on it.
My full-time job keeps me busy and working on my side business eats up time. For example, an API upgrade we were kind of forced into swallowed up a massive amount of my spare time. That doesn't even cover other work I wanted to do in my side business, never mind everything else in life. As luck would have it, I know an experienced programmer who is not working a full time job right now, and I have paid him about $7000 so far this year to do work on my side business. He gets some cash in his pocket and I get some of my spare time back.
In terms of finding jobs like this - I have known this person for over a decade, and he just started doing some work this year.
On another tangent - someone I used to work with on my team left for another company, and started his own side business of a consultancy. He started getting so much business he reached out and a lot of programmers including myself started moonlighting, doing those projects after work. He did so well he left his full-time job to work on his business full-time. Then he started releasing his own projects as well. Me and others I know did work (actually, I recommended the guy who is currently doing work for me to do work for him, and he did some features for a project).
So with regards to my business and this other business - you work with people, some of the more energetic types start their own side businesses, and some of those side businesses grow. I think the parent poster is right, people hiring part-time might tend to be smaller, underfunded businesses.
Part time makes sens as an employer for jobs that require constant presence and not much context to be executed (think of a cashier, for example). Then you can fill a full time with multiple part time workers.
But for jobs like programming, part time makes less sense.
For any job that requires coordination, there is a huge communication overhead when hiring multiple people. It's extremely inefficient to split work between multiple people, so companies prefer to hire people for as many hours as possible.
The only way a part time softwate job would make sense for employers is if the job is so simple it needs no coordination, and two part time employees would be cheaper than a full time employee.
But I don’t know if human nature supports this. If you’re a five year old and you know that you don’t have to work, does it change how you dream of the future for better, or for worse? Does it end up like the Expanse where people have UBI but are still miserable because they can’t afford to go to school to learn a trade, and colleges become socialized and bureaucratic, enforcing artificial scarcity?
If I think about living only off UBI, or UBI + a passion project, it assumes all the infrastructure and service businesses are still running to make my life comfortable. Will those things run if the motivation is taken away?
I've often wondered if the solution to the "who will clean the toilets?!" problem is: everyone, but only when it's their month to do so.
A pipe-dream, of course, and likely only doable under a military dictatorship.
* In the big cities, increased rents will almost immediately eat up the extra income from the UBI, and there won't be any meaningful change in the status quo for anyone who rents — which I imagine includes the majority of the people who do the important but undesirable jobs.
* Anywhere that the people doing these jobs either can afford houses (smaller American towns, e.g.), or where there's enough rental supply that rent won't immediately go up by the same amount as the UBI, will have to start paying people more to do these jobs. As far as I understand it, jobs like trash collection are already relatively well-paid given the training and qualifications required, so they might not even have to pay that much more.
Most devs could work 25-30 hours a week and score eye-popping income. In fact, we do this as employees even, working basically 20 hours for our salary.
There are a lot of part time devs called "contractors."
The 8 hour 5-days work week is so outdated it's not even funny anymore. I want to do more stuff than just work my whole damn life...
The best way to get a part time job is to get a full time and then eventually reduce hours.
though it would be nice if businesses were required to always offer jobs as a part-time option
Enough people are doing it that the average number of hours worked a week is 32.
i'd rather just work for a dysfunctional company and half ass it until i'm fired/
that's where i'm at in my career anyway.
I've also had good luck on Codementor (I've had mentoring calls that turned into longer term projects), though that may have dried up it seems.
In your shoes I think you're unlikely to "find" part-time work, and may need to take the initiative. Think about how to best "package" the work you enjoy or are good at, and offer that as a productized service. I'm no fan of spamming, but you can ethically reach out to companies that run your stack (there are services that will provide targeted lists, like BuiltWith)
Wondering if someone could do the Productized Service into Portfolio route.
At some point I switched to becoming a full time contractor but taking 3-5 month contracts and taking a break of several months between each one. Some of the clients are startups, some are dev shop consultancies that hire extra contractors into their teams for certain projects (there are several of these in London). These are full remote.
I get a good amount of music done this way.
I’m not sure their story so you may or may not scare away the recruiter if you ask for part time up front.
I’d also do the same for remote work. I have successfully converted to remote twice when they technically don’t allow full remote. Had to put the time in for that though
If one lists the positions and dates on one's resume, recruiters/interviewers notice this and regard the applicant as flaky and noncommittal. They don't want to invest in someone who will jump ship after a short stint.
If one doesn't list those positions, it's hard to prove experience, and creates the appearance that you've struggled to find work, which can be a red flag.
So, I think that works well for younger folks, but I'm in early graybeard territory, myself.