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Comment by the_lonely_road | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

On the flip side, if you want the best part-time moms, pay well, supply the hardware, and be very flexible with when work hours happen.

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.

Were you working at an hourly rate at those companies? A salary at reduced hours/pay?

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 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.

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