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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that 2nd point is that quite often people need "full time salary" so it is not that management somehow has backwards thinking.

I have a friend that can really work 4 hours a day, but he is a special case where he does not have a family to upkeep and no mortgage. He is also a bit hard on the frugality.

But finding such person is basically 1 in a million. If I post a job with 4h a day which amounts to 1/2 of a normal salary I will probably never get a candidate. If I post a job with normal salary and then start explaining that it is 1/2 hours and accordingly paid, some people will get angry.

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> If I post a job with 4h a day which amounts to 1/2 of a normal salary I will probably never get a candidate.

I think you're mistaken about that. If you can persuade candidates that it really is 4h a day at 1/2 of a normal salary, you will get candidates who are excited by the job because it opens up their time for other opportunities for hobbies, home life, side projects, open source projects, looking after family, other consulting gigs, education, etc.

However, for developer roles you might find that potential candidates don't entirely believe the ad. I think they'd imagine the employer having unrealistic expectations of what 4h reasonable output looks like, so that they'd feel pressure to work overtime, resulting in closer to 8h anyway while pretending to get it done in less, for 1/2 of a normal salary.

This is a good point.

Persuading candidates is where it breaks. I don't have time for that, we need to hire now and if we hire someone then for next 2 years we probably won't hire anyone new, and I don't think there is enough people who would like that 4 hours. I also have to pay for ad that will get most CVs

It would be much easier if I get someone CV and he writes cover letter explaining that he would like to try such an arrangement.

I tried to get part time dev for Kibana/Elastic needs like 4 hours - anyone I approached was not even willing to discuss "why" they just said no. People also don't have time to listen to your persuasion, most of the time it is clear cut and goodbye.

The other problem is with overhead 2 half time employees != 1 full time employee. There is the extra equipment cost, benefits (perhaps), management overhead etc. e.g. If I replace a team of 7 full time engineers with 14 half time engineers, do I keep 1 manager? That seems like a very large team for 1 person to handle, so now maybe I need another manager too. From a purely economic perspective hiring half time engineers at half the comp just doesn't seem to make sense.

You can argue that half time engineers are more than half as productive as a full time engineer because as others have said full time engineers don't work a full 8 hours anyways. While theoretically that's true, as I originally posted, that's not what I've seen. Based on my anecdotal experience, half time engineers are less than half as productive as a full time engineer.

So from both a productivity and economic perspective, it hasn't made sense.

I think the idea is that you replace a team of 7 full-time engineers with 7 half-time engineers, and get 80% of the benefits at 50% of the cost.

That's the theory, but like I said for us it hasn't really worked out like that. Maybe we're doing something wrong so who knows.

It won’t be 50% of the cost due to overheads like said above, it may be more like 60%+.

Another factor is that often the cost of developers is not the most significant factor. If a company can get say $100m of value out of $10m of salary cost on engineers, it doesn’t really make sense to instead spend $6m to get $80m of value.

And just adding more people isn’t easy as each person increases communication overhead.

Someone who's getting offered $300K+ for a full time job... Even 50% of that is already a full-time salary for many.

Not if you have a 2M mortgage

This sounds like a choice made by the person who chose to get the 2M mortgage, which is broadly speaking an outlier rather than average outcome.

If you need $300K to support your expenses, than that's a choice you can make -- if you have the ability to have a $300K plus income. That's of course a choice not available to 95% of the USA. (300K happens is around the 95h percentile income in the USA).

That some people live in houses they couldn't pay for on $150K doesn't mean that $150K isn't possibly a "full time salary". $150K is definitely in the category of "a full time salary", many people make this much or less working full time.

That a skilled engineer could possibly make $150K for working 50% time -- is a choice not available to most people, most people don't even have the choice to make $150K working full time! So a skilled engineer has that option, make would be a (healthy) full-time salary for most of the USA, working only half-time. Or anyway would, if employers would hire like this. That's the point I meant to be making.

Income distribution in the US does continue to get more uneven every year.

I'm in the same situation as your friend and I know of at least 3 others in my friend circle. I don't think part time availability is as low as you think.

Personally, I would take that part time job at 80/90K a year, simply because that's all I need and I value my free time for other projects, cycling, whatever.

However, I'm not "there" yet as a developer. Maybe in a few years after I've proven myself.

I can live quite comfortably on half a typical salary, and I'm available.

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