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Part time makes sense for a company if it's a specialized role that they can't saturate with 40 hours of work per week but still need on an ongoing basis. E.g.

* Remote hands for 10s of racks at a datacenter

* SOC2/auditing paperwork

* Customer service

* DBA

* Accounting, HR, and other backoffice

For most other roles (e.g. developing product software), the company would rather onboard the minimal number of people to finish quickly, so they will want full-time. It's pretty rare that a company needs part-time work for a fixed-length project, but it's sometimes useful if it's a small part of a larger project. E.g. a designer could be part time on a typical web-dev project once implementation starts.

A really good tester would be awesome to hire for 1 hour per day, but it seems like that part of the industry is unfortunately a race to the bottom, so it's probably hard for talented people to get paid what they are worth.

> True part-time work is hard to find because most companies would rather hire someone to work 4 x 40 hour weeks on a project instead over the part timer who wants to do it in 8 x 20 hour weeks or 16 x 10 hour weeks.

My last two contract jobs have been old customers - more than 5 years ago - with whom I left on good terms and who reached out for more work.

Secondly, I've started "team" working with a colleague so I can apply for 40 hour per week jobs and only have to put in 20 hours per week myself. The clients were unsure about it at first but soon realised they are actually getting two full-timers for the price of one, particularly when something goes wrong or something needs to be delivered asap.

With my colleague, I charge a 10% admin fee because I'm the one invoicing the client and I pay the colleague immediately each week whether or not the client pays me. My colleague has reciprocated and I've done work for them (and paid their 10% admin fee).

The teaming up concept is very interesting. I wonder if there's a matchmaking startup idea to help people do this.

Compilr?

I think it depends a lot on supply and demand dynamics for the specific role. If the company is having a hard time finding someone qualified and they see you as a good fit, they definitely might prefer to get someone working part time immediately compared to waiting who knows how long for another good candidate. This especially applies to startups under time pressure.

And then once you get in the door and show you’re a net positive, why not keep you? 15 hours per week of net positive is better than 0, even if they’d really prefer 40+.

I've been on the managing side of part-time employees. We did part time when people were going back for advanced degrees or had other short-term needs away from work, but still wanted to keep their jobs.

Unfortunately it's really hard to have one person working 10-15 hours per week while everyone else is working 40.

You encounter a lot of situations where teams are delaying meetings until the part-time person is available. You have to catch the part-time person up on things that have changed while they were away. If the part-time person doesn't finish an important task before their 10-15 hours is up, someone else might have to take it and restart the task to remove it as a blocker.

It only really works when the part-time person's project is really independent and not time sensitive. Anything that interacts with the rest of the team or the rest of the company comes with additional overhead that might come close to cancelling out the productivity of having one person working 10 hours per week.

There's a lot of wishful thinking about part time work where all hours worked contribute equally to the project, but in the real world having 4 full-time employees and 1 part-time person working 10 hours on a project is basically the same as having just 4 full-time employees working on the same thing. Having only 4 full-time employees might even be more efficient due to the lower communication overhead.

So that leaves independent projects and work that isn't time sensitive.

Yeah, these are definitely valid points. But is it so bad that you don’t hire someone great who comes along and only wants part time when you’ve got no other decent candidates in the pipeline?

The challenges you mention are real, but many companies will still be tempted even if they have to make an effort to carve out specific tasks that are a good fit.

> But is it so bad that you don’t hire someone great who comes along and only wants part time when you’ve got no other decent candidates in the pipeline?

Sorry to tell you this, but this is correct.

If I hire someone part-time while I search for another person then I have to fire the part-time person when I find a full-time person.

Then I have to do all the work of on-boarding two people, the work of transitioning work from one person to another and the struggle of turning the position over. If I have the part-time person onboard for 4 months and they're working 10 hours per week, I'm only getting the equivalent of maybe 1 month of extra productivity. That 1 month of productivity is probably offset by all of the overhead and transition time.

I know it's not what you wanted to hear, but it's how things go.

If someone is only available part-time, we reserve isolated project-level work for them on an as-needed basis. Hiring someone to be part-time for a temporary time is so much overhead and work for someone who's barely working 1-2 days per week.

I don’t “want to hear” anything as it’s not relevant to me personally. Kind of strange to include that in your comment.

But in any case, I see your point. I’m just not sure your perspective on this is as universal as you seem to think.