
Ask HN: Is it possible to work part time? - statik
Hi! I've been working in technology for a long time, 20 years since I started my own little company in high school. For the last 6 years I've been privileged to work from home, mostly on open source software. This has involved a lot of travel and a LOT of hours of work per week, and the glamour of the dream career is fading. I want to simplify my life, cut my expenses, and work 2 or 3 days per week so that I can spend more time with my wife and daughter doing volunteer work and making a difference in the world. Everything I have learned about starting my own company or working at other companies points to making lots of money while working constantly, not making a small amount of money while working less. It seems like starting my own company is the only option, because every high tech company I've ever worked for wants people to work full time, and never hires part-timers.<p>Has anyone successfully moved to part time work, or started a company that allowed them to work 1000 hours a year instead of over 2000 hours a year?
======
patio11
Yes, I work part-time essentially all the time these days. (I run a small
software business and consult on the side, average 20 hours or so a week, and
take off pretty much any day I feel like.) If I wanted to, I could sustain
this lifestyle indefinitely.

I'm told that many consultants do something like this. If full-utilization for
a consultant is $200,000 (and that is by no means a ceiling), then 50% still
puts your household in a pretty decent place to be. There exist some
consulting opportunities where you can schedule arbitrary amounts of work over
long time scales -- I have one client relationship where, if I wanted to bill
four hours on Monday and four hours on Tuesday and then never touch the
keyboard again, he'd be thrilled by that. There are other opportunities if you
want to parachute in, work for two weeks, and then get back to living.

~~~
gizmomagico
How do you find your clients, and is your consulting/contracting work
something a mere mortal could pull off too?

~~~
patio11
If I'm not too busy tonight with Business of Software prep work and dinner,
I'll write something on my blog about it. I'm a mere mortal whose skillset is
very, very difficult to hire for. That describes lots of people on HN,
although the skillsets are probably different.

~~~
gizmomagico
Cool. It would be interesting to hear more about this.

------
icey
This is definitely possible. When I was consulting, I used to take off between
Thanksgiving and New Years Day every year to do nothing but decompress and
dick around with whatever new technology had caught my eye.

I had a day job for a little while when I had gotten tired of the constant
sales cycle of consulting. They were more than happy to let me go part time
because I brought a good plan to the table - I worked 20% less and took a 12%
pay cut - they got the benefit of the fact that I was learning new stuff on
the day that I wasn't in the office.

Anything is possible, all you have to do is make a plan.

------
jgalvez
Most people work part time anyway by procrastinating like mad :) It's not a
bad a idea to put some structure to it. Protip: read The 4-hour Work Week.

------
Nate75Sanders
Look at university jobs. They even have a special term for it: 50% FTE (Full-
Time Equivalent)

I'm 100% FTE at a university right now doing sysadmin/programming/network
stuff for a small team and will be moving far away and telecommuting at 50%
FTE in a few months.

Like patio11 says, everything is negotiable. Additionally, I did a LOT of
networking (the human kind) and it paid off. The guy who hooked me up with
this isn't even a tech guy -- he knew people who needed one, though.

EDIT: 50% FTE includes full retirement and health benefits, too, in my
situation.

------
dpcan
Have you considered jumping on the app-store/mobile market bandwagon? It's
working wonderfully for me, but it may take you a "full time" effort to find
your sweet spot and start making a real living.

~~~
city41
Can you share a little what your apps are about and how long it took to become
sustainable? Not expecting vivid details, just some food for thought if that's
ok.

------
jules
Almost 50% of the people here in the Netherlands work part time, so I'd
definitely say it's possible :)

------
lsc
I've done this quite a lot throughout my career as I attempted to bootstrap
various businesses. there are, really, two ways of going about it:

1\. scrounge for several short-term contracts.

The problem with this approach is that the life of the independent contractor
is very feast or famine. My biggest problem was that I'd put effort into
selling and then I'd end up with more hours of work than I wanted; then I'd
pull back and I'd end up with not enough.

The advantage is that you can often charge higher hourly rates, and it doesn't
require establishing yourself as difficult to replace at your current job.

You can pull it off, but there is a lot of sales and financial planning you
need to do. I've personally supported myself this way for almost a year, but
it was pretty difficult.

2\. talk your current employer into letting you do the same work, only two or
three days a week.

(this usually involves losing your health insurance and most other benefits)

If you want to work 20 hours a week for the same employer steady-like (as
opposed to scrounging for work all the time) you will have to take the job
full time and make yourself hard to replace, first; then you explain the
situation to the boss. I've had pretty good luck doing this... better luck, in
fact, than the aforementioned 'scrounging for several small contracts'
strategy. I've probably done this for a total of two years of my career (while
working on prgmr.com) and they were relatively easy years (vs. my year doing
#1, which was really difficult, and involved eating a lot of tuna.) This
strategy results in a steadier (and for me, larger) income, and because I'm
really not that good at selling 'premium products' it usually results in me
earning more per hour, if you count sales effort. Someone who is better at
sales might have the opposite result, just 'cause part time catch as catch can
gigs often can give you better hourly rates.

------
mgkimsal
There are part-time gigs out there, but ime they're pretty rare, and afforded
to people who've been with a company a while and 'earned' the right to the
flexible working situation. Everyone else if f/t or contract.

I think you do need to move to freelance/contract work, and be firm in how you
structure your work agreements. If it's MTW, with Th-Sun off, be up front
about that. You'll be able to find gigs where they just need you 5-10 hours
per week. Get 2-3 of those, work your time, then take time off - you should be
good to go.

Most of those part-time gigs may not pay as well as f/t work, but you're
looking for the time freedom, not maximized revenue anyway, right?

<http://indieconf.com> might be useful for you to attend, with respect to
getting started in freelancing. We don't specifically have anything on 'going
part time', but I'm sure some of the sessions can address that.

------
udfalkso
I tried a couple of times to get startups that were actively recruiting me to
pay me 3/5 the salary in exchange for working 3 days a week. I wanted to
devote some more time to some side projects and to just generally do whatever
I wanted with my time. Sounds similar to your situation.

Nobody was interested in this. They would offer me very, very generous
packages, but only for full time work. This part time idea was a no-go.

Startups have this dream that every employee is in ALL THE WAY. They think it
will be bad for morale if the other employees are working their asses off and
you don't show up now and then.

In my opinion, this is silly. Either my services are valuable or they're not.
If they are, then they are also valuable in part. But, perhaps not.

------
rms
I did it. My ecommerce company is doing well enough to comfortably support two
people (ramen profitable --> pizza profitable --> casual dining profitable...
we're just short of casual fine dining profitable, but if linear growth
continues we'll be there in 6 months).

I'm not sure that I have very many useful lessons for other people, other than
that it is possible to make money by selling stuff online while doing your own
supply chain/order fulfillment. It took more than three years of SEO growth
for us to hit critical mass.

------
fleitz
Start by floating the idea by the people paying you. Your situation and the
people in your life (clients, partners, etc) are not going to be the same as
everyone else so it's not going to be very relevant to your specific
situation. Try transitioning rather than starting from scratch. Perhaps it's
better that instead of working 2 to 3 days a week, you're working 6 months out
of the year. Try going down to 4 days a week, then 3, then 2, etc. The less
drastic the change the more receptive people will be to it. It's also going to
be better for you as you'll adjust to the new work schedule and income over a
longer period of time. You mentioned cutting expenses, just do that, you don't
have to ask anyone, less expenses will make the transition easier and is never
a bad idea.

You should be prepared with the concessions you're willing to make to make
this happen and this will likely be asked when you float the idea.

Also, consider that you've moved up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and re-
evaluate a lot of things in your life that may no longer be relevant. I'd bet
you're transitioning from esteem to self-actualization. This could make
cutting expenses much easier than you think it is because you no longer derive
much happiness from materialism.

------
TamDenholm
I'm not sure if this is an option for you but if you average out my hours over
the year, i work part time. I'm a contractor, I work 6-8 months of the year
full time, and the rest of the time i do what i like.

It does mean i have to be financially disciplined, which thankfully (after
learning the hard way) does now come easy to me. It also allows me the
flexibility to not be tied down to one location throughout the entire year,
which working 2-3 days a week does.

------
CyberFonic
I have done what you suggest and having been living the "ideal life" for over
10 years. The biggest challenge was to our cost of living to about 30% of what
it was on F/T work. First time I attempted the change, I got broke fast and
had to get some contract work to pay off the bills and credit cards.

Once we established the required habits, we ended up with a small nest egg
which has come into handy.

Although I do have to take on short consulting gigs to top up the fund, they
are becoming less frequent as I we get better at managing.

The only difference is that P/T work for employers hasn't worked out as
expected. Instead, I take on project oriented work which lets me bill for
completed work and have deliverables and milestones that fit with the other
activities. Sometimes it is tough to say No to work that has deadlines that
would require working F/T or more to deliver on time.

------
tjr
I work full-time for an avionics company building simulation software. A
couple of my co-workers are part-time.

I also work part-time for a startup. In this case, I'm more of a consultant;
some weeks I'm very busy, other weeks I might do nothing at all.

Part-time work is out there, but it's not always floating on the top.

------
wccrawford
Yes, it's called 'contracting'.

No employer is going to let you work part time. There's a lot of time and
expense involved in finding and maintaining programmers, and they'd rather
have a full-timer instead.

As for starting your own company, those always take more time than a full-time
job if you want to make any money.

~~~
patio11
_No employer is going to let you work part time._

Stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a lawyer: this, like
everything else in your contract and HR handbook, is ultimately negotiable. I
mean, heck, my day job put it on the table while trying to prevent me from
leaving, and I was a Japanese salaryman. (They had a couple of offers --
another one involved more work and less pay.)

Any particular company may be more committed to full time employment than a
Japanese megacorp, but I strongly doubt (and have personal knowledge that it
is not the case) that all companies are totally committed to full-time only.

~~~
j_baker
"They had a couple of offers -- another one involved more work and less pay"

Just out of curiosity, what was the reasoning behind that? Was it something
that could have ended up being a good position, or was it a hand-wavy type
thing?

~~~
patio11
He heard my concerns about work/life balance and family issues, and thought
"10 months on, 2 months off to go see family; you won't be a salaryman
anymore, so material conditions will worsen as a matter of course" would be
among the better alternatives to the company losing me.

I had more compelling options.

------
nfriedly
Its certainly available. I'm working part time right now doing Java and
JavaScript development. My employer has stated that they'd be happy to have me
full time any time I'm avaliable, but they're also happy to have me at 20
hours per week. I work at a ten-person company which probably makes some of
the difference. One of my previous jobs had similar circumstances.

