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OT, but I thought I'd ask, since you seem to have experience with this sort of work...

In your experience, is it possible to negotiate work at a rate where one would only be working 2d / wk? I'd imagine it's hard to negotiate such an agreement with a company because they want work done on a faster timeline?




Sure, probably. I worked briefly for a small (2-5 engineer, plus designers, and administrative) consultancy that did web app development; we had multiple clients at once, some clients got two FTE days a week of our time or less, sure. So I don't see why it shouldn't be possible. (Whether you can charge enough to live off of 2 days a week of work, I don't know, and depends on your living standard and location!)

But there's a lot of work that isn't your hourly billable that goes into running such a business too, administrative overhead, client relationship management/development, etc.

I personally ultimately decided this kind of consultancy was not work I found rewarding. I also was not one of the owners/principals, and was not there very long, so I'm not really an expert in this kind of business, and probably there are people who might be better to give you advice. But since you asked.


For contract work in general, both technical and non-technical, the answer really is "it depends."

Sometimes a company really does need something yesterday and you're the bottleneck in getting something released/getting revenue/etc. Bit I've also taken on writing and video projects for example that were components of a marketing campaign that was scheduled to launch some months down the road so it was a pretty part-time thing. Mostly I've worked on internal projects but the same principle applies.


Maintenance work can easily be negotiated at this schedule. For example, you can launch a project, and then stay on "retainer" for 5 hours a week for bug fixes. If you find a few projects like this it could meet your criteria.

With new feature development it would be harder. But you could negotiate a weekly fee based on a 4 day work week, and then get so good and efficient that you do the work in 3 days.




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