Ask HN: Where are the part-time remote coding jobs?

[DamnInteresting]

I really love writing, and over the years I've cultivated a respectable audience of readers. But the money in writing is abysmal, far too little to make a living.

In years past, I supported my writing habit by taking on remote coding jobs, either as a part-time employee, or putting in part-time-like hours as a contractor. For almost a decade I coded in the mornings, and wrote in the afternoons. I tend to live inexpensively, so this approach was satisfactory.

My last such part-time position wrapped up in mid-2021, and since then I've not seen a single part-time opportunity that matches my skill set (LAMP back-end, everything front-end). After months of looking, I had to break down and take a full-time coding job just to keep the bills paid. As a consequence I have very little time and energy left for writing--weekends are mainly spent caring for my kindergarten-age kid. The deprivation is difficult.

Have part-time remote coding positions gone away? If so, I suppose I must despair for now. If not, where can one find them?

[rickcarlino]

I tried finding such roles when I was younger and cared more about flexibility than pay. My assessment back then was that most people who hire a part-time dev are hilariously underfunded and insanely price sensitive. Offering a part-time role is a sign that they don’t actually have enough money to be in the software industry, rather than an indication that they have less than 40 hours a week of work to outsource.

Disclaimer: I am American living in the US. These sorts of arrangements might be more palatable to people living in places with lower costs of living.

[al_borland → rickcarlino]

A company might want/need a dev without being in the software industry.

Maybe they have/want a little internal portal for their employees to use. After the initial build, ongoing maintenance wouldn’t take much time. Maybe they need someone to write some VBS for some stuff thy do in Excel. Or any countless number of general office tasks on the computer that would be made easier with a little code.

[bdcravens → al_borland]

MOST development jobs aren't in the software industry, even those that build out enterprise level systems. For example, my employer is a logistics optimization company. Software drives our business, but the truth is it's just scaling an operation that COULD be done by hand. Software isn't our product, our product is really domain knowledge. That said, we spend a substantial amount on development and AWS. (including part time or contract hires when the situation required it)

[giraffe_lady → al_borland]

I had one of these once and I know of couple others. The thing is you get these jobs by having a full time job there for a few years, and then saying "hey like, can I just do the maintenance part time or at an hourly rate" and they either fire you for asking or let you do it.

These arrangements are 100% custom, highly dependent on relationships & office politics, and are never ever posted publicly. You are also just putting a big ass "please lay me off" sign on your head so even if you wrangle one of these you can't expect to keep it for more than a year or two.

[FredPret → giraffe_lady]

> These arrangements are 100% custom, highly dependent on relationships

This is what the very best jobs are like

[chirau → giraffe_lady]

Lol. Why would they fire you for asking?

[giraffe_lady → chirau]

When I was in this situation it was perceived as me looking for another job. I didn't get directly fired immediately was I was moved to a more demanding role on a less prestigious project outside of my competency and then eventually let go.

If you're a critical internal expert your boss really has your back or something it might be different for you. Like I said it has a lot to do with relationships & politics. Even just asking draws attention to yourself and scrutiny to your position in a way that I don't think is usually to your benefit.

[al_borland → giraffe_lady]

The way I did it, I never really asked, but I also didn't go to part time. I just started spending more and more of my time helping people learn how to do the job better, and then building tools to help when it seemed like no amount of training would help them get better with the tools we had.

Over time the boss saw the value and made that my job without me asking. Of course, that requires a decent boss, and it also happened slowly over several years. I'm pretty sure he would have let me go part time if I asked, since he saw me as more productive in 1 hour than most people are in a week. At one point he told me to go to Amsterdam and work from coffee shops for a few months. I didn't do it, but in hindsight, I kind of wish I had.

I have a different boss now and things are drastically different. A boss can make a world of difference.

[oldprogrammer2 → chirau]

Because you just inadvertently labeled yourself as a potential flight risk. Bad managers don’t know how to handle that, and will assume you’re going to leave if you don’t get what you want. The “firing” probably won’t be immediate, but bad managers will passive aggressively manage you out.

[ranger_danger → al_borland]

This is exactly the kind of gig I would love to find. But everywhere I've looked online is just filled with race-to-the-bottom 3rd world devs.

[sodality2 → al_borland]

Yeah, I've heard a good tip is finding local non-tech companies that have various pain points that cost too much to have an enterprise solution, but that would be easy and cheap enough to pay part-time.

[Mc91 → rickcarlino]

> Offering a part-time role is a sign that they don’t actually have enough money to be in the software industry, rather than an indication that they have less than 40 hours a week of work to outsource.

Kind of. I work full time for a big company, but also have a software-heavy side business which used to make thousands a month in revenue. I have enough money to be in the software industry with my side business - when I worked on it alone, my expenses were very, very low, unless you count the spare time I have spent on it.

My full-time job keeps me busy and working on my side business eats up time. For example, an API upgrade we were kind of forced into swallowed up a massive amount of my spare time. That doesn't even cover other work I wanted to do in my side business, never mind everything else in life. As luck would have it, I know an experienced programmer who is not working a full time job right now, and I have paid him about $7000 so far this year to do work on my side business. He gets some cash in his pocket and I get some of my spare time back.

In terms of finding jobs like this - I have known this person for over a decade, and he just started doing some work this year.

On another tangent - someone I used to work with on my team left for another company, and started his own side business of a consultancy. He started getting so much business he reached out and a lot of programmers including myself started moonlighting, doing those projects after work. He did so well he left his full-time job to work on his business full-time. Then he started releasing his own projects as well. Me and others I know did work (actually, I recommended the guy who is currently doing work for me to do work for him, and he did some features for a project).

So with regards to my business and this other business - you work with people, some of the more energetic types start their own side businesses, and some of those side businesses grow. I think the parent poster is right, people hiring part-time might tend to be smaller, underfunded businesses.

[bdcravens]

As is so often the case, it's about making yourself available. Everyone wants a remote job, so anytime anyone posts anything, they get flooded with a ton of low quality solicitations. As such, the best jobs never get posted. For example, I've had good luck posting my information on the monthly "Seeking Freelance" posts, and then later being contacted for what ended up being great projects.

I've also had good luck on Codementor (I've had mentoring calls that turned into longer term projects), though that may have dried up it seems.

In your shoes I think you're unlikely to "find" part-time work, and may need to take the initiative. Think about how to best "package" the work you enjoy or are good at, and offer that as a productized service. I'm no fan of spamming, but you can ethically reach out to companies that run your stack (there are services that will provide targeted lists, like BuiltWith)

[ProductizedHQ → bdcravens]

Do you have a portfolio or published work you show potential clients?

Wondering if someone could do the Productized Service into Portfolio route.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

Have you looked at NGOs/non-profits?* Many of them are very small and cannot afford full time coders/developers/support. They might not pay a lot, but if you gather a bunch of clients together you can easily start making quite a bit. They usually have comparatively simple requirements, but are very underserved because they cannot pay as much.

I would say, though, that NGOs/non-profits can have very interesting employees, to put it kindly. They are usually very stressed, underpaid, and overworked, but also very committed to the cause. For those reasons, I'd recommend approaching them only on a contract basis.

Another option is Higher-ed. I've seen some absolute coast jobs in higher-ed related to archives and databases. You can easily be only working essentially part-time hours for full-time (modest) pay.

* By no means should you only think "charities" --- many NGOs/non-profits are arts and culture/legal related as well, for example.

[DamnInteresting → beezlebroxxxxxx]

I have indeed worked as developer/IT for non-profits, and so far it's always been a positive experience. Those positions can be tricky to find since they often don't list the openings on traditional tech job sites, and networking is less likely to lead to those places. Maybe I need to do a Google alert or something. Hmm.

[beezlebroxxxxxx → DamnInteresting]

They don't often list on tech sites. They don't have the technical expertise to accurately describe what they're even looking for. IT and tech is a blackbox for them.

Usually they either have NGO/charity specific sites (charityvillage in Canada, for instance, is a job aggregator site), or just go by word of mouth.

If you find one you're interested in, just sending them an email or directly to whomever is in charge of hiring might work. Arts and culture nonprofits also have a strong networking component - if there's a local event, introducing yourself and what you can offer, would also work.

[madewulf]

There is a reason for part time programming jobs not to be common: in most case, you want the work to be finished as soon as possible.

Part time makes sens as an employer for jobs that require constant presence and not much context to be executed (think of a cashier, for example). Then you can fill a full time with multiple part time workers.

But for jobs like programming, part time makes less sense.

[newaccount74 → madewulf]

For cashiers, hiring two part time employees is preferrable to one full time employee, because you can have their shifts overlap to cover peak hours. It's the reason why cashier jobs are almost all part time. They don't hire full time cashiers because then they would be overstaffed during slow times of day.

For any job that requires coordination, there is a huge communication overhead when hiring multiple people. It's extremely inefficient to split work between multiple people, so companies prefer to hire people for as many hours as possible.

The only way a part time softwate job would make sense for employers is if the job is so simple it needs no coordination, and two part time employees would be cheaper than a full time employee.

[romanows → madewulf]

Maybe as there are more and more older programmers looking at partial-early retirement, part-time, lower-paid gigs might make sense? I could see working part time improving CI/CD, docs, refactoring, etc. Stuff that the main developers might not have time to do, is largely orthogonal to product development, but that may not get done otherwise.

[toomuchtodo]

Not part time per se, but 4 day week tech roles can be found at https://4dayweek.io/, run by u/philmcp

(no affiliation, just a fan)

[angusb]

I'm a software engineer and musician. My music is an art project and is currently loss making. For a while I was able to negotiate part time by using contacts I got going through a tech accelerator in London, and finding the companies where the founders were having a harder time hiring. These companies usually wanted some in-person time, but mostly were ok with remote.

At some point I switched to becoming a full time contractor but taking 3-5 month contracts and taking a break of several months between each one. Some of the clients are startups, some are dev shop consultancies that hire extra contractors into their teams for certain projects (there are several of these in London). These are full remote.

I get a good amount of music done this way.

[mywittyname]

The only people I've seen successfully pull this off are people who worked full time for years, then were able to negotiate a move to part-time.

Consulting is theoretically "part-time". I got by in college doing part-time consulting, but that's only because I knew the person running the business. In reality, the good part-time gigs are going to be projects that you worked on full-time, that then transitioned into maintenance.

[PaulHoule → mywittyname]

Consulting can also be an oscillation between having way too many hours or having not enough hours or no hours sometimes.

[Proziam → PaulHoule]

As a long-time consultant, the truth is that unless you aim for more hours, the drought periods are likely to kill you.

[ericmcer → mywittyname]

This is the most practical way. Put in the time, become indispensable, then figure out an arrangement that meets you and your employers needs.

I have had a few contract remote gigs and they always end in the employer going broke or me moving on once it becomes clear they are just going to burn their funding.

The wisdom during the boom times was to job hop and maximize your compensation, now that we are in a more realistic slowed down economy building job security and comfort seem way more wise.

[r0m4n0]

I’d just aim for a full time gig and then back away to part time. I work with someone at Google who has a formal arrangement to work part time (Tuesday-Thursday).

I’m not sure their story so you may or may not scare away the recruiter if you ask for part time up front.

I’d also do the same for remote work. I have successfully converted to remote twice when they technically don’t allow full remote. Had to put the time in for that though

[simmons]

I've been in a lot of different work situations over my career, including occasionally working part-time. Most of my part-time situations have tended to be very small, well-defined projects, or situations where I may be able to provide some unique and valuable skill that makes up for the reduced coding throughput.

I think a part-time coding job would be fantastic, but such jobs don't seem to be abundant or stable. It's my experience that very few people need just a little software engineering. If someone needs software engineering at all, they usually need a lot of it. Also, the structure and management of most teams don't seem to be compatible with part-time work. Many companies aren't sure how to deal with someone who can't attend all the meetings.

That said, if you managed to do this for a decade, you likely have more experience with how to pull this off than the rest of us here. I'm not sure what may have changed since mid-2021, other than the general tech slump.

[skriticos2]

Sadly, doing the work is usually just half of the effort if you want to be independent. Maintaining business contacts is the other half. You seem to have been doing quite some coding in the past on part time jobs. Do you have a database about who you have been working for? Maybe they need some updates or maintainance on the stuff that you have built in the past? Or maybe they know someone who needs something done. Personal connections are what makes any business work.

Not saying you have to be a sociable person. I'm a total introvert myself, but knowing a couple of insiders that act as multipliers for these kinds of jobs would sound like it could help you, especially if you have a proven track record.

[legitster]

In my experience, we have hired remote coders exclusively through services like Upwork. And if there is anyone we really like to work with, we'll bring them in on a longer term contract based on their availability. But we have never, ever hired a part-time employee "from the street".

Part-time professional employees in the US are really disadvantaged these days because you still have to pay full benefits, so per-hour they are much more expensive than just hiring a full time employee and splitting their time between projects. Also, recruiting and interviewing is a huge time suck, especially just for someone who only does half time. So usually I have seen more contract-to-hire approaches.

[ranger_danger → legitster]

> you still have to pay full benefits

source?

[newaccount74 → ranger_danger]

I'm not sure how health insurance works in the US.

In Europe, health insurance and social security is just a percentage of your wage. So for the employer it doesn't matter how many hours you are employed, taxes and health insurance is just a percentage.

I was under the impression that in the US health insurance is a fixed cost, that depends mostly on what is covered, but it doesn't depend on the income of the individual. So if an employer offers health insurance to part time employees, the cost would be the same as for a full time employee.

[ranger_danger → newaccount74]

Social security is a percentage, but since health insurance is not usually provided by the government (unless you have Medicare/Medicaid), you pay a flat fee to a private company regardless of income. But my understanding is that companies are not required to provide any benefits to part-time workers whatsoever, and frequently use that loophole to avoid having to pay, by making their workers either subcontractors or part-time. https://www.healthcare.gov/part-time-workers/

[andjd]

How long have you been in your current role? You can talk with your boss, and let them know you'd like to go down to part time. No guarantees that they'll say yes, but if you don't ask, the answer guaranteed to be "no".

[pfannkuchen]

Have you tried working part time hours at a full time remote job? In theory if it’s salaried they should care about your output not your butt in seat hours.

[masijo]

If you can find some, let me know.

The 8 hour 5-days work week is so outdated it's not even funny anymore. I want to do more stuff than just work my whole damn life...

[imbusy111 → masijo]

Take a year off. Ideally some time in June to maximize the tax benefits.

[chirau → imbusy111]

Why does June maximize tax benefits?

[simmons → chirau]

I'm not the poster who mentioned this, but I assume they're thinking about tax brackets. If you make a year's worth of income in a year, then take a year off starting in January, some of that income may be taxed in a higher bracket. If you take a year off starting in June, then you make 1/2 year income in one year and 1/2 year income in the next year, so there's a better chance that all the income will be taxed in lower brackets.

[iosguyryan → chirau]

June may be too late in the year, but some credits have an income cap.

[ponector → masijo]

If it is outdated, you can try 996 schedule. /s

The best way to get a part time job is to get a full time and then eventually reduce hours.

[tropicalfruit]

companies that offer the best work life balance are all also choosiest. you have to be part of "the family".

i'd rather just work for a dysfunctional company and half ass it until i'm fired/

that's where i'm at in my career anyway.

[WD-42]

They are out there. The problem is that it’s a part time job just finding them.

[em-bee → WD-42]

it's a full time job to find them

[c-fe]

In the Netherlands, I think it is possible to apply for a fulltime job and then after some time ask to work part time and i think your employer can not discriminate against you. They may not like it so maybe best to discuss with them in advance but its a legal option from what i remember. Maybe its the same situation in other countries.

[TrueGeek → c-fe]

I recently moved to the Netherlands. The majority of parents here work less than full time hours. They'll split up the day and you'll see one parent drop off the kid at school and the other one pick the kid up. Kids are able to go to school on their own from a young age, so you don't have to do this forever.

Enough people are doing it that the average number of hours worked a week is 32.

[em-bee → c-fe]

from the sources i found, this is definitely the case in germany. good to know that other countries are following this.

though it would be nice if businesses were required to always offer jobs as a part-time option

[TheMagicHorsey]

The way you get highly paid part-time work is by making a piece of open source software that's targeted at some niche vertical. Then you will get consulting/customization requests for that software and you can do that part-time.

Another option is to work for a consulting company that bills hourly. There are lots of those.

[peterpans01 → TheMagicHorsey]

can you share some of those consulting company?

[TheMagicHorsey → peterpans01]

It depends on what stack you work on. There are thousands of these small shops with 1 to 50 devs, that just take on work from companies to do small outsourced IT projects.

From a Google search, these guys do Rust: https://ferrous-systems.com/

These guys do Flutter/Dart: https://flutterbountyhunters.com/

These guys do embedded systems: https://landing.witekio.com/embedded-software-development-se...

These guys do web stuff for corporations: https://pixelplex.io/web-development/

[prewett]

You could also look for MVP-type projects, work for three months, and then take a three month break. Although I feel like that might work better for something like an phone app than the back end. I wonder if higher interest rates have put the squeeze on projects like that. Possibly indirectly, by reducing the number of worthwhile startups/projects and thereby increasing the number of available developers. Most developers will want full-time, so the companies might have enough full-timers now whereas before supply was so tight they'd take whoever they could get.

Contracting definitely benefits from being a generalist, though. If you can expand into different languages, native development, adjacent areas, etc. that will increase the number of jobs available.

[ianpri]

Based on your skillset I would start to reach out to smaller businesses using a similar stack asking if they would be interested in a retainer package for all those little tweaks, e.g some custom WP code, shopify tweaks etc.

[hinkley]

I really want to believe there are people out there for whom UBI would motivate the, to take a part time job to do something they love but couldn’t afford to eat on.

But I don’t know if human nature supports this. If you’re a five year old and you know that you don’t have to work, does it change how you dream of the future for better, or for worse? Does it end up like the Expanse where people have UBI but are still miserable because they can’t afford to go to school to learn a trade, and colleges become socialized and bureaucratic, enforcing artificial scarcity?

[al_borland → hinkley]

There are jobs almost no one would take by choice, but they learn to have a passion for over time. In other cases, some jobs simply need to be done.

If I think about living only off UBI, or UBI + a passion project, it assumes all the infrastructure and service businesses are still running to make my life comfortable. Will those things run if the motivation is taken away?

[ipsi → al_borland]

Yes, for one of two reasons, I'd say:

* In the big cities, increased rents will almost immediately eat up the extra income from the UBI, and there won't be any meaningful change in the status quo for anyone who rents — which I imagine includes the majority of the people who do the important but undesirable jobs.

* Anywhere that the people doing these jobs either can afford houses (smaller American towns, e.g.), or where there's enough rental supply that rent won't immediately go up by the same amount as the UBI, will have to start paying people more to do these jobs. As far as I understand it, jobs like trash collection are already relatively well-paid given the training and qualifications required, so they might not even have to pay that much more.

[hinkley → ipsi]

Pretty sure my uncle, the reformed fuckup, bought his first house with sanitation dept money.

[acuozzo → al_borland]

Would you trade one month in twelve to make things comfortable for everyone?

I've often wondered if the solution to the "who will clean the toilets?!" problem is: everyone, but only when it's their month to do so.

A pipe-dream, of course, and likely only doable under a military dictatorship.

[al_borland → acuozzo]

I visited Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen when I traveled to Denmark. I don't have a lot of information, but I walked by someone giving a tour, and from the little I overheard, it sounded like that's how it worked there. Everyone rotated handling the various responsibilities to take care of what needed to be done. But that's a small community of like-minded people, so it doesn't really have to scale like it would for it to work on a large city, state, or country level.

[rglynn]

Depending on seniority and the role, combined with tenure it isn't that hard to negotiate a part time arrangement. Even in startups where being on hand to solve issues is key, I don't actually need to work full time to deliver what's required.

Sure I doubt there are any roles advertised as such, but you can definitely create them.

[_adamb]

I run tech at a venture studio (gateway.xyz) and I _rely_ on part time developers.

None of our businesses sell software and none have any full time engineering support. That said, there are lots of little tools that have been custom built to enable the businesses to scale. It's not enough to support full time roles, so I go to part time contractors when I need it.

Weirdly, I struggle to find part-timers with availability! Where have you been looking? I'll make sure I start posting in those places.

[peterpans01 → _adamb]

Are you looking for someone right now? I am available. Currently, I am in SEA.

[wsdookadr]

There are no roles of that kind. If you want to work in IT, you need to be a recruiter or a manager. While this might seem controversial, it's very accurate.

[datavirtue]

I think we all shop for the highest bidders and there are enough high bidders to employ all developers and then some. A lot of us, when we go part time, charge an hourly rate that is at least double what most businesses can pay.

Most devs could work 25-30 hours a week and score eye-popping income. In fact, we do this as employees even, working basically 20 hours for our salary.

There are a lot of part time devs called "contractors."

[kulor]

A bit of a curveball I spotted was professional skill marketplaces like https://www.bark.com/en/gb/software-development/ which, when on the platform, you'll find people posting their esoteric software dev requests which could lead to some interesting gigs.

[randomdata]

As you live inexpensively, and appear to have been working full-time since late 2021, you'll have a sizeable cushion on which to go without work for a while. Why not do that and focus all of your energy on writing? Once the runway runs out you can go back to working full-time again for a while to rebuild the cushion.

[DamnInteresting → randomdata]

I've used a strategy like this in the past, but as the short-sprint roles pile up, I find that one develops a bit of a resume problem.

If one lists the positions and dates on one's resume, recruiters/interviewers notice this and regard the applicant as flaky and noncommittal. They don't want to invest in someone who will jump ship after a short stint.

If one doesn't list those positions, it's hard to prove experience, and creates the appearance that you've struggled to find work, which can be a red flag.

So, I think that works well for younger folks, but I'm in early graybeard territory, myself.

[spacephysics]

I would look at upwork or fiverr, there you’ll find programming work on a project basis, so essentially part time

[romulobribeiro → spacephysics]

Upwork is terrible. Most projects are scams and the ones that are real are so overwhelmed with proposals you don't get anything

[giraffe_lady → spacephysics]

Maybe 7-8 years ago but certainly not now.

[_tubs]

I recently discovered https://www.fractionaljobs.io/, which has positions that are less than 40 hours a week, though there aren't many (engineering) roles

[tbird24 → _tubs]

Thanks for sharing. We get new roles every week tho! Hiring part-time engineers is growing very quickly in popularity.

[generalizations]

I've come to the conclusion that remote coding work is only really possible when starting your own business - not consulting, but actually figuring out something useful and selling it. Then you can sit on a beach and work on it part-time.

[adrianmsmith]

One thing I’ve noticed in startups is that investors will demand of CEOs things such as “you need to hire a team of 10 developers” whether that’s really needed or not.

It’s just easier for that CEO to hire 10 full-time people than 20 part-time people.

[getregistered]

I saw Data Annotation offering flexible coding jobs for around $40 an hour https://www.dataannotation.tech/coders?

[oliwal]

Higher-tier freelancing networks like Toptal were my go-to for these roles.

[shmatt]

are you not finding jobs or not finding jobs for enough pay? If you're willing to work for the price of an engineer in Romania or Brazil there should be opportunities out there

[ponector → shmatt]

True. There should be lot's of opportunities if you are ok to get a 30$ per hour contractor position.

[diyseguy]

I'm not sure how anyone can do software engineering part time

[pavel_lishin → diyseguy]

How do you mean?