Over the years one of the things that I’ve seen missing in disproportionate amounts are many opportunities for part time work in the software development industry. There are two things about this fact that makes me kind of chuckle at the absurdity behind them.

1. Much of the time there isn’t any part time work because so much of management and the existing group think is that more hours equal more productivity and more product. This is, however, very wrong.
2. If software developers did work fewer hours, they actually have a high possibility that they’d become more productive, not less.

Shock, gasp, horror, no, tell me it isn’t so, you mean an entire industry is wrong about the human psychology behind an occupation?! Yup. The perverse thing is this isn’t exactly the first time. It appears, we humans are really bad at determining the best psychological state to be in for a particular occupation. We tend to get better at managing this, but overall we humans don’t have a great track record.

What I’d like to see, and I’m by no means assuming anybody would listen, but if leadership out there is, here are my thoughts. They’re free, I’m putting them right here on this blog, and I’m not even asking for any pennies for my thoughts. Disseminate and use as you would like!

The Part Time Coder Position – $40-80k Dependent on Experience & Contribution Ability

Description: Available for meetings, pairing and coding for 4 hours per day, either on a declared morning or evening schedule to sync up with the team. Spending 4-5 hours per day total either meeting or working on project code. No excess meetings, domain planning or other business meetings necessary, core focus is coding and communication with the team and team lead that are working on the coding project.

Requisite Job Requirements:
• Possibly spend a full time week or two to get up to speed on practices, such as kanban usage, task tracking or whatever else is in use for project management.
• Be familiar with software development in general, with the expectation being of several years of experience with some stack that is similar to the primary stack that is being used.
• Be able to communicate, determine need for communication (especially if remote), and up-manage as well as determine self-direction with minimal interaction. i.e. ability to use the right comms for the right messages as often as possible.
• Be able to apply algorithms, patterns, and related thinking to provide solutions to the problem domain space that is being approached.

Other Peripheral Requirements:
• Ability to provide rough guesstimates on where and what effort something will take, pending reasonable time given to determine such things. Also management, as always, should keep in mind, estimates are always wrong. Just sayin’.

So where is this position availability? How about throwing some of those out there and see how or what could be done with some roles like that? It could be very useful. If you’re interested in putting some positions like this into place, I’d be happy to help consult or determine what you’d need.

Recruiters: I pose this question and write this blog entry knowing of no less than a dozen people that would work in software development, are exceptional software developers, but don’t because they’re either A: well off and have no need or desire to work full time or B: want to spend considerable amount of time living life and don’t have huge expenses, so they’d be really happy with a part time job. Neither of these people have any desire to work more than about ~20 hours a week. It’s a workforce that hasn’t even been touched on and overall, the businesses in the tech sector are seriously missing out