Hey all!<p>I recently had some personal stuff which made it necessary for me to cut back on the hourly commitment I could make to work, but found it difficult to find contract, part-time, freelance (anything not full-time) jobs through traditional means, so I built sidequestjobs.<p>It's an aggregator, so it gets jobs from various sources and curates them into part time, freelance, or contract based positions. I'm hoping to add more sources over the next coming weeks, but I wanted to post it to get some feedback now.<p>Thanks for checking it out!
I worked for a company once that was very remote friendly. You could disappear for a month and then pop into Slack and ask, what’s next in the issues queue? Then work on issues for however long you wanted, billed hourly at a generous rate. Several times I disappeared for weeks to travel and climb and was always welcomed back.<p>That company was minting money and wasn’t worried about deadlines. I wish more work was structured this way.
I’ve slowly come to realise that:<p>1. There’s a large latent pool of talent that can only do part time/flexible jobs but aren’t even looking because so few are available.<p>2. The total economic loss from such jobs being rarely offered is massive.<p>Consider women who stop working for a year or two due to having a child or children. Many are only able to return part time at first. There’s so few part time jobs in software that many choose not to return to the industry. By the time they can return full time they feel so out of touch, from just a few years away, that they never return at all.<p>Same happens with people who are injured, temporarily disabled etc. The demand of full time only (and often more hours on top again) means that the industry misses out on retaining a lot of skilled talent.<p>And yes chronic conditions and disabilities are also very disadvantaged by the requirement of full-time only work.<p>But as cool as the name sidequest is - I don’t think it’s quite right. Because for most people of the scenarios listed above this would not be a sidequest but a main quest.<p>Awesome work though. And good luck!
Foremost, congratulations on the launch; I am a fan of more diverse ways of working, and more diverse ways of upending the recruiting mess in use today<p>I wanted to mention two things for your consideration:<p>1. it would be stellar to have Atom/RSS instead of mailing list subscription. I don't need more email in my life to ignore :-)<p>1. related to that, it appears there are job tags but one cannot click on them in order to find more jobs tagged in that way. I said "related to that" because it would also be stellar to be able to subscribe to just the tags of interest, versus the firehose of all jobs (extra bonus points for `/feed/java+spring+whatever.atom` style multi-tag feed subscription)
Congratulations, I love it! To me it would be very valuable to have a filter on location requirements - if you have such information available of course. Like, who needs office presence (and where), who is okay part-time, who is offering full remote... but once again, great thing!
One of my predictions/hopes is that part-time work becomes far more prevalent. In addition to the benefits already mentioned here, it would be great for people who want to be e.g. entrepreneurs or independent researchers. Wrote a bit about this here: <a href="https://jacobobryant.com/p/what-im-trying-to-do/#1-help-build-a-career-path-for-software-inventors" rel="nofollow">https://jacobobryant.com/p/what-im-trying-to-do/#1-help-buil...</a><p>Also relevant: <a href="https://sahillavingia.com/work" rel="nofollow">https://sahillavingia.com/work</a>. I'd like to make a collection of part-time success stories like this.
This is also good for people with disabilities, such as chronic fatigue, chronic pain, or any others that limit how many hours per week you can work.<p>These sort of people deserve a good chance at happiness in getting to work a fulfilling well paying remote job.
I wish recruitment platforms would start classifying the level of remoteness instead of a blanket remote allowed statement.<p>These days remote often means work from home due to COVID in the time zone of the physical office. Presumably won't be remote forever.<p>Remote used to mean people would be working asynchronously, and it didn't matter where you were physically situated and what hours of the day you were online. Obviously this only tends to work for places that are results driven as opposed to ones that care about the number of hours you put in.
This type of site is what always has me considering moving “up” in the stack.<p>Remote work on either hardware or systems level programming (embedded) is almost non existent. Remote and not full-time is even rarer.
Always thought that someone should do something like this but for part-time marketing/comms/content jobs. I'm sure there are men in the following position too, but in my circles there are loads of 30-40yo women returning to work after maternity leave and looking for 2-3 days/week, often in marketing and related jobs.<p>On the other side of the coin, there'd be a lot of small businesses sick of paying an agency but unable to justify a full-time role. Great match, IMO.
Great idea!<p>I feel like there is a gap in the market for experiences engineers who want to work for good rates on well defined projects and occasionally (less than 1 month) and don't bother with client management.<p>I've seen some people charge good hourly rates on Upwork but from talking to them there is a lot of friction / time spent in managing clients, chasing payments, filtering out all the low paid jobs.<p>It would be nice to have a platform that does product / client management for you and just use you for your coding skills.
The toggles filters are driving me nuts, as it stands, it unclear what the checked state is. One would assume that when the "handle" is on the right side, however, the color coding suggest otherwise.
Congrats on your launch.
Love this idea. I just went through a painful search for someone and finally found a good match (I think), but it would’ve been fantastic to have this a few weeks ago. I look forward to trying it out sometime
This is a wonderful idea! (I like the name too BTW.)<p>Unfortunately for me, I've never been able to do freelance or part-time work because I've always needed healthcare coverage...and living in the U.S, it is much cheaper (but definitely *NOT* cheap) to get it through full-time employment. But, hot damn, if i lived in a country that provided healthcare, man, would i jump at the chances to do this kind of work!<p>Regardless, for those that can take advantage of this type of work, this is a great move! Kudos and best of luck!!
I wish the posts quantified their compensation.<p>I have spare time for side gigs, but I'm not cheap, and I don't want to put my information out there (by applying) only to get a lousy offer.
Love the concept. I'm fresh out of college, so I'm more than happy with full time work at the moment, but I'm definitely hoping to FIRE (or more like FIPT) within 10 or so years if things go well. Working 20 hours a week sounds fantastic. Enough to give me something to do on a regular basis, but also enough to let me do whatever I want to do, whether that be freelance development, or a new hobby.
Interesting, I didn’t know big companies like eBay would actually consider a part time employee. Do they really mean that, or are they signaling they seek an intern/student?<p>The availability of part time work always felt like a package that included a tiny shop, cheap clients, and insane amount of cheap international labor competition, and only available through platforms that promote all three things (upwork, etc).
I wish you the best of luck and will be keeping a bookmark to check back frequently. I would love some part time work but having done the consultant grind for a long time I’m just exhausted by the process of finding it. I would love a marketplace I could keep tabs on and pick things up when they make since.
This is off to a great start!<p>Being able to filter by things like industry or type of role would make a huge difference too, or even search by keyword. I know that's additional layers of complexity, but it makes a huge difference when trying to find the right fit!
Looks pretty cool.<p>Also looks like a lot of companies are using it to find FT employees.<p>If so, you are saving them a lot of money on recruiter fees.<p>Good job!
Lol I thought that this was a spinoff of the sidequest app for the oculus quest (which is kind of an app store - really the main none for unofficial content).<p>Even though the name is very well chosen, expect this confusion to come up more...
Not to be confused with 1st google result for "side quest": <a href="https://sidequestvr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://sidequestvr.com/</a>