I dislike going through interviews and all the rituals that involve working for a company full time.
I don't like to stick to one project for a long time, which is visible on my resume, and recruiters don't like that.<p>I've been thinking of a way to work around these traits, and what I have come up with is - work part time, on B2B, with invoices instead of employment contracts.
I'm hoping that with B2B it will be easier to find work, fast. It should be more flexible to employers.<p>But where do I find people to do work for?<p>Edit: I'm a full stack developer, mainly focused on Go and React.
If you dislike going through interviews, I'm not sure that freelance work or going into business for yourself (which is the normal model for this kind of thing) is really the right answer.<p>When you're freelancing you're essentially interviewing for your job every single minute you're in front of or have an active project with the client. Soft skills and doing work that has nothing to do with engineering is even more of a requirement.
I'm in the same position, and I am once again asking for "talent management" to become a thing. I am a software engineer, I am willing to pay a recruiter/manager some percent of my revenue to keep sending work my way and find new quality clients.<p>Yes, I would pay a recruiter to keep around so that I do not have to spend time sending resumes and searching job boards whenever a contract dries up.<p>Right now I am looking for work. If you're a recruiter (or another engineer for that matter) interested in such an arrangement, email is in my profile.
If you have any experience with the game Counterstrike, reach out to me. Email is in my profile. I run a small, bootstrapped B2C business and have a number of interesting projects I could hand off to people.<p>It’s a weird prerequisite, but without it there generally isn’t enough context to do meaningful work sans a lot of hand holding.
I've used a recruiting company <a href="https://www.facet.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facet.net/</a> that also handles contract work, and works with a lot of startups. They can add you to a mailing list to send you opportunities that match your criteria.
I did this for a few years.<p>Find companies for whom you are a total catch of a full time hire, and negotiate a part time contract.<p>I was on a 20h/wk max retainer for one co, and another I could flexibly bill anywhere from 15-40h max depending on load. They both asked me to come full time before and after working a few months. But I held the advantage. I also worked for slightly less pay than ideal, but the lifestyle was the point for me.<p>That's my big takeaway from freelancing. The power relationship is different. You want to be in a position where they really need you.
It sounds like you're looking for freelance work?<p>In my experience as a python/full stack freelancer, you're best off starting with a full time and then reducing your hours per week after getting familiar with the project. I've done this several times, either because the project went in to more of a maintenance phase, or at my request (normally to spend more time on a side project).
I do this, what I do is avoid recruiters and look for job postings that are a good fit, then send them an email asking if they'd be interested in discussing part time contract work instead of FTE. Often they say no, they want full-time (especially at larger companies) but sometimes they are willing to chat about it.<p>I think you have to have enough experience that you (and the employer) are comfortable skipping the interview gauntlet. After all, if you're contract if you're not doing good work they can just stop. One thing that is helpful is to suggest working on a small, limited project for like 2-4 weeks, and they can decide if they want to continue working with you or not. (of course, you have to do a good job on the project).<p>It's a little weird, there are times when I'm scrambling for work and it seems like there's nothing out there, and other times when I'm turning away work, but if you can deal with the unpredictability it can be good.
The part-time developer I’ve frequently used is one of the main contributors to a WordPress plugin I use. They were able to help with some plugin specific customizations as well as on other general work.<p>Because they were well-respected in the WP community, there wasn’t much interviewing needed other than discussing the specifics of the project.<p>I found them via the plugin GitHub.
There's an interesting "reverse job board" for Rails devs -> <a href="https://railsdevs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://railsdevs.com/</a> that sounds pretty close to what you're looking for. I'm not sure what stack you work with but it might be of interest.
If you're interested in working on Outline (<a href="https://github.com/outline/outline" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/outline/outline</a>) hit me up – big backlog of fun features to build on an open codebase.
Startups are probably more flexible to work with.<p>I'm looking for a contractor at the moment: <a href="https://travelmap.net/jobs/fullstack-web-developer" rel="nofollow">https://travelmap.net/jobs/fullstack-web-developer</a>
I worked variously as an individual consultant, or either leading or as a member of small ad-hoc contract teams, or as a co-founder of a consulting firm, for about 14 years. If you don't like the process of selling yourself, you will not like this life.<p>We did eventually build up a stable of long-term clients, but we got those by doing lots of short-term work, each one of which was at least one interview-equivalent. You also have to learn how to judge when to pitch - you will get a lot of nibbles for jobs that don't make sense, are not serious, scams or beyond your capabilities. You need a well-tuned bullshit detector, and especially when you're hungry, correctly judging situations can be tricky. But writing proposals and estimates for everyone will bleed you dry, and you'll probably develop a rep as a sucker - a lot of companies solicit proposals they never intend to act on for various reasons.<p>In any case, good clients for consultants generally come from word of mouth. So you want to do good work for someone who knows lots of small business owners. Go look for those people. Small IT support shops are less plentiful now with the rise of cloudified commodity services, but that was my angle.<p>FWIW, I went back to full-time employment. We cold make it work, but we couldn't thrive, and it is hard to grow a shop on contract work (2x the workload generally means 2x the employees - there's very little leverage). I make significantly more as a wage slave than I did as "my own boss".<p>But you might well do way better. And there absolutely is a bright side - freedom is a big one. It was very hard to give up ownership of my time again. You also meet a lot of folks who can be very different from the sort you run in to in HugeCo technical silos.
This topic comes up relatively often on HN - my opinion is it’s difficult to find these sorts of gigs and if there was a great resource for it we’d probably know about it?
I’m not pushy with the opinion just my two cents
> I don't like to stick to one project for a long time, which is visible on my resume, and recruiters don't like that.<p>Have you considered the consulting industry? Project rotation is high (2-3 projects/year) but you don't look jumpy in your resume (although to be honest, I have done the same before and only once a potential employer brought it up as a red flag)
I write and train for Skiller Whale (skillerwhale.com) who train teams of software developers on React, Go, Typescript & PostgreSQL (with lots of other curriculums in development).<p>We're always looking for experienced software developers who are personable and can go deep into a topic with learners, work through exercises, help them correct mistakes and so on. It's 1-2 hours of well-paid work per session:<p><a href="https://apply.workable.com/skiller-whale/j/2D3E071FD5/" rel="nofollow">https://apply.workable.com/skiller-whale/j/2D3E071FD5/</a><p>(Warning you do have to prepare each session quite well - it's much harder to teach something that you know as a working programmer than as a teacher, because you're probably not used to saying what you know out loud!)<p>But if you know the topic and like helping other software devs it might be exactly the kind of short-term you're looking for.<p>Happy to answer any questions here, and I'd probably be involved in an interview session too.
Build a profile that says as much on Hired.com and see who reaches out. So far a handful of companies that fit this bill pretty closely have shown up that I don't think I'd have found otherwise. It couldn't hurt and I'll be watching this thread closely for tips because while I don't mind interviews/ritual I just love small B2B shops.
I have hired through A.Team and Moonlight. Both seem to have good engineers and good employers, both allow for part-time roles (Moonlight afaik _only_ has part-time roles). I heard from the engineers I hired through the platforms that they are happy with it from their end too.
Depends what industry you're in. Given HN audience I would guess there's a fair chance you're an engineer or in some tech role, in which case beyond Upwork there are many more bespoke sites that either let you bid on roles/projects (there's a company that uses the blockchain and is like a more upscale Upwork but the name escapes me now and the old classic TopTal) and some other ones that are a little more high-end that vet projects for you (e.g. Tribe.AI- disclaimer, I used to work with them and a friend runs the company)
Early-stage startups, ideally ones with fewer than 50 employees. If you can be employee #10 or so, you can work on the project/company for a year or two; at that point, it should be obvious if the company will be successful/get acquired or if it will fail. It's a lot less weird to job hop in the startup world, and if you can get your foot in the door, smaller companies are more likely to be flexible about contracting, part time, etc.
I had a friend introduce me to a coworking space startup which wanted small fixes 5-10h per week.<p>I was the only person working on the codebase, deployment was broken, but the code was actually pretty good and had a test suite. The guy I was working with was easy going and let me take the reigns.<p>It was one of the best gigs I've had. Sadly the work stopped (their business was a casualty of the pandemic).<p>I'm not sure how you'd go about finding these types of jobs, but they do exist!<p>Best of luck.
I found that Linkedin job search can be refined to find these out of band jobs as well. When I was looking for a side hustle it helped me land a support job that was part time and after hours remote. It was a small company and there was one interview before I got the job.
There are brokers for IT consultants.<p>I don’t know any where you live, but it is a thing. They’ll connect you to clients and my experience is that nobody throws leetcode interviews at consultants.<p>If you are willing to work full time you can also join a consultancy and they’ll find you something to do.
From my experience, part-time roles are few and far between.<p>(It certainly doesn't help that agents post jobs as part-time only to lure you to apply so they can start nagging you.)<p>The part-time roles that are available are usually either very simple, short-term tasks,
Or companies with extremely limited budgets that will under-pay you, and try to squeeze the most out of you and give you trouble with payment and hours worked.<p>I suggest opening a company, adding some friends, and taking up multiple contracts simultaniously.
Not a recommendation, no affiliation, but Angelist maintains a job board for startups<p><a href="https://angel.co/jobs" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/jobs</a>
I have this problem too so my friend and I started working on this:<p><a href="https://polyfill.work" rel="nofollow">https://polyfill.work</a><p>You can pick “part-time” availability and “small” or “medium” company size (whatever looks good) and you’ll only hear about part-time jobs at small companies.
There's plenty of part-time work out there: launch your own LLC and multiplex between clients.<p>Source: I launched my own software consulting business back in July 2022 and I work with a handful of customers "part-time" (e.g. project based work, 10 hours a week).
Try web development agencies. You may be able to get on an older project that isn't in such a rush and can be moved along by a part time contractor. That's what I'm doing now. I found the open position on the agency's website.
Ask them, in person. Many small businesses have unarticulated needs, that they have trouble finding people for.<p>But due to resource constraints those things just get pushed. Specially IT things like backups
You will still need to interview for part time roles. Unless it is freelance, in which case you will need to sell yourself instead. Probably no way out of this unless you find a network to tap into.
You can look up for freelance platforms like fiverr, upwork. It is not boring everyday have different task/work, It is feels like puzzle solving everyday.
> I don't like to stick to one project for a long time, which is visible on my resume, and recruiters don't like that.<p>This is first to me. Why'd recruiters not like if you've worked on only one project for a long time? On the contrary, I think it's a plus - shows stability and 'long-term' mindset individual.