1. "Ultra-low hours part-time senior developer" - This role is pretty straightforward. The idea is you have a talented, motivated, and flexible senior dev that you can plug in anywhere. I would assume that anyone who has been in management long enough knows of an employee who they would still want to keep on the team even if you only had them for one hour a day.
- Work Mon-Fri, one hour a day.
- Leverage experience and expertise where it matters most without paying a full salary with benefits.
- Outside of the company bonus/incentive structure. It is clear to everyone that this is and will remain an ultra-low hours part-time position.
- Imagine always having a smart competent employee who can hop on anything you need without derailing what the other employees are working on.
- Potential ideas for work,
- Manage these three developers for one hour a day for the next six months and work on this moonshot project.
- Hop in on code reviews during this sprint.
- Create and manage the company's social media/Github account.
- Find me the best consultant for this upcoming project.
- Create a new process for our CI/CD.
- Take a look at this business process from a different perspective.
- Work Mon-Fri, one hour a day.
- Loyalty, discretion, and protection of reputation are the most important requirements.
- Potential ideas for work,
- All of the items listed in the above position.
- My nephew is failing his freshman computer science course, tutor him one hour a day for the next few weeks.
- Improve/clean my online reputation.
- Build me a script to scrape data from xyz site, analyze it, and email me the updates each morning.
- Go through the top 100 HN posts each morning and send me everything that I would likely be interested in.
- Research the next new thing and let me know what the deal is.
- Come up with ideas to earn money for me on the side that will pay for your hourly fee.
- I volunteer at a local non-profit and I told them I would find a new venue for the next banquet, set this up for me.
Things to consider,
- The hour-long block should be the same time every day. It may be hard to find a time that works for both parties but most of this work would be async.
- After discussing with some friends that are also senior developers, 3/5 (myself included) said they would be interested in something like this if the money was right and they could count on it being long-term. There exists a supply of senior developers that would like the novelty and extra cash that would come with a role like this. They have an hour a day to spare but for whatever reason they are not ready to jump into something like starting their own company or finding and taking on regular freelance projects.1. Domain experience - every business is unique and you need to put a given problem into context to see how a given solution fits the business.
2. Project requirements - most projects have barely intelligible requirements that change regularly - sometimes daily. The person would need to get up-to-speed on what that is.
3. One hour is a short amount of time to understand the task and complete it. The best you could do is try to understand and point someone in the right direction. People aren't machines and the need for flow is real.
4. AI code assistance requires oversight and understanding. You never want to generate code and check in unless you fully understand it. Code hallucination is and will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future.
Email in profile. Contact if interested.
I sometimes provide feedback as a senior engineer that gets corrected because there was context that I wasn’t given. It’s nobody’s fault but it’s a recognition that we all have a responsibility to understand our systems deeply in order to solve hard problems and I’m not sure that 1 hour per day gets you there.
If I wanted a senior devs opinions, leaving them days to ponder and consider their responses is also valuable, so three hours every few days is much more valuable than one hour a day.
The problem with one hour a day is like having a washing machine once a month: It's useful, but you still need to rely on the workhouse alternative for 3/4 weeks, and it saves you time, but might add more mental burden or risk, making it risky to do.
In the world of corporate software this person is a purple unicorn. You will likely want to bring in somebody from a different walk of life (yet still have a software background) where this personality set is more common yet has an aptitude for software and organization, which can include places like community organizer, military, project manager, logistics engineering, and so forth.
Also keep in mind that many developers are both entitled and have a super narrow perspective on how to proceed. Bringing in a part timer to shake things may result in emotional distress and immediate rejection from many developers, so this person needs a superior title. In the end it’s about saving the employer money and simultaneously increasing product quality first, and secondly increasing developer confidence and satisfaction. I would plan on two to four hours per week diving into the product and sprint planning, about two hours per week with one on ones, and another two hours per week on writing summaries for the team.
My team and I toss out more than five hours a week in meetings, together. Claw that back and benefit from context this pluggable advisor won't have.
Can you imagine the context-switching?
Folks that bill by the hour are stuck in the 90s
Someone that useful would be worth bringing on full time.