Where are the part-time remote coding jobs?

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.

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)

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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