Ask HN: Where can I find small companies to work for part-time?

[ggktk]

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.

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.

But where do I find people to do work for?

Edit: I'm a full stack developer, mainly focused on Go and React.

[busterarm]

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.

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.

[tluyben2]

Soft skills I don’t mind; grown up interviews I don’t mind. I have done freelancing for 30 years now and had 0 requests for balancing binary trees, time/space complexity of sorting algos; things that are often associated with interviews here on HN and things which I did, you know, in uni, for which, you know, I have a degree to prove I could do them and know what they are. They are generally 100% useless on modern jobs (I worked on specific embedded jobs I needed knowledge like it, but you can look that up as well). I just give my company’s (it is a 1-3 band gang depending on what the others are doing) portfolio and no one requests weird things like that.

Now soft skills are different and 2 of us are good at those and one of us is really bad; so we hire out based on the client, wishes and need for soft skills and a lot of communication overhead or not. And I agree that needs to be a match, however I cannot see how that requires 6-8 gruelling interviews spread over weeks instead of 15 minutes and a portfolio (which is how we get hired).

So yeah, I think OP would do better in a small collective of freelancers or even small consultancy company; I find it much easier to get into anywhere that way than the employee route.

[DoingIsLearning]

From the description, it would probably be a better fit to work as a contractor via an agency. You get the hit of the agency comission but at least most of the talking will be through some Project manager assigned to the client.

[akhmatova]

Interviewing != "soft skills", and it wasn't soft skills as such (in the legitimate sense of the term) that the poster was objecting to.

But rather that set of weird, contrived rituals (which pretend to measure soft and other skills, but basically don't really measure anything other than the candidate's ability to game up answers to questions they looked up on the internet) -- not to mention the frequently appalling lack of decency, common courtesy (and common sense) has come to stand to in for the interview process these days.

[charlieyu1]

I work for myself and I feel this is quite different. Freelancing, the client finding you already has some interest, and you don’t really compete with others. A freelancing interview is more about sorting out the details, making sure both sides want to go through etc, rather than trying to impress the client.

[rg111]

> 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.

There is one significant difference. In this perpetual interview, you have access to the internet and can find factual answers from there.

The problem solving part is what makes someone a good engineer/scientist. Not knowing particular algorithms, or knowing formulas (in case of DL jobs).

Interviews focus on the wrong things.

I am okay with the perpetual interview as long as I don't have to rote memorize a bunch of stuff like some poor middle-schoolers in 1970s communist country.

I threw away many recruiters who even mentioned technical interviews. I am doing more than okay financially and career-wise, btw.

This might change in the future just as a step to do something I want to do. I will hate all the interview, HR initiation, onboarding, etc. forever.

[firstplacelast]

Maybe it’s because I have better soft skills, but I’ve had a much easier time getting freelancing gigs than full-time employment. I’ve only had a handful of freelancing gigs and only on the side, but no one has ever made me do a code test or acted like I needed to “prove” my lack of mental deficiency.

In interviews for full-time employment, this has rarely been the case.

[sph]

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.

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.

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.

[ethanwillis]

This is exactly the conclusion I've come to as well. It's not that I don't have the soft skills capability to do it myself. And maybe it's an ego thing but I think I'm also pretty strong on the soft skills front.

HOWEVER, and it's a big "however" -- I don't truly enjoy it. I don't mean that I don't like building a relationship with clients, putting thought into my communication, etc. In some way I do enjoy those facets of it a lot. But, I'm an introvert by nature and when managing clients, acquiring clients, etc... It feels like I'm putting on a persona that's not truly myself and it's very draining emotionally and intellectually which ends up actually impacting the quality of my work over time.

I would love to be able to find a "talent manager" who can do the job of "talking to the customer and bringing the specs to the engineers."/officespace I think to most people this sounds exactly like just "having a job." And people will ask what's the difference from simply having a manager?

I think this perspective is also why there's not a solid existing industry that fits the needs here.

As well, I don't know if this is necessarily true but having someone with at least some basic level of software knowledge I think is a huge plus to being a talent manager as you or I would think of them. That helps to ensure that the quality of working coming in meets at least some base level. The problem of course is that anyone with the right knowledge will either be a developer themselves or in some other role already. To make this work they might need to be able to manage multiple talents.. but then it runs the risk of turning into an agency of sorts, right?

And I don't off the top of my head know exactly what the qualitative differences are here between an agency managing multiple contractors and a "talent manager" but I think there are some and would love to hear thoughts on what those would be. I think it's all centered around how the relationship actually works. As you say you want to hire/pay a percentage and I would as well. That keeps the talent manager working for the engineer(s) versus the other way around.

[AlwaysRock]

When I was a recruiter I did this. It was difficult though. It worked best when the dev had a specialized skill set. In 2015ish a lot of companies needed native ios or android devs in Chicago. I had 1-2 folks who would dive in, build a mobile app, then leave. They were awesome. Clients were okay with it because they needed something fast and it wasnt their core app. I remember doing it a few times with vue, ember, and react (early in the react days) as well.

We were a lot less likely to be able to talk a company into doing that for a typical full stack dev.

That being said you will probably have to talk to a lot of recruiters to find someone who has the right relationships to do this. Like 2 out of the 80 recruiters at the company I worked for would have gotten you to me. The rest would have pressured you to interview for a full time role. That is just at one recruiting agency.

[f0e4c2f7]

I haven't tried it yet but I've seen 10x Management[0] mentioned on Hacker News. It's essentially the model you're describing.

[0] https://10xmanagement.com/

[pyuser583]

I read an article (decade ago?) about talent agents for software engineers. It was a thing, for a bit at least.

[calvinmorrison]

How is this different than just working with the same recruiter over and over?

[switz]

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.

It’s a weird prerequisite, but without it there generally isn’t enough context to do meaningful work sans a lot of hand holding.

[rofo1]

Haha, I am global / ~3000 ELO Faceit player, curious what do you do with regards to CS?

[pc86]

How many hours should I play before reaching out? I'm only sort of kidding.

[atom-morgan]

Are the projects all development related?

[eklavya]

I am curious, why the weird requirement?

[MAMAMassakali]

Do you have any work for iOS?

[smithmayowa]

Sent you a mail.

[asn0]

I've used a recruiting company https://www.facet.net/ 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.

[bgibbons]

I'm one of the founders here. Yes, we work with hundreds of startups and large FN 500 companies. Happy to answer any questions. That's why we created Facet - trying to eliminate recruiter spam and create a better experience for engineering, product, or design contractors. Dev founded - dev run.

[probotect0r]

This seems interesting. How was your experience?

[wnolens]

I did this for a few years.

Find companies for whom you are a total catch of a full time hire, and negotiate a part time contract.

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.

That's my big takeaway from freelancing. The power relationship is different. You want to be in a position where they really need you.

[bizzleDawg]

It sounds like you're looking for freelance work?

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).

[nottorp]

Freelance work usually means full time projects serially. The OP doesn't want that. Neither do I, for example, but I'm looking to meet new people through part time projects.

[joeld42]

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.

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).

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.

[stevesearer]

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.

Because they were well-respected in the WP community, there wasn’t much interviewing needed other than discussing the specifics of the project.

I found them via the plugin GitHub.

[michaelbuckbee]

There's an interesting "reverse job board" for Rails devs -> https://railsdevs.com/ 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.

[joemasilotti]

Hey there, I’m the solo-founder of railsdevs! Thanks for sharing my site.

Since I launched in November I’ve placed 10+ Rails developers with gigs. About half for full-time roles with salaries ranging from $100k to $200k.

For context, cold messages on LinkedIn have a 5-20% response rate. Usually on the lower end.

railsdevs is currently sitting at 50%+. If you’re hiring a Rails developer everyone is already half qualified - so matching is much more likely.

[drekipus]

I've thought about this sort of "reverse job board" for the traditional labour market..

How well does it work for rail Devs?

[tommoor]

If you're interested in working on Outline (https://github.com/outline/outline) hit me up – big backlog of fun features to build on an open codebase.

[smithmayowa]

How to reach you?

[clementmas]

Startups are probably more flexible to work with.

I'm looking for a contractor at the moment: https://travelmap.net/jobs/fullstack-web-developer

[clementmas]

Or you can work for a remote digital agency.

This one accepts part time: https://www.zdigitalagency.com

[j3th9n]

You're offering 25 euro/hour if I'm right?

[_jal]

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

[dieselgate]

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

[pmelendez]

> 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.

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)

[gspencley]

Your mileage will vary there.

I've worked for two consulting companies, enjoyed both but one company had me on 3 projects within 8 months while the other had me on the same project for a year and a half and only moved me when I told them I needed a change (to their credit they accommodated me, but I bring this up because every consulting company will be different).

A lot of the reasons why this variability exists has to do with the types of projects that the company takes on. In the second case, being on a project long-term, the client hired us because they wanted to outsource their software development in general and had created long term relationship with the agency. In other cases the client will just want a proof of concept developed, or a bit of additional help on a project that it is in the weeds etc.

[mattbee]

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).

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:

https://apply.workable.com/skiller-whale/j/2D3E071FD5/

(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!)

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.

Happy to answer any questions here, and I'd probably be involved in an interview session too.

[jventura]

> (with lots of other curriculums in development)

What other topics are you guys planning? I'm a part-time CS professor who is always looking to supplement his income..

[its_bbq]

I am looking for some part time work. I have a good amount of TS experience in different contexts -- can I get in touch with you all?

[tepitoperrito]

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.

[rsstack]

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.

[eric-hu]

Is that https://www.moonlightwork.com/ ?

[atlasunshrugged]

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)

[panda888888]

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.

[LouisSayers]

I had a friend introduce me to a coworking space startup which wanted small fixes 5-10h per week.

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.

It was one of the best gigs I've had. Sadly the work stopped (their business was a casualty of the pandemic).

I'm not sure how you'd go about finding these types of jobs, but they do exist!

Best of luck.

[ezekg]

I've had success with https://moonlightwork.com in the past.

[kidgorgeous]

Upwork. Just spend an hour a day submitting proposals, and you'll be drowning in offers at the end of the month

[scottydelta]

I used to be a top rated developer on upwork even before they renamed upwork from Odesk. I stopped using them since 3 years ago and I would suggest you to keep away from it since the platform has become very predatory over the years.

You need to pay upwork continuously to be able to bid on jobs and you can pay even more to see other people's bids. It has become sort of pay to play scheme.

For example, they advertise and allow you to create a free agency account but you can't apply for jobs until you upgrade to agency plus.

There was also a recent case where upwork permanently suspended a freelancer's account without any recourse where the freelancer had $2000 in their account. I am sure that's not an isolated case knowing what Upwork has become.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I have not had a good experience with Upwork, as far as looking for work.

My experience was that I got 100% scam and dangerously unhinged contacts. Not one single valid proposal ever came my way.

I have heard great things about Upwork, but always from people who wanted to hire, as opposed to be hired.

[scrapcode]

My experience has been very short of "drowning in offers," however I am also reluctant to list certain things on my profile such as my current and previous employment, and I'm also reluctant to work for nothing. Any suggestions are welcome.

[juice_bus]

From my experience they may start drowning in $1/hr offers.

[frittata]

There was a concerning post on HN about upwork's impersonation problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32096656

I don't think I'd ever put my information on their platform, and I'm also considering getting off linkedin for similar concerns.

[spapas82]

Is it possible to get paid in cryptocurrency in Upwork? If not does anybody know of a platform that would allow that? Register using stunt crypto wallet, do the job, get paid in your wallet.

I'd really like to avoid all the bureaucracy of banks, government etc for my side projects.

Ty

[nekoashide]

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.

[wodenokoto]

There are brokers for IT consultants.

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.

If you are willing to work full time you can also join a consultancy and they’ll find you something to do.

[marek_leisk2]

Sell yourself as a consultant via your LinkedIn profile. Ask for a retainer that'll be used over x months. Say, 160 hours over the next 4 months.

[TruthWillHurt]

From my experience, part-time roles are few and far between.

(It certainly doesn't help that agents post jobs as part-time only to lure you to apply so they can start nagging you.)

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.

I suggest opening a company, adding some friends, and taking up multiple contracts simultaniously.

[mellavora]

Not a recommendation, no affiliation, but Angelist maintains a job board for startups

https://angel.co/jobs

[piinecone]

I have this problem too so my friend and I started working on this:

https://polyfill.work

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.

[itsmemattchung]

There's plenty of part-time work out there: launch your own LLC and multiplex between clients.

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).

[hobo_in_library]

Would you mind sharing how you found your customers? That feels like the hardest part

[robswc]

Yet another person that has to ask about this, lol.

I like to do a lot of different things. I'm currently building basic web-apps for clients part-time and love it. Get to work on 2-3 different projects every month, since its usually coming down to basic CRUD apps.

I could build these apps in my sleep but finding the ppl that need them (or a good client) seems like a full time job.

[jdsleppy]

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.

[guzik]

Have you ever thought about starting teaching people or selling tutorials in Go and React?

[bacan]

Ask them, in person. Many small businesses have unarticulated needs, that they have trouble finding people for.

But due to resource constraints those things just get pushed. Specially IT things like backups

[davidzweig]

If you are by chance in Eastern Europe, our project might fit: languagereactor.com .

[quickthrower2]

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.

[rishidevkota]

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.

[b1476]

I'd strongly recommend against a platform like Fiverr. I spent some time doing various odd DevOps and Linux jobs on there. I basically had to charge next to nothing for my services because the sheer amount of other people doing the same thing (probably to a very low standard). Despite this I thought building up my reviews would be a good way to increase my prices and still get work on there, which it was. Unfortunately the attitude of quite a large percentage of the people who hired me was just absurd. Difficult language barriers in many cases, endless disputes over deliverables, constantly changing requirements and even some cases blaming me for things completely out of my control. What I was hoping would eventually lead to a nice little side business of odd sysadmin type things just made me really stressed and frustrated and I realised why I work for a company where there's a barrier between me and the end user and their insane demands.

[jokethrowaway]

Those platform are pretty bad unless you are a beginner or you're into a very specific niche.

I started on those platforms and I couldn't scale up my rate well enough as without those platforms.

At the same time I know a few crypto devs who built their reputation there and can get good rates.

For high paid normal web development, nothing beats a good network of wealthy companies who constantly need crap done.

[ushakov]

try Advisable: http://advisable.com

[arrosenberg]

Your best source of work will be former coworkers and bosses who enjoyed working with you.

[tasuki]

> I don't like to stick to one project for a long time

Why not?

[rodrodriguez]

Work for us: github.com/generalbots. Reach us.

[smithmayowa]

How to reach out?

[Apocryphon]

Could you offer to consult for a former employer?

[Mave83]

4dayweek.io maybe

[cliffwarden]

Have you been self-employed before?

[ggktk]

Yes, although it didn't differ much from regular, full-time work. Basically only for tax reasons.

[M5x7wI3CmbEem10]

do you have any contact info that we can reach out to?

[ggktk]

Yes, I just added my email to my profile. If you click on my name, it's in "about".

[rodrodriguez]

Would you help us with General Bots (github.com/generalbots)?

[jmconfuzeus]

You can try Toptal.

I heard good things about them but haven't got in myself because they require leetcode puzzles which I suck at atm.

[lowercased]

I just had a short interview the other day with 2 folks. Screensharing, we went through the first 'problem'. They gave me some SQL tables with dummy data, and asked for some data/queries.

"How would you get X?" "How would you get all X who are not retired?" etc

After 3 questions, the guy stopped and said "no one has ever gotten this far this quickly before - I don't have any other prepared questions right now. Let's try one more..."

That one took another 10 minutes - I sort of 'knew' it but... doing 'live' pairing being on display adds a bit of nerves, and... I just need to hammer through multiple trials. Felt awkward, but got there after a bit of time.

Then... person 2. "Leetcode" exercise... I reviewed it again a bit later, and one of the things that tripped me up is that the description and the expected 'sample in/out' answers were in conflict. At best, the description was ambiguous, but to my reading was in contradiction to one of the expected answers.

I struggled 20 minutes in front of them... and we were out of time. The question was (to my reading) relatively abstract and doesn't map to any of the sorts of problems I've tackled over the past 20 years in development.

They thanked me and closed the interview. I wrestled with the leetcode for another 30 min or so later that evening and 'got it', but... annoying.

I reply with this partially to say "you may never get better at the leetcode stuff" but don't let that get you too down. :)

[sph]

I did one interview with them with flying colours, 3 puzzles with 100% score, I had one employee contact me before I was done with the whole process to tell me they had a client that needed my exact set of skills, so interviewed with them as well, and passed.

But during the last technical call I couldn't finish one out of two puzzles in time because I initially went for a sub-optimal strategy, so I got told to practice leetcode and apply later.

With 16 years of professional experience, I shall do better with my time than getting good at solving timed Fizzbuzz-type puzzles.

[LouisSayers]

Anyone know the payment structure / cut for TopTal?

[mandeepj]

> 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.

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.