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Is Finding Part Time Work In IT Unrealistic?
I like my current job writes "Having worked full-time in IT for the past 12 years, I would really like to work less and focus on other goals and priorities in my life. I asked my current employer and was shot down. It seems like everyone I know in IT works full-time except for entry-level help desk staff. Striking out on my own seems to be the only way to control the ball and chain around my ankle. However, my experience with independent consulting is a 'feast or famine' situation, with work coming all at once, thus making part-time impossible, or the other extreme (which is even more likely). Is part-time work a pipe dream in IT? Maybe a career in toilet cleaning is calling me."
Depending on your definition of part-time, but many companies in The Netherlands will allow for a 32 hours week (4 days).
As far as I know is hat not uncommon in Sweden either.
I did it for about 6 months. I went from 40 hour weeks to 20 hour weeks comprised of 2 10-hour days. After a few months the situation became untenable and I chose to quit and move on.
The problem was the manager couldn't sequence the work where I could perform it on the days I was there. I wasn't just asking myself to rise to the challenge, I was asking him to do so too. He couldn't. So he placed another employee to deal with issues that came up while I was out of the office. The other guy was what I like to refer to as a brilliant idiot. That's not just sour grapes; a few months after I left he escaped just ahead of the axe. In the months I was there he took it upon himself to unilaterally reconfigure systems on the days I wasn't scheduled to work.
Faced with the conflict, the boss made the decision to go with the guy who was in the office. Not the wisest of choices as it turned out, but completely understandable.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
If your reasons for wanting to work part time are that you're lazy and you don't like being told what to do, good luck! You'll need it. I successfully ran my own independent software business for a couple of years, with a combination of internet sales of my own product, and part-time contracting for a couple of companies. I could set my own hours of work, but that didn't mean that I worked any less - just that I had to rely on personal motivation and sense of responsibility to get the work done. And if you think "being your own boss" means that you can do things your way, think again. It means that you have to learn to put ego aside and do what your customers want.
Especially in small businesses, part time work can be deadly for productivity.
When you only have a handful of people, there is usually less enforcement of proper procedures and documentation, leading to situations where only a single person can help with certain issues fast - of course, other people would be able to figure it out too, but need more time to immerse them into the situation.
For example, i have a few customers with which i work every week. I keep the documentation up-to-date, but it doesn't change the fact that i know their infrastructure by heart and don't have to look up most of the stuff.
So when i take a day off, people have either to choice of investing 30-60-90 minutes of reading docs and familiarizing themselves with something, or calling me and getting an answer in 5 minutes.
Of course my coworkers respect my time off, but customers don't. This can lead to nasty situations, which is why i think part timing is a big problem.
Of course in big, faceless corporations, it matters less, as employee morale is basically nonexistant.
As someone who did exactly what you are trying to do I can tell you that while the arrangement was ok for me, it wasn't that great for my employer. What happened was that I decided to quit my job as a developer because I was starting a business (not IT related) and wanted to devote more time to it. Since we were in the middle of a pretty major project, my boss tried to persuade me to stay and after a bit of wrangling we settled on a 3 day week, Mon to Wed.
The problem is, on most IT projects you don't work by yourself. And other people on the team are still there when you are not and face a choice of either calling you on your days off (in which case you might as well work full-time) or assigning your tasks to other people and working around the fact that you're not there (in which case your role will be increasingly marginalized to the point where you might as well not be there at all). It's not just a matter of scheduling. Unexpected things pop out all the time and since we were working on a deadline it was a major annoyance for people to postpone say a conference call where I was needed by 5 days (say Thursday to Monday) etc.
I guess it depends on the circumstances, but generally I would ask a question what's in it for the employer? If you are absolutely essential to them and there is no other way they can keep you then great, but in most cases they might as well hire a full time person instead.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Um, no. The common usage of the phrase "pipe dream" most often was a reference to the crazy whims and idea a person would talk about after smoking opium. Freud doesn't matter to enough people to become vernacular.
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
I can't agree with myself whether I should quit or I should be fired.
There is the obvious caveat that if you look for regular work again in 5 or 10 years, it will be slightly better to have quit your last regular job than to have been fired from it.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Anyone who thinks web development entails only HTML is probably still writing COBOL or RPG on some big iron. And if you think this way you definitely have penis envy about not understanding that whole "innernet" thing that all the kids are raving about these days.
As a web developer, I know how to and on a daily basis write HTML, CSS, Javascript, XSL, PHP, ASP, JSP, and SQL (several different flavors). I know how to design a database and tweak it so that it performs well. I know how to design a UI. And all that stuff in between? Yep, I know how to do that too. I know how to set up and configure a web server on Windows or *nix. So that makes me something of an sysadmin, though I do not claim to be an expert SA.
What I don't know how to do is write some lame command line program that nobody understands how to use, or some fat client app that requires an install CD and a fat manual to use. (And actually I do know how to do these things, since I cut my teeth on C, I just choose not to.)
Kind of makes your little COBOL skills or whatever you have seem kind of...well, how *do* you stay employed with so little going for you? And if you are employed, don't get too comfortable.
I don't normally reply to troll ACs, but the misconception that web development is somehow a lesser skillset is just plain obtuse and needs to stop.
blah blah blah
My company hires a lot of part-time people for engineering. They are entry-level, and the savings in pay and benefits are marginal compared to the added costs of supporting part-time people. We do it because it helps us find quality people and poses little risk for us (not hard to terminate someone part-time).
For people more senior that only want to work part-time, we hire them as independent contractors. They all have day jobs and moonlight, and their pay is really just 10-20% above their day-job salary. Again, we gain benefits at minimal risks, making it worthwhile.
It works for us because the tasks they are doing are between 2-10 hours, and can be done in one or two sittings. It works for them because they already have benefits and the money is generally extra cash.
Part time employees don't take the place of full time employees. There are tasks that part-timers can't be expected or trusted to do. You get disappointed with performance periodically.
So, converting a full-time job to a part-time job is generally impossible, especially on a long-term basis. (I pulled it off for 8 months once though.) You aren't going to get 2x the hourly wage to cover billing, benefits, and overhead if you are working part time and picky about hours.
What does work is recognizing a deficiency and understanding how it can be solved part-time or in a geographically-agnostic way by someone with your particular experience.
I work as a "Software Consultant" (21 years so far) and 10 years ago I went from the standard 40 hour week to 30 hours when our second child was on the way (FWIW I am male: all the other part-timers at that time were female).
Just recently a friend also went down from 5 to 4 days a week.
IIRC the law here in Germany just changed such that the onus fell on the employer to show a reason why *not* to let you work part-time.
"My answer? Be your own boss."
This is one of those things that sounds great when you're disillusioned with your job, but isn't all it's cracked up to be:
As your own boss, there is no one sitting between you and irate clients (and clients will get irate regardless of how well you perform, especially if they don't understand how your industry works). I wrote an entire custom business management package in one year, replacing an old DOS-based package that hadn't been supported for over 15 years, and my client was furious. He thought that since modern software was created by drawing simple pictures on a screen, I was must have been extremely incompetent to have taken an entire year.
Since you will become personally responsible for EVERYTHING, the stress you face will usually exceed that of your regular job. There is no longer a manager to stand between you and the constant badgering of your customers. I think most people with the, "become your own boss!" advice greatly underestimate how much crap they don't see when their manager runs interference.
With rare exceptions, you will work more hours than you ever have in the past; especially when you are dealing with your first couple projects. The project I mentioned above was done after work and on weekends. I went from working steady 40-hour weeks to working 80-100 hour weeks during some weeks.
Depending on your industry, you may run into a "feast or famine" situation. When I was working this project, I was making 4 times my normal salary. But in the post-project era, the software works so well that I rarely hear back from them. When I call them periodically for routine customer relations, they tell me that the software works flawlessly (Linux, PostgreSQL, Qt, Cygwin for those interested) and covers all their current needs. They expect to need additions at some indeterminate future point (which recently came to pass), but for now (four years after the initial delivery), the software is more than they had hoped for.
Being your own boss has a number of pros and cons, and is certainly not a cure-all for job dissatisfaction. I highly recommend that people try it for at least a year in order to gain a greater appreciation for the benefits of letting someone else be the boss. Despite all that, I love the sense of accomplishment that comes from having done things my way, the right way.