ernestipark

You create embryos, which are distinctly uniquely a human, then destroy the ones you don't want. It's eugenics, just at an earlier stage of human development.

Your network is always the best bet to start. Leverage past co-workers who can vouch for you, reach out, let people know you're available.

If you're a part of YC or other similar investor/tech networks, often those are very strong referral networks.

Beyond that, there are various niche job boards and sites like https://www.fractionaljobs.io/, https://www.hirefraction.com/, marketerhire.com depending on the type of work you do.

Sites like upwork/toptal can be good but often are a race to the bottom.

Relevant: I started a newsletter a little while back exploring this space for tech workers

Over a decade ago I was a summer intern on the same team as Noah. I was a pretty clueless college student with no real work experience on a team of real experienced rockstars. It was a long time ago, but I still remember how kind and helpful he was. I barely knew what a terminal was, but I remember him walking over to my desk or going over to his, and having him explain things so cheerfully and patiently. He was so genuinely thoughtful and kind. Folks like Noah help shape the careers of the next generation and can make tech a good place to work. Rest in peace.

Highly recommend looking at Kite (https://kite.video), YC company.

Easy to make these videos, edit, match music to it, etc.

As long as we dont increase housing stock (at least in the United States) if we implement this more universally, the money will just further increase the value of real estate and make homes more expensive.

Theres definitely going to be a lot of startups in and around this space.

I've been building a basic RAG system DIY and just built a basic admin panel that displays these traces by dumping a lot of data into a postgres table. But this type of observability, configurability, and ability to score results and get feedback loops, version, etc etc will be really key.

Rotten tomatoes is actually very useful if you know the magic formula:

* If tomatometer & audience score are within 5% of each other, you can trust the ratings to give you a decent indiciation of movie quality.

* If tomatometer is more than 15%+ higher than audience score, it means it's an artsy fartsy movie that critics like and movies don't.

* If audience score is 15%+ higher than tomatometer, it's a fun movie even if it's not oscar worthy. (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/old_school is a perfect example)

Each of the problems you describe will become a slew of startups and open source projects. Compared to the typical web stack things are really immature and it'll be interesting to see how everything shakes out and fills in.

As a sidenote, looks like langchain is working on some of this: https://www.langchain.com/langsmith.

What you're looking for is pretty hard to find in terms of a marketplace. What you're most likely looking for is just a really good software agency, but it's not always easy to figure out quality. If you're a well-funded startup, I'd maybe reach out to investors/portco network to see if they have good referrals.

Outside of that, the closest marketplace I know of is a.team. They are basically forming software/development/other role teams for you. However, they haven't necessarily worked together before.

And then of course there's the opportunity to acquihire a tiny company, but that's probably way more effort than you're looking for.

The short answer is no. The long answer is sort-of.

Just finding a part-time role like a full-time one, where you find it on a job board, or LinkedIn, or some company's career page is extremely rare.

What's more common is that you are at a full-time job and you negotiate down to part-time because the company already knows you're good and they'd rather keep you part-time than lose you completely.

Other options include freelancing where you choose your own hours and time, but then you have to do sales. There's also many marketplaces that will do the sales for you, but there's no guarantee of work. IMO software agencies are likely to also be a bit more open to flexible and part-time work.

I dont love shilling my own stuff (who am I kidding I do), but I wrote a guide for this exact question on my newsletter: https://www.parttimetech.io/p/work-part-time-as-a-software-e....

This comes up every once in a while on HN. I've been using vimium for over 10 years now since I did an internship at the same company as the guys who created it. Can't imagine browsing the web without it. Works especially well with HN and those small link targets :)

Semi related, but I firmly believe everyone with a yard should have chickens. 4 chickens can feed a family with more eggs than they'll ever need, you'll almost never throw food scraps out again, and you'll keep harmful methane producing waste out of landfills.

$1200/m as a decent software engineer should be really doable, whether writing software directly or not. It just might take some work to get creative and figure out where the right niches are.

I think you really want to explore more non-traditional routes, since $1200 is not much for a full time job, and probably too low end for traditional consulting as well.

For instance:

* I would get on all the expert networks (GLG, Guidepoint, Alphasights, Deepbench, etc) and get really good there. These can be a bit of overhead, but it only takes a few gigs per month to get close to $1200/month. Charge $100-$300/call. reddit.com/r/expertneworks will give you more detail

* Do you know friends/ppl in your network who work at startups or are indie hackers/solo software shops? If you're still a solid engineer, but you have a cost cap, you could be really useful to some startups who need flexible help thats not 40 hrs/week. You can also offer to be a generalist doing software, documentation, other stuff as well since you're not trying to optimize salary. A jack of all trades who can pitch in on software could be very useful for the right startup.

* Some others have suggested it too, but I'd explore the Fiverrs/Upworks and see if you can find an optimal niche where you're working, say, 10-15 hours/month and hitting that $1200. I think it's doable if you figure out what works well on those networks.

I've written a bit more about ways to get part-time work here (https://blog.parttimetech.io/p/work-part-time-as-a-software-...), hopefully some of the tips there and resources can be helpful. I've had friends with disabilities leverage part-time to be able to stay in the workforce, hope you can as well.

While I’ve never been a workaholic (was pretty good at keeping 40hr boundaries), this article describes me. Remote work, despite its flexibility, burned me out for the lack of in person interaction. I left a good job to consult and work part-time. Anecdotally, I know I’m not alone and I have a lot of friends and contacts, both women and men, who are doing the same. When you consider how much wealth has been created in tech over this 10 year bull run, it makes sense a lot of people are pulling back and finding more balance in their lives.

How much work do you think the new work would take? Depending on the nature of the engagement, it doesn't have to be a 'jump' at all. If possible, an option would be to make it a more reduced hours engagement that you can moonlight. Then you can get the consulting experience, maintain the income of your full-time job, and see how it goes. Once you have one engagement under your belt, then it also becomes much easier to get more through WOM and very basic marketing/promotion through LinkedIn on what your skills are and what you can offer.

As others have stated in the comments also, a lot of consultants never have to do marketing or sales, they just get it word of mouth through their networks as they continue to do good work. I think doing that first job well, but in a way that's not as scary as jumping away from your full-time job is a good choice if you have it.

Yeah that's fantastic! I'm a huge proponent of diversified streams of income, and the low barrier to entry means people can try it out with little investment and a little elbow grease. If that can bring in xx% of your full-time income I think a lot of people would call that a win.

I half agree with this article. There does seem to be a typical power law in terms of who is able to make a bunch of $ and make this a viable career.

That being said, 'winning' doesn't necessarily mean having this be your entire job or revenue source. I think we're progressively going to see more 'portfolio careers' or people holding multiple small jobs. I've seen many folks have small ish followings (say few thousand subs on YouTube), but that's enough for them to generate good leadflow for a consulting business that sustains their family. Put another way, being a creator can just be the marketing or top of funnel for other activities.

If we view it solely as a full-time job, then it probably will be a privileged few <1% that 'win'. But if it's part of a larger portfolio of work, then the creator economy opens up a lot of new possibilities for people.

When looking specifically at the tech and startup sector, there's a couple things worth pointing out:

* Though the 40 week is still standard, more and more tech people are making their living as independent consultants/contractors, working part-time, advising, retiring early, etc. When you look at the amount of wealth created by tech and software, but also the flexibility and ability to do things like remote work, we actually have made a ton of progress here

* In the US at least, as long as health care is tied to full-time employment which is quantified by some arbitrary # of hours, it will be the predominant way to work

* Working hours are ultimately set by founders/owners, not by the employees (unless you're in a union like situation). Many software businesses have enough leverage that they can be run fully on fewer than 40 hours/wk, but generally investor interests, greed, desire to grow quickly, wanting to optimize profits, etc etc. Ultimately, culture and precedent is a really strong thing.

I'll hypothesize though that after the grind that was COVID, a refocusing on profits vs growth, we're going to see many more balanced businesses taking a far more progressive approach to working hours and reduced time roles. The 4-day work week is just one movement in this direction, and we're going to see a lot more tech companies that offer 20/hr week positions and more.

I have a large 20kw system for an old leaky farmhouse and it provides me about $6k in energy and credits a year.

I like thinking about it as a near guaranteed, medium return long term investment that's good for the environment. Each year is roughly 13% returns and I should get that for at least 20 years or so.

Generally the advice is to sell immediately and diversify.

I've also had ESPP shares that appreciated significantly and therefore held onto them to get long term capital gains, then sold them into a donor advised fund (DAF) to give to charities in a doubly tax advantaged way.

(OP) I've actually been trying to figure this out myself and haven't found one yet. Started this Ask HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978686) to try to find out.

My prediction is that we will start to see more over the coming years though. Whether that means finding creative ways to share equity/upside, or using more contractors and part-time folks.

Not the original commenter on this thread, but I wrote about this here: https://blog.parttimetech.io/p/fix-gender-inequality-hire-pa...

But TLDR, whether by preference, or because there's no better choice, much of the gender wage gap can be attributed to the fact that women are usually the primary caretaker when kids come along. Part-time roles can be a good way to give women (but really any parent) more options on how to balance career and family. At least in the US tech industry, often times the answer is really work or quit without many intermediary options (that are well known at least).

If it will be a startup in the more traditional sense, slicingpie.com also exists. The idea is basically dynamic equity allocated based on everyones contributions.

I've been thinking about this type of problem recently so very timely question.

IANA Employment Lawyer, so take everything here with a huge grain of salt, but is the separate product going to be a separate company? If it is would some mix of equity + cash work? If not, it seems like some custom contract based on the product and its dedicated revenues/profits might be necessary with lawyers involved.

To zoom out a bit, the problem I've been honing in on is that there are a lot of companies that may want to issue profit-sharing like agreements or revenue share that have no plans to exit/IPO/go huge. But no one, especially early on when they're small or solo, wants to go hire a lawyer to write these contracts. I wonder if we can create good templates for rev/profit shares for solo/indie/bootstrapped businesses. Think the SAFE that YC created, but more around profit or revenue shares. If this is interesting to you shoot me a msg would love to talk to others who are seeing this type of problem.

Also, if you know Gumroad, they're building out a new product called Flexile.com that enables companies to hire contractors but also give them equity/dividends. It's not released yet, but may be worth looking into and getting on the waiting list. May or may not solve this exact problem but it's in a similar realm.

The housing crisis.

Build more houses, increase supply, lower prices. It's simple on the surface, but unfortunately, NIMBYism, political interests, status quo, antiquated zoning/permitting, etc etc makes this far too difficult.

Its part of German labor law that it’s required under certain circumstances. That doesn’t mean managers like it necessarily of course. I’ve had friends do it successfully.

Sorry to hear you had that experience. I’m sure it’s a YMMV type situation and it’s not guaranteed. The few anecdata points I have show that people have done it successfully. But certainly it’s small numbers.

Why do you think so? While being really senior and very talented will always give you more options and leverage, I’ve met a lot of people at varying stages of their career do part time work.

Yes very common in Germany and other European countries as well.

I recently did an interview with Sahil and they’re still doing it. I believe they’ve iterated on it and changed parts of their policies though as they’ve gone along.