[LRUG] [JOBS] Freelancer. And some reflections.

[Thomas Buckley-Houston]

tl;dr I'm Bristolian, but Asia-based, looking for short or part-time
work: http://tombh.co.uk

I have the massively first-world problem of not needing much money.
I'm looking at the job boards and everything is full-time. So I ignore
each job's requested application process and just send a brief email
asking about short or part-time work. The uniformity of the responses
clearly indicate that I'm swimming against the tide. It crosses my
mind that I can pretend to be interested in full-time work just to get
3 months of paychecks, but that's hardly a good precedent to be
setting. Of course this is why I'm posting here, I don't have the work
contacts I used to have and I'm sure short and part-time things exist,
it's just not on the job boards.

Is this a common predicament? It can't only be Londoners that have
anything near a genuine need for the kind of money software people
earn? Is a 5 day week provably the most efficient use of a person's
time? From a business perspective, perhaps there are cases where the 5
day week is merely an unchecked assumption, arising from the
irrational fear of losing out to the competition? Expressing such
views gives me the uneasy feeling I'm instantly checked off a lot of
company's lists: evidently I'm not a motivated team player capable of
handling the everyday realities of life at the coalface of industry
leading standards.

I'm a good developer, looking for work, I'm sure there must be
something out there that's a genuine fit. No doubt my cynicism is in
no insignificant part fuelled by the bite of financial vulnerability,
which as I mentioned earlier is a peculiar kind of financial
vulnerability I'm actually extraordinarily privileged to have.

Thanks for listening,
tom