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

[Evgeny Shadchnev]

For me the main reason I prefer not to work with freelancers or remote
developers (even though hiring devs in London is damn hard even with an awesome
job spec <http://makers-academy.breezy.hr/p/70ee689657c4-lead-engineer> :)
 ) is that remote or p/t work reduces the contribution of the person to
writing code and not much else.

Any new developer is going to try to figure out what needs to be done. An
on-site, f/t person will spend weeks if not months talking f2f to everyone
in the business acquiring a very good understanding of the problems we're
trying to solve before they start coming up with really good ideas of what
to do. Someone who's remote or who will be here for only 3 months will need
a more specific task. That's better than nothing but I still prefer to pay
through the nose for people who'll be f/t onsite because in my experience
ingenious ideas come from f2f conversations in front on a whiteboard or a
piece of code. I don't need a person who can close tickets, I need a person
who will look at the company and figure out how to prevent half the tickets
from appearing.

Then there's an issue of integration into the team. It's easier to develop
a deep, trusting <https://t.co/XA3rVV4Lmh> relationship with them. It's
hard to mentor junior on-site colleagues if you're in Asia in a different
time zone. It's harder to understand where the breakdown in communication
may be if you can't see your colleagues' body language. It's harder to be
in the loop if most conversations happen face to face because we're all
sitting in the same office.

I would be willing to ignore all of that if the entire team were
distributed, like Buffer, but when everyone's on site, I'd rather not have
a remote freelancer. Thomas, I'm sure you could be an awesome team member
if you were in London, but I'm sceptical of remote contracts.

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 6:47 AM, Thomas Buckley-Houston <tom at tombh.co.uk>
wrote:

> 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
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