Part 3: Flexibility

Right now, as I type this, businesses throughout the world are laying off employees in record numbers. While plenty of companies are unaffected or even increasing their business due to COVID-19, others are forced to cut back, axe projects, and ask more of their remaining employees. Typically being the largest expense (or investment) for a business, careful consideration needs to be given to the workforce when times are tough.

A great way to optimize labor costs is to use contractors instead of W2 employees. Full-time employees have a lot more overhead and implications (health insurance, unemployment insurance etc), while contractors can be far more flexible. With hourly contractors you can negotiate hourly rates as well as even hours per week.

Contractors can also be used for a limited time or for a specific project or for specific expertise. Perhaps your database has become a bottleneck and you just don’t have the database expertise in-house to tune effectively. A 3-month, part-time contract with an expert may be all you need. Perhaps that UI is only expected to take 6 months to build, so instead of hiring a perm front-end engineer just use them for a 6-month contract. If you really like them, and resources permitting, keep them. Otherwise you both know the deal and can go your separate ways in 6 months.

Global opportunities

Hiring engineering talent in the US is very expensive, and for many startups may not even be an option early on. However, there is a whole world of engineering talent that can live comfortably off much lower pay due to a lower cost of living, but as with anything you get what you pay for. Language barriers, timezone differences and other factors can affect productivity, and it may take some trial and error or trying different services to find the right setup.

With a ‘mini-corp’, the principal can simply be the point-person or communication liaison/buffer between the startup and international service and be responsible for managing the relationship. On the other hand, a foreign agency or engineer could be used more as a supplement to the principal, handling much of the day-to-day and routine tasks in order to free space up for bigger picture/creative work or more urgent matters, similar to what was discussed in the section about junior engineers and interns.

Why Part-Time is the Best Time

Some contractors may be fine with, or even prefer, part-time contracts, especially if they have a low cost of living or have other interests they’d like to spend their time on instead. Oftentimes it’s hard to get more than 20–30 productive hours/week out of an on-premise engineer anyway, at least once you factor in meetings and social or unrelated activities that are typical at modern offices.

As much as I wish it weren't true, I'm not a machine. I have emotions and needs and distractions that prevent me from working 16-hour days, 7 days per week, uninterrupted. Even if I put in 16 hours per day, how good is the code I write going to be? My brain is usually fried after 6-8 hours, and I at least need an hour or two reset before I can pick up again. Plus, there is something to be said for stepping away from something in order to come back with fresh eyes. Going for a 15-minute walk works for me more than anything else when trying to solve difficult problems.

The point is that all you can really ask is 4-6 hours of solid work out of your engineer every day. Beyond that their productivity starts to dip, and if overworked for an extended period they'll end up burning out. Instead, why not save some money, hire engineers just for the 4-6 freshest hours they have per day, and let them get some of their personal time back? Plus, because it's far less common, you'll have a loyalty advantage if the engineer prefers part-time.

This may be a little trickier to do with full-time W2 employees, which is just another reason why contract should play a larger role in hiring today.

Leadership, not Management

This all leads to a premise that I'll end up exporing deeper in another series, which is the difference between leadership and management. The terms themselves say everything that needs to be said, but in essence a manager is going to try to force everyone into the same box and process in order to 'manage' their individuality. A leader will instead embrace the individual and their specific needs, interests, strengths and weaknesses with the sole intent of maximizing loyalty and productivity. The leader, however, will also need to establish proper boundaries, as not all requests or preferences are reasonable or feasible.

It's pretty simple really... give your engineers what they want, within reason, and they'll do everything they can to give you what you want. If you find an engineer you like and they want to do C2C and leverage an assistant for more mundane tasks to ultimately be more productive and deliver better results why are you going to turn them away? Because they don't fit into the arbitrary mold you made? Individuality is the strength of the USA and why we're so innovative, so why are we trying to make everyone into little worker clones and squash what makes them unique? This isn't a public, government institution, it's a free market enterprise and a great company culture reflects that.