I kinda get where they’re coming from. Those kinds of companies are really rare. Generally management wants to squeeze as much out of labor as humanly possible, to the point where they demand exclusive access to one’s entire labor availability.

The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.

The rarity of these companies varies widely on sector. I agree that it will be difficult to find typical tech startups that wont try to squeeze the maximum amount of time out of you.

If you want high chance of relaxed workloads, look for large corporations that exclusively contract with government out of a large budget. For example, the defense industry (e.g., the few companies designing and manufacturing planes, radars, avionics, communication equipment, guidance systems) is the biggest supplier of these type of roles that I know of. The pay in these roles is usually market competitive or better. At least from my experience, only about 20% of time or less is actually spent "working on something", much of which is sitting in irrelevant meetings. I would only recommend it if you are purely looking to collect an easy paycheck and you have a high tolerance for boredom, bureaucracy, internal politics and incompetence at all levels.

Post-covid remote work that much of government and contractors have moved to (permanently?) has likely also made it significantly easier to have multiple "full time" jobs. Management does not care about anything in this sector except that hard deadlines are met (the real deadlines, very rarely even gets close), soft deadlines are missed (used to justify "needing" more money), and nothing is completed too quickly (they want to give the illusion that hard work is being done).

> The fact that xxEightyxx has found not one, but two companies willing to pay six figures for a functionally part-time employee is pretty mind-boggling.

There’s an entire internet subculture of people devoted to doing this. Check out r/overemployed. And there are far, far more people who do similar things entirely above board as consultants and contractors.

Working by project with set deliverables as a consultant/contractor makes perfect sense to me. What makes less sense is doing so as a full time employee.

Basically, this is just not what salaried full-time positions are. Hourly positions pay you for your hours worked, part time positions pay you for part of your productive working time, but full time positions pay you to work full time, not part time. But I think I get it now from OP's further explanations, these are just part time positions that are in the books as full time.

A salaried role is paid the same regardless of how long one works. A rationally run business should care about what's produced, not the amount of labor-hours it takes to produce it. Developer productivity varies wildly, so in a fair labor market, time worked and compensation should vary with developer productivity (sometimes compensation is correlated with time worked, but generally at diminishing marginal returns).

Of course there is a dynamic between the business and the employee when it comes to their expectations of each other. All else being equal, a business would like to get more output per dollar spent, and an employee would like to get paid more in total and work fewer hours. Nowhere in the goals of this dynamic does hours worked come into the picture. What does happen is that businesses believe they would get more output per dollar spent if they can get a salaried employee to work more hours, so they pressure employees into doing so. People generally like to be in charge of others, so un-enlightened managers force employees to be at the office because they like seeing them there.

Enlightened managers care first about cultivating great relationships, secondly about the total output of an employee, and therefore not at all about hours worked. Marginal productivity per hours worked eventually goes negative as hours worked increase, and in my opinion the point at which it becomes negative is a lot lower than most people believe (probably ~20-30 hrs/week over the long term).

Besides, highly productive developers are in very high demand. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't give them a fair deal, because they'll go somewhere else, unless they're on a work visa in which case they'll remember if you don't treat them well.

Please do note that this argument applies mostly to salaried employees in knowledge-work.

> Besides, highly productive developers are in very high demand. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't give them a fair deal, because they'll go somewhere else

Ok, but "we expect you to work full time when we hire you for a full time job" is a fair deal. It is not "unfair" to hire people full time rather than part time.