Finding two separate jobs that each pay median developer salaries while requiring only half-time input, working them concurrently, and then constantly finding new contract jobs that fit your criteria is not what I’d call “easy”
FWIW, I’ve managed remote teams for a long time. It’s not hard to spot the people who are playing games like this to put in half-time.
Not every place is a startup first off, there’s many companies that hire separate frontend, backend, every little thing is a separate team. I’ve found these places to be the easiest workplace to get work done in less time.
Finding the second, part time contract is incredibly easy right now.
There’s 2-3 recruiters per day that email all of us on linked in. All you have to do is say “I’m only open to part time contracts at this time” and every other day you’ll have a request to interview and they don’t mind a part time commitment.
People make this seem so much harder than it is. It’s just networking well, and becoming an expert at your chosen language / field. Then you can easily produce enough output to keep everyone happy.
It might not be hard for you to spot those people. But as best I can tell, the median software developer has a not-very-good manager. So I suspect quite a lot of people could get away with some sandbagging.
That's a shame, as that's exactly the fear not-very-good managers have of remote work. I expect we'll see a reaction toward proctological monitoring of remote workers, even professional software developers.
The person probably is doing more work than they claim.
Is it that easy to spot people? I always felt like the baseline for work at my jobs was 2-3 hours a day of productivity + 5 hours of screwing around for most people.
There were always the outliers who seemed 2X-3X productive. Anyway, you would be still doing double the work of the lazy people.
I am able to fit all my work into 4 days and make 275~. I think that is tough to have in a single company. Unless you are FAANG and even then, I doubt you’d be at 4 days. I’m curious how your hard work was able to get you such substantial raises?
Finding two separate jobs that each pay median developer salaries while requiring only half-time input, working them concurrently, and then constantly finding new contract jobs that fit your criteria is not what I’d call “easy”
FWIW, I’ve managed remote teams for a long time. It’s not hard to spot the people who are playing games like this to put in half-time.