15 hours a week? Jesus... I spend half of that in meetings. I really need to reconfigure my schedule!

I'll warn you though that the type of arrangement you suggest does exist, it's called: 'a consulting house' as opposed to: 'a software bouse' and it is the worst kind of scam.

First off, your 'market rate' ...that you can forget. The Firm sees to its own needs and those needs are fat salaries and bonuses to (non technical I might add) management. You'll get a salary and a fancier title than 'contractor' something like... Say... 'consultant' yes! Consultant! That's gonna bump up the hourly rate... But not YOUR hourly rate of course, that of the Firm my friend.

I guess my bitterness in this regard is quite obvious but here in South Africa, this type of thing is utterly rife. You have a few managers who have swept in over time on the winds of apathy and who for some I fathomable reason have good, big contracts and a slew of underpaid 'consultants' who run around doing their bidding.

You seem to believe that this relationship will play out the other way round where you are earning that 'market rate' and for a small percentage of that you'll have in your employ not only someone who'll ensure you're always employed but who is also a personal assistant that runs your admin?

That's called: 'a boss.'

Please correct me if I'm wrong here but it seems you have the world (as I know it) bass ackwards and programmers are not Hollywood stars, not where I come from.

Any wave of disruption cast towards recruiters is going to have to destroy consulting houses as proof of it's efficacy. The time and effort required to find work/workers that bartonfink mentions has to be expended by either the employer or the employee. In both cases this a poor use of time so the heavy-lifting of placing people is either done by recruiters or temp agencies. Anything that disrupts this has to make the process effortless, or nearly so, and generate better results so the employer/employee can by-pass the middle-men completely. An unlikely outcome but one which would be welcome almost universally, excluding the obvious casualties of this change.

But Hollywood stars sit on set 12 hours a day, for a 16 week shoot, as does the rest of the crew.

If they only did 15 hours a week the film would not get made.

I would be interested In knowing what gigs you do take on and how the code integrates with the work being done elsewhere

if you are doing maintenace and bug fixes on a codebase you know I can see how it would work.

My apologies if this seems overly aggressive I am just interested in how this could work - we could alll fit in 10 hours a week for beer tokens

I'm a full time freelancer. I work on several projects at a time, from large companies to startups, and most of them I only give 10-15 hours a week to. You can get a lot done in 15 hours a week if you put your mind to it. The trick in this case would really be the scheduling, 15 hours a week all done after a normal job schedule (say after 6pm) would likely not jive as well, and your productivity would not be nearly as good.

My question and same to @bartonfink is still what is the work? If I am say design and build a rest backend for a company, and its say two months work at 45 hrs a week, doing 15 hrs a week telling them it will take six months cos I have other clients is a sure way not to get the gig

So I amwondering what the actual meat of the work you do is? How did you land the work - is it maintenance from past fulltime gigs, is it real consulting where you are training g the in house teams,

I am honestly interested because I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get such gigs myself

thank you

the work is designing and building web applications. almost all coding, a small amount of training/consulting. generally i come into projects that were already built at least part way by someone else and need to be fixed up and have features added. though i am also doing one right now from the ground up with a small team. most of my projects involve small remote teams as well.

right now i work with 2 startups and 1 large company, as well as do occasional consulting with another large company (this is usually less than 5 hours every month). i'm all about simplicity and breaking things down into small pieces, so on all projects i am able to deliver and launch features regularly with 10-20 hrs of work a week on each. my total billable hours for the week usually are in the 40ish range.

i've found all the work through referrals pretty much, so i can't say exactly how to find it for others. i will say put as much as you can out in open source, that is the best "sales" technique i've had (often "referrals" have come from someone i've only interacted with in the open source community). also, be consistent with your deliveries, and open and honest about scheduling, as well as when something is going to take longer than you estimated. surprisingly few contractors are good at communication it seems. often i come into projects for people who were abandoned by a developer and even when they were working together only got spotty communication from that dev.

Thank you

good points on the communications side - something I can easily let slide

I think you've overlooked the point that I already have a job. I'm "on set" 10 hours a day already.

10X Management is trying to do this: http://www.10xmanagement.com/

Thanks for the shout-out, Hang!

Altay from 10x Management here. Yup, we're doing this, and ramping up quickly. Feel free to get in touch (email in profile) if you want to learn more.

Interesting. Doesn't look like they're up and running yet, but I'll keep my eye on them. Thanks for the link!

Last I heard, they were not quite ready to take on more clients at the moment so they closed signup until they could scale their services better.

Try http://www.evisors.com they match clients to consultants and take care of the payment side of things