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JobSharing

Two people in one job, alternating time in the office.

I'm thinking it's possible in software development if each person works three days a week, pair-programming together on one of those days. With tasks divided up finely enough to fit within a day or half-day, it could work.

KeithRay 2003.05.16

My Korean coworker was telling me yesterday how businesses came into Korea (eletronics manufacturing, etc.) years ago, and then left for China and other cheaper places. He blames the unions, but I blame greed -- always looking for cheaper labor.

KeithRay 2003.05.17

Fraud for the sake of greed, on the other hand, is another story. If only the borders were not foggy, as in Johanna's example.

MikeMelendez 2003.05.17

In a sense all jobs except sole practitioners are shared jobs. If the fundamental unit of software productivity is a team, for example, the several team members each own all, and some of those results. Job sharing as in "less than a full week on site each week" can work, I think with things like a repository, some metrics and a strong habit of iteration helping it work. "Your job is to do this one story that we estimate at 20 hours, by the end of the iteration." Doesn't work so well when the organization is oriented toward face time, emergencies, or both.

I have had a technique for managing job expansion that might work for the overworked 20 hour / week person. In the past, I've been willing to work as many hours as they like, provided I'm paid by the hour. Oh, yeah. "You can pick any 40 / week you want. If you want more than 40 / week out of me, I'll pick them." That's put scheduling and "core hours" nonsense to bed pretty fast. Same approach might work for the nominal 1/2 time person. The employer might not take either option you are willing to live with, in which case get another employer.

That said, some jobs, and more often some situations, are hard to organize so that the individual in them can be away part of the time. If all of IT operations is a mess, well, you're probably going to be busy for a while straightening it out. The goal, however, has to be to get out of the mess where you have to be personally on call all the time, and personally involved in every decision of importance. Again, you want to get paid for this situation (something I have forgotten more than once.)

-- JimBullock, 2003.05.17

I don't see that the company is taking advantage of them if each party is getting something better than they could otherwise. For example, the moms might have spouses who are fully covered by healthcare - that was my situation when Dani was working at the university.

I think, though, that if they worked 36 hours, they would legally be classified as full-time, and the company would have to pay benefits. I'm not sure what the legal cutoff is, and it may vary by state. Can somebody inform us?

In addition, moms or dads who care for kids often want an arrangement where they can work shorter hours so they can spend out-of-school time with their kids. Again, how do you measure this benefit - it may not be strictly a matter of money. - JerryWeinberg 2003.05.25

In the US, there are *some* federal regulations about how much is "full time" mainly for things like FICA (federal tax) status. *Some* states also have regulations on when part time becomes full time. And *some* states have regulations about requiring one kind of benefit or another. Most of the regs about benefits are more about consistency. If you offer some benefit to some full time staff, you have to offer it to all of them.

This is another one of those areas where the feds and states aren't sure who should be in charge. Whether there is more or less federal vs. state ownership of the issue has a lot to do with who got elected last.

-- JimBullock, 2003.05.25

I agree with Jerry that not everyone needs benefits, especially if their spouse can provide benefits. And, maybe it was their choice to work more than the 24 hours per week.

But here's what I saw: working mothers who'd decided they didn't want to work full time, working only 1.5 hours/week less than I did at work. (I had an arrangement with my employer when my younger daughter was less than a year old to work only 37.5 hours/week on site.) They didn't count the overtime not-at-work, and they weren't paid for the overtime-at-work. The moms were exhausted trying to make everything work for everyone.

I'm sure it's possible for some people to succeed at job sharing. I'd love to hear how they arranged it, and how their managers arranged it. My problem is that I have three instances of it not working, where the people job sharing were so busy placating their management and companies, that no one looked out for them. No one looked to see that the arrangement was appopriate for all concerned.

Each of these women left when they were ready for "full-time" work, because their companies took advantage of them. I suspect the problems of PlacatingatWork are significant. -- JohannaRothman 2003.05.27

PlacatingatWork is the problem. There's a natural payoff, actually, to fewer hours. People can be more productive when fresher, and their background processing goes on 24x7 whether they are on site 40 / week or less.

Sounds like an operational kind of job, one organzied so that presence is required. Also sounds like there was no balancing of workload vs. hours. When this kind of thing happens, there's a problem in the layer immediately above the overworked (Definition of owerwork - more work than agreed to) employee.

How about "no" as a solution? -- JimBullock, 2003.05.27

The arrangement that occurred here was that at some point the employee would start taking every other Friday off. That way there vacation would be drawn down to zero by the end of the year, but since they were around most of the time, and salaried to boot, their assigned tasks stayed the same, they just fit them into nine days instead of ten. One fellow took half of each Friday off for the rest of the year, but some emergency would always erupt; as far as I could tell half day meant seven and a half hours versus nine,

BTW, interns were paid by the hour, time and a half for anything over forty. Plus the internships had fixed end dates when one returned to school, so I didn�t have to argue about getting time off. Worked out nicely for me, but I never understood why the college students got treated so much better than people who had worked there ten years.

I haven�t done job sharing, but I did have a job for about three months where I was working four eight-hour days a week. Given my experience while interning, I was very conscious of making sure the work didn�t creep into a full time job with 80% pay. If that had happened I would have went back to 100% pay. But I had the support of my boss and it worked out. The biggest problem was that other people wouldn�t realize/remember that I was out of the office every Wednesday. So they would expect one day turn around of email and voicemail, as well as schedule meetings I need to attend for that day.

-- ShannonSeverance 2003.05.27