The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
- Less communication overhead due to fewer people
- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)
- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes
- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)
- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for
Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.
- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)
Health insurance coverage is not tied to an employer. Being able to pay for health insurance premiums with pre tax income is tied to an employer.
The benefit to the (large) employer is that it makes it harder for their employees to compare competing employment offers, and adds a little more friction to an employee who might be considering switching jobs.
The administrative costs of implementing benefits so that pre tax money can be used to pay for them also serve as a barrier to entry for smaller employers (helping large employers), since these costs cannot be amortized over a large number of employees.
But beside all that,
> There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
It’s just cheaper, in all ways, to have fewer employees. Less people to trust, less people an employer is liable for, less hiring/terminating costs. The cost of burnout is clearly not a significant factor considering the lack of success of businesses full of part time employees.
The second part of your post is something I've thought about a lot. There are a lot of incentives driving business operators to try to get the most out of the fewest number of employees possible:
- Less communication overhead due to fewer people
- Constant availability (less need to pre-plan meetings, etc to match everyone's hours)
- Less complexity WRT HR, payroll, taxes
- Employees still have to pay for full healthcare, so the employer either provides this or pays a 1099 salary premium (the US's terrible approach of tying health insurance coverage to your employer rears its ugly head yet again)
- Fewer SaaS seats to pay for
Some of these are more solvable than others, and allowing more people to work part-time in tech is definitely swimming upstream, but I do wish more businesses would try.
Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad) is one person leaning into this approach with great success: https://sahillavingia.com/work