[natrius]

An employee that works three days a week isn't worth 60% of the value of a full time employee. More people will be required to do the same amount of work, which means more communication overhead. If you still want full benefits as well, you'd be lucky to get 40% of your full-time cash compensation.

[lsc]

I strongly disagree. If you hire someone part time who is only doing that type of work for you, I believe you get /more/ than the value you pay for.

E.g. if you hire a programmer for three days a week and they go rock climbing the rest of the time, You probably get about the same productivity as hiring a programmer full time, and you don't need to pay them for the rest of their time.

The thing is, so many problems are solved 'in the background' - When I hire a knowledge worker, really, I'm paying for the background processes when they are in the shower as much as anything else.

Now, things are different if you are splitting someone with another job of a similar type, I think. In that case, if you are providing more interesting work and/or better motivation, you can 'steal' some of the background processing from the other job, but the other way around is also possible. (a win win is also possible here; your guy can learn something one place and use it at the other, etc... but it's less of a sure win, I think, as, say, hiring an artist to work on your customer support when they are not doing art.)

Of course, if you are hiring someone for a rote job where performance doesn't vary or matter, or where burn-out doesn't happen, none of this applies.

[natrius]

That's a good point.

[Tamerlin]

Whole heartedly agree.

Are we hired for our skill, or to warm seats?

In corporate america, I'd say to warm seats.

[ZeroGravitas]

I'd imagine you get more redundancy (in the good sense) by having more part-time people, lower your truck-number, and have people less likely to be distracted by personal stuff in work hours since they can visit the bank (etc.) on their free days. Recent posts about productivity have claimed white-collar/creative workers are most productive at lower than 35 hours a week. I wonder if anyone has actually studied the cost/benefits from both the employer and employee side.