Expert Insights

Ernie Park
Founder, Part-Time Tech

Leaders, Ernie is the epitome of the most exciting trend in the freelance economy…future VP’s choosing to freelance over the corporate ladder. Ernie runs Part-Time Tech, a newsletter highlighting the benefits of freelance models for tech talent like him. Prior, he majored in computer science at MIT, and was a software engineer at Hubspot for over 7 years.

It is crucial to understand how this new freelancer demographic thinks. A couple core differences:

The best people were great in corporate, better fit their lifestyle and ability to make an impact (they don’t need to follow the corporate ‘Kingdoming’)
The best people aren’t looking for a job, they’re prioritizing opportunities
The best people find work through peer connections

Our Favorite Quotes

How would you describe freelancers?

“A lot of the people who can go freelance are actually some of the most entrepreneurial and are really effective.”
“I think the biggest learning is that there are people who want to be fractional, part-time, freelance, whatever we wanna call it, let’s just say non-traditional full-time. There’s not just one group.”

Why hire freelancers?

Efficiency matters and the best talent is not always on the market for full-time. For me, I see it so clearly this convergence of all these things in the macro, in the micro and in personal stories. I just don’t see how it doesn’t become a much bigger thing. So my call out to anybody listening is , be bold, think a little bit differently and stick your neck out there.

What’s wrong with full time employment?

“People are just kingdom building. Managers fight, ‘hey, I can’t accomplish my goals cause we just don’t have enough people and because we need more headcount.’ Then it’s a jockeying for position, I need that number on that spreadsheet to be four more than it was last quarter.”
“I think what that leads to is sort of a laziness within companies where you think the only way to solve problems is with more people. For the engineers out there, you know, if you know the mythical man month, it’s basically the fallacy that more people makes you more productive. That’s not always the case. “
“What I’ve started to see now is, we should have found a different way to hire those people. I waited months and quarters to figure out the pipeline, work with recruiting, gather interviewers, and try to hire this person. And we just waited and waited.”
“Now I’m like, wow, there were probably thousands of contractors or freelancers who were experts on this that we could have gotten within a few weeks that could have helped us through that.”

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Ernie Park, Founder, Part-Time Tech

Expert Insights