My Experience As a Fractional Developer

I seek to spread the “gospel” of fractional development. OK — that’s a bit much. But I do seek to normalize the idea, because it is a concept that has served me well both as a developer and later when hiring developers.

How did fractional work even start?

My time as a fractional developer began in 2007. I had moved from New York City to Atlanta, and in the process lost access to the lucrative Wall Street-focused technology positions that had commanded a premium for someone with both technology and investment-finance knowledge. In Atlanta, that finance expertise had far less market value.

I found a position with Oracle (initially BEA Systems) on a technology “SWAT” team that was sent on-site to close critical enterprise deals through live development work. The role consisted of one intense week per month, with the remainder of my time largely unoccupied and remote. I performed well and received above-average bonuses — but I quickly saw there was no realistic promotion path, and no employer, Oracle included, was going to pay me 2x for my output even if I won every engagement I touched.

So what was I to do — a senior developer earning substantially less than at my last NYC role, with roughly thirty hours a week sitting idle? If hard-working people juggle two or three physical jobs to make ends meet, surely I could pull it off in front of a computer.

How did juggling multiple roles actually work?

In January 2007 I applied for contract development positions. This was before universal remote work, so when I started a contract at Air2Web — an Atlanta-based SMS startup — I timed my start date to give myself three full weeks in the office. I got code into production in the opening weeks and established credibility quickly.

When I next had to travel on behalf of Oracle, I was direct with Air2Web: “I have other responsibilities, and I need to be away roughly one week a month. I can work evenings on those days to make it work — does that work for you?” They said yes, because they did not want to lose a now-proven consultant. And so it began. I ran that split — and a similar arrangement between Oracle and AT&T thereafter — for three years, before the startup bug finally bit me and I started building HiddenLevers.

The key was radical transparency from day one. Constraints that are documented upfront give both parties something to plan around, rather than something to resent. Once the rules were clear, the arrangement ran smoothly — occasional spikes in workload were manageable exceptions, not a chronic problem. If you are curious how to structure that onboarding conversation, the guide to onboarding a fractional developer covers the specifics.

What did employers gain from the arrangement?

Looking back, every employer in this period came out ahead. The pattern held whether it was a Fortune 500 or an early-stage startup:

• Every employer received positive reviews and above-target bonuses from me throughout the period — output quality did not suffer.

• Oracle retained me years longer than they otherwise would have. Without fractional work to keep me engaged, I likely would have pivoted to a startup sooner.

• Fractional clients kept me on for years despite my schedule being preempted roughly 25% of the time — because the work itself delivered consistent value.

• My skills stayed sharper because I was exposed to how multiple companies in non-competing fields attacked similar technical problems — which fed back into better output for every client.

This last point is underappreciated. A developer working in a single codebase for years tends to over-index on the patterns that codebase rewards. Cross-company exposure forces faster generalisation. For context on how this dynamic plays out at the management level too, see how fractional developer management can rescue a stalled engineering organisation.

What did the developer gain from fractional work?

The developer side of the ledger was even stronger. Three benefits stood out clearly in retrospect:

• Oracle was paying me full-time for what was effectively surge capacity. The day-to-day reality was boredom. Through fractional work I was able to put that surplus time to use and stay sharp, rather than coasting.

• I could not get paid 10x for being a 10x developer — in practice, it was hard to be paid more than 20% above my stated target in a single-employer structure. Fractional work let that leverage translate into income, and I increased my take-home substantially.

• That surplus income, saved over three years, meant I was later able to start HiddenLevers 100% bootstrapped — no outside capital needed to get off the ground.

While juggling multiple roles might sound complex on paper, the mutual understanding established upfront made it manageable in practice. The occasional spikes in load were real — but they were the exception, and they were worth it.

What happened after three years of fractional work?

When I started getting traction with HiddenLevers and needed development help myself, the first model I reached for was the one I had lived: fractional developers. Having been on the contractor’s side of the table gave me an operator’s-eye view of what makes the arrangement succeed — and what makes it fail.

That experience is one of the core reasons Fraction exists. The fractional model is genuinely better for a large class of companies and developers than the binary choice between full-time employment and one-off freelancing. It just requires the right structure, the right expectations, and the right match. For a detailed look at when fractional makes more sense than a full-time hire, the full-time vs. fractional CTO cost and ROI breakdown lays out the numbers clearly — the logic extends to developers as well.

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