&gt; there are not many companies hiring you for full time at $x that will allow you to work 3 days a week for 50% of $x, much more likely they will let you go and hire somebody else (unless you&#x27;ve been there forever and are the only person that can do something, in which case the company should worry about you getting hit by a bus)<p>Your calculus is a bit off. A company will not hire you part time because employees need time to learn the job. This includes the culture and political aspects.<p>Once you&#x27;ve been there for awhile, that all changes. Now you&#x27;re a part of the company, so the company is going to be way more willing to jump through hoops to keep you around. The reason they wouldn&#x27;t let you come in at 3 days a week, is the same reason they will start letting you (if you negotiate it right) after you&#x27;ve been there a year or so. It&#x27;s tougher and more expensive to assimilate a new employee than it is to make a productive current employee happy.<p>If you can show to the company that the bottom line won&#x27;t get impacted by a proposed change, make it clear that you&#x27;ll leave unless you get your way, (hard to do convincingly) and offer an acceptable path to move from A to B, then you too can find work&#x2F;life balance.<p>It&#x27;s not impossible, but it&#x27;s not easy either. I&#x27;d put it as being slightly harder than getting a 20% raise, which I&#x27;ve done. Now that I think about it, if you want a 20% raise, then one path to getting it might be to start the process of negotiating something like this, (to let them know you&#x27;re serious about not being happy) and then come in one day and ask for more money. If you play your cards right, they&#x27;d be much happier to open up the checkbook than to deal with the prospect of having half their workforce ask for the same thing you just got. (that&#x27;s the real reason they don&#x27;t want part-timers. Even if they can trust you not to abuse it, what about the next three people that ask?)