Professional
Gig Work

No Meetings, No Deadlines, No "Full-Time" Employees.

Working at 9th resembles playing for a sports team. Team members may have different goals, play different roles, and possess different strengths, but we work collaboratively aiming toward a common goal.

We emphasize freedom — not only when it comes to your time, but your workflow, creative expression, and location. We work hard to empower team members and provide the freedom, tools, and trust to do the best work of their careers.

We're not for everyone. In broad strokes, Managers of One thrive at 9th. If you consider yourself an eager learner, a self-starter, a conscientious worker, and a thoughtful, kind, supportive human, you might just have a home here.

Our way of working isn't for everyone. There are no company retreats or team-building activities, and we have limited opportunities for growth beyond your job title. We also can't compete with the comp packages that big tech companies and organizations can provide.

But we can compete — and win — on flexibility and freedom.

The majority of the time, striving professionals have two options: work a full-time job and hustle nights and weekends, or leave your job and risk everything to start a company or pursue your goals.

We offer a third. You can contract 10–35 hours a week, organize your own week structure, and design your own hours. This lets you continue a full-time job, pursue your personal goals, manage a business, or make sure you're available to your family and other obligations.

The future of work is extinguishing the work-structure "norm," where your career requires you to design your life around it — instead of designing it around your family, friends, and personal pursuits.

It'll take some getting used to if you've been immersed in ASAP culture, but after a while you'll wonder how you worked any other way.

Friendly and thoughtful? Let's talk.

What we're not looking for are ideological clones or people who are otherwise just like us. We need free thinkers — opinionated individuals who are their authentic selves and take pride in who they are and the work they do.

It's a given that diversity is a must for us. But it's more than that: diversity has deeper value beyond the monetary. There are few better ways to expand your horizons and grow as a person than to put yourself in the company of others with different backgrounds, experiences, and identities. So don't shy away. Come work with us. We'll do some growing together.

A calm, collected environment where you can do your best work.

Working at 9th resembles playing for a sports team. We find members who fit into our style while covering and working to fill a gap in our system. We work collaboratively aiming toward a common goal — each of us an all-star at being ourselves and offering our best creative selves to push forward the products and services 9th provides.

There are limited touch points. We're all working within our own individual areas of the business, focused on executing assigned tasks and projects. Most of our communication happens through Basecamp message boards or chats, documents with feedback, and occasional emails or scheduled Zoom calls. We aim for any communication that commands someone's immediate attention to be rare — you should aim for that too when working with colleagues.

You have to write, and you have to write well. Not in the sense of perfect grammar or writing conventions, but in expression. You shouldn't always need a meeting or a phone call to express your thoughts and communicate with colleagues. Compiling and articulating your thoughts in well-written form is hard. That's exactly why we require it. We want you to be heard, but we all need to be thoughtful. If you have a suggestion, provide some research and references within it. If you have a question, provide the previous steps you've taken in your attempt to address the issue.

Manager of One.

We have an "anti-overtime" rate: past 35 hours a week, people can continue to work at an hourly rate of 50 percent. This lets us keep a high hourly rate for the highest-leverage work while still allowing people to work more per week if they wish. We're stricter about how this is tracked, but also aware of the tasks and projects we're working on. Usually these situations are reflected in a monthly or quarterly bonus — it always comes down to the situation and the active phase of the company's work.

We don't care when you work, how you work, or where you work — as long as tasks are completed with the quality, thoughtfulness, and care we all expect. Then we're happy. We recommend a weekly flow like this to get your work done and stay roughly in sync with everyone else (though to be clear, we require zero synchronous communication):

• Do all work that is blocking other folks. This mostly includes reviewing open tasks assigned to you and addressing any outstanding questions in Basecamp message boards.
• Look at open issues and tasks listed in your team's queue.
• If you're running out of work, add tasks you see that need to be addressed — or do some research and offer opinions, feature ideas, or methods around how we can better compete with our peers and competitors.
• Try to tackle one broad task a week, including all of the small tasks associated with it (for example, updating a page's copy or improving the user experience of a landing page).
• Provide a weekly update in the company's main Basecamp message board — outlining work you've completed, experiments you're running, your thoughts on the general work week, metrics you've found, or feedback on how the team and company can improve.
• Resume ongoing tasks or projects.

Everyone at 9th works on a per-contract basis. Even the founders.

Compensation, responsibilities, and role are determined on a per-contract basis. We don't have an established rate for any role — too many variables come into play in a position's value to the company, including (but not limited to) the candidate's talents and skills, experience, and the overall responsibilities and duties of the job. In essence, everything can be negotiated.

The expiration terms categorize our employee contracts. We have two types: expiry date and projects.

Typically the process looks like this.

• 1
  ApplyApply via the available form and complete an intro call if you're contacted.
• 2
  A short challenge (unpaid, ~1 hour)An exercise that resembles the type of task we'd need you to solve — improving the design of a module like a form, planning the schema and technical specs of a small feature, or writing up a new help-center article.
• 3
  A paid trial period (a few weeks)Work that resembles the day-to-day at 9th — fixing bugs, shipping a feature, or answering support tickets. This can usually be done on the side or on weekends, and takes less than 10 hours a week.
• 4
  Offer & contract finalizationIf we agree to move forward, we settle on your rate, hours, and terms together.
• 5
  Official onboardingWe get you set up and ready to do great work.

Company-provided benefits are a work in progress.

We currently provide the following benefits:

• Nine official paid American holidays — New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, the Day after Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day.
• Two paid personal holidays associated with your culture, religion, political beliefs, etc. (used at your discretion).
• 112 hours of paid sick time per year (used at your discretion).
• 112 hours of paid vacation time per year (remaining hours can be paid out as a yearly bonus or roll over in a contract renewal).