> Do you find that you're more "out of the loop"? Naively, I would expect you to become a lot more of a satellite employee, less involved in any decisionmaking
yes. more decisions will be made without your ability to influence them. if everyone else is full time then projects won't wait for you!
there are some ways to mitigate this, that perhaps also overlap with ways to organise decision making more effectively. if your company or team has a culture of drafting and circulating written docs (e.g. engineering design docs) before making a decision, then you can somewhat influence decisions by submitting written feedback and recommendations in advance, even if you cannot attend the meeting on the day when the decision will be made. also, if there is some written record of the decision -- written up in the company wiki, or emailed, or broadcast into the project slack channel -- then you can catch up over morning coffee and review how the entire strategy has changed since last week.
similarly, avoid becoming a bottleneck for your full-time colleagues. if i leave a code review on a colleague's pull request that we're not able to close off before my week ends, i tell them they don't need to wait for me to "approve" the pull request & ask them to merge it when they feel they've sufficiently addressed review feedback, or get a colleague to review it instead.
yes. more decisions will be made without your ability to influence them. if everyone else is full time then projects won't wait for you!
there are some ways to mitigate this, that perhaps also overlap with ways to organise decision making more effectively. if your company or team has a culture of drafting and circulating written docs (e.g. engineering design docs) before making a decision, then you can somewhat influence decisions by submitting written feedback and recommendations in advance, even if you cannot attend the meeting on the day when the decision will be made. also, if there is some written record of the decision -- written up in the company wiki, or emailed, or broadcast into the project slack channel -- then you can catch up over morning coffee and review how the entire strategy has changed since last week.
similarly, avoid becoming a bottleneck for your full-time colleagues. if i leave a code review on a colleague's pull request that we're not able to close off before my week ends, i tell them they don't need to wait for me to "approve" the pull request & ask them to merge it when they feel they've sufficiently addressed review feedback, or get a colleague to review it instead.