What exactly are you asking for? At ININ, we have core hours of 10-4, and you can fill out the rest however you want. Seems a decent compromise for a salary employee gig.
If you want real flexible hours you can always do contract work or start a business.
I don't want to do contract work or start a business (again). That would make the problem worse, not better, because I'd have to spend more of my time on my job in order to make a living, and the additional time would be spent on tasks I enjoy less and am not as good at as the work I do which is the focus of my career. The point is that I have a wide variety of interests and to me a good life is one where I get to pursue them. Focusing exclusively on a single activity (coding!) might be better in terms of making money, but what am I making that money for if I can't use it to live a good life in the other ways I want to live it?
Your response illustrates the problem I was describing: why, when I suggest that the standard packages don't suit me, do you think it is helpful to suggest that I just pick one of them and deal with it? Why shouldn't we accept, as an industry, that different people have different needs and different motivations, and consider it normal to work out whatever mix of time, responsibility, and compensation suits each person?
The paradox of the salaried job is that you can either have money to spend or time to spend it in, but you can't have both, because nobody will let you trade some of one for some of the other. Well, why not? If we adopted a flexible attitude about work hours, as a culture, it would not just make things better for women who are stuck with traditional family-care tasks, but for everyone - whether they want to use that flexibility to raise a family or for something else important to their life happiness.
It could be, if "part-time job" simply meant an ordinary job which one works for fewer than ~2000 hours per year; but "part-time" also means "no benefits", "no stability", and "no respect", and in any case there are no part-time jobs to be had as a software developer. If there were, I don't imagine they'd be much good for making a living.
What I want is more about flexibility than about a smaller number of hours. I'm happy to work 50+ hours in a week when it's called for; I just wish I could take a month off to go travel, when that's what I want to do, or take Thursdays and Fridays off for two months because there's some project I want to work on, or take a week full of half days because we just shipped a release and I feel like goofing off a bit. I mean, sure, I could probably just do the last one, unofficially, but I'd like it if this were all above board and OK, instead of just something you try to get away with and hope nobody complains. And there's just no solving the problem of wanting to travel: only once in my career have I gotten a month off, after almost seven years at a single company, a tenure I will probably never repeat. Why is PTO always non-negotiable? I don't get it.
If you want real flexible hours you can always do contract work or start a business.