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So here I am, looking again at listings for part-time work-from-home to bring in a little extra money. The past six years or so have convinced me that I'm unemployable full-time for anything I'm physically capable of doing at this point¹ (I could probably get hired to work retail at, say, Home Depot, but my knees and left foot would never stand it). And it seems there's basically three types of jobs listed if you're looking to work from home:
Telemarketing. 'Nuff said.
(I'd almost sooner mug old ladies.)
Unspecified get-rich-quick promises using all the pyramid-scam buzzwords.
(Sub-category: Unspecified get-rich-quick promises using all the pyramid-scam buzzwords plus a liberal showering of "Christian" and "Mentor" and the like, to take advantage of the pious who think that if it's Christian it must be honest, because surely no fellow Christian would ever try to cheat them... right?)
And "Get paid to take surveys on your computer." I have a hard time believing there's significant money in that. The sites I've looked at so far, it seems that to sign up, you have to agree to be spammed, opt in to a bunch of marketing crap, and sometimes even sign up for online college courses. Can you say "just another scam"? Sure you can.
Once again, I find myself wondering about a home-based PC repair business. "The PC Doctor makes house calls!" With places like Best Buy charging $70-$80 just to examine and diagnose a problem, there almost has to be a way to undercut them on repairs, and there may be money in support too. (With the number of cheap-crap white-box PCs on the market stuffed full of lowest-bidder parts, there's probably little chance of making money building machines; anyone who knows enough to understand why it's worth using better-quality components probably knows enough to build their own.)
But how does one get started...?
[1] Well, unless I were willing to uproot everyone again and move back to California. Which I'm not. It'd be chancing everything on a roll of the dice, and we'd be back into apartment-rental hell for the foreseeable future.
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But, yeah, the options all kind of scrape.
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They're legit at least. :)
http://www.alpineaccess.com/external/careers/
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(Hmm. Looks like I meet basically all of their requirements except "Quiet and professional environment during work periods." Um, this may be just a wild stab in the dark, but I'm going to guess "screaming fighting children in the background", which is all too frequent, doesn't qualify there...)
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One of our maintenance companies approached us with a offer of support, the company they're subbing for for phone/software support appeared to use people at home for escalations. (They told us highly trained, highly experienced people. Sounded interesting, but I want Sun Support because if I'm calling them, it ain't easily googleable, and I've probably run through the obvious attempts.)
I could dig up the contact info if you'd be interested in tossing a resume towards the company.
(The websites I was looking at in 2002.. I don't recall off the top of my head, I'll see what I've got on the hard drive at home..)
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I am doing one of the MLM things right now. It ain't get-rich-quick, but there is definitely money to be made, if you are willing to work.
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If you can't get a job with someone else doing it, then you could always set up a "real" blog and get Google Ads on it.
Among other things, there are a lot of free or nearly free options for various applications on the internet. There's a demand among people running searches for articles comparing them.
There's a whole lot of applications that offer evaluation versions. There's a searching market for articles comparing products.
Do good work and you might be able to get enough traffic and click through to make a bit of cash.
The other side of that is a good site with a lot of traffic is an advertisement for your ability to do technical writing. Product reviews and technical writing aren't all that dissimilar.
You don't necessarily need to be employed by someone else to do technical writing---could run it as your own business and target smaller mom and pop shops who can't afford to take someone on full time.
I don't know what standard rates are for tech writing, but for short stories and such, typical (unless you're a pro) is about two or three cents a word, so you'd probably want a minimum, or a base charge to look at it and then by the word. Dunno. You'd have to investigate average pricing.
Tech writing doesn't really take much talent--just a good grasp of the English language and the ability to explain things clearly.
If you do the pc repair business, you might want to try the tech writing/product reviewing thing as a sideline.
The advantage of product reviews is you can work them in as money work, however limited, when you're low on other work. They also serve as an advertisement for your PC repair business, by demonstrating you know what the f*** you're talking about. :-)
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And yeah, ouch is why I don't do it.
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I didn't consider the angle of doing product comparisons though. That's not a bad idea. Neither is leveraging it into technical writing.
I'm going to have to give that some thought. Thanks for the suggestion :)
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(Suggestions for a PC Home Tech Support Business?)
I think it's a pretty good idea, if your area will support it.
Remote sys-admin is also promising. Your skills may or may not be up-to-date there, but I know you have skills, and shell scripts are shell scripts, even when the shell changes some.
You could try partnering up with a cheap virtual hosting company (whether or not you let them know you're a partner :) and offer cheapo-sysadmin+virtual-colo services. Small businesses may bite, and all you'd really be doing is reselling a virtual colo spot and actually logging into it from time to time, once it's set up. You could probably run the thing through alarm scripts and just do nothing, more often than not.
Hell, I'd probably be willing to pay you to set up a virtual colo for me one of these days, though I dunno about ongoing admin. I've been wanting to move my now-numerous domains over a server I control, but really have no idea how to set it up. It'd be valuable to me to have someone do it who knows how to comment a script and write basic "what did I change/where is this rc?" docs for me.
I don't know about remote coding, unless you've kept yourself up or are willing to do some damned quick cramming. The landscape's changed a lot in the last 5-10 years.
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Yeah, there's a bunch of new languages on the playing field, and for want of a good learning project I haven't even kept up really with a lot of the last round. :p Python, Ruby, Java ... heck, I never actually learned any of the ++ bits of C++.
That Slashdot thread is useful ... the suggestion about focusing on home/SOHO network setup is good.
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I have something like ten domains right now. It's enough that managing them through a hosting company is a pain.
Mostly, I want control over my own software loadout. My current host doesn't support Ruby on Rails, and I'd like to learn it. I could go to a host that does, but they'd eventually not support something I wanted.
C's not all that popular outside of systems or embedded programming anymore. And embedded is more like C wrappers around ASM, in a lot of cases. There are still legacy C projects to be had, though. It's possible you might find something in that route if you got lucky.
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Honestly, if I could figure out something non-computer-related to do for a living that I was good at, I'd get out of IT altogether. There's too many pinheads, too many people who think buzzwords trump anything else, and too many people who expect to be able to hire Larry Wall for the hourly rate of an Indian summer intern because they could hire an Indian summer intern for that rate, so why not? (Plus, I feel like all my skills have gotten stale, and playing catch-up seems futile when you basically can't get a job without hands-on industry experience within the last year anyway.)
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Application programming is C++ in Unix (Qt/KDE, varies for GNOME), but it's Objective C on Mac, .NET (usually C# or Managed C++, somewhat different) on Windows, Java or web-based for cross-platform.
Database/Enterprise stuff is either the same, or 4GL of some kind (Delphi or more esoteric tools). Nowadays, a lot of it is web-based intranet.
Test Automation, like I do, is either based on an API or reflection-scheme in the language of the app it automates, based around a proprietary language, or--for a couple of test systems--based on more general scripting languages like python or tcl.
Systems programming is pretty specialized. So's compiler or driver programming (another C possibility I forgot) or embedded.
Not saying it's impossible or anything, just probably not a short-term plan. If you were truly interested in coding, best bet's to find some open-source project you like and hitch up. That way, you'll get some practice and possibly some visibility.
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It'd be easier if I had a 2.6 kernel on babylon5, because then I could effectively build a new install in a chroot environment until I get it usable... but I'm still running 2.4 because I can't easily upgrade to 2.6 without changing a lot of how the system is set up.
What I really need is another machine to install on. Much easier and less brain-hurty than trying to do a major upgrade-in-place on a machine you can't really afford downtime on.
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Actually, what I probably need is something like VMWare. Do a Gentoo install in a virtual machine, wait until I've gotten everything nailed down, then save the important configs and do the install for real.
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It's a relatively painless way to mess around with multiple different Linux distros without having to reinstall. It's a bit of a pain to manage, but no more so than VMWare, and it's a good deal less resource intensive.
The only problem I've had with it so far is setting up X under it, but I think that's more of a learning issue than a real limitation.
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(Of course, mere minutes after stating that, I find - I think - the information I was looking for.)
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QA isn't exactly the sexy part of software development, but it turns out that my software building skill set is kind of rare there. It's put me at a distinct career advantage.
So, sometimes it's not about the suitability of the skill set. Sometimes, changing the context makes all the difference.
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I just meant that there may be opportunities you're not considering, because they're not the usual career path for our skills. I think the SOHO/home support idea is a good step towards exploring some new ideas.
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I understand what you mean, yes. I just don't see at the moment what they might be. There's lots of things I know how to do — the big problem would be convincing people to pay me to do them, when I've never been paid to do them before. (Well, that and picking the right one in the first place.)
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1) The first thing you're going to need is customers. Insurance, permits, equipment, bank accounts, etc. can all wait until you've secured your first customer. If you can't get that customer, spending money on the rest of the "real business" trappings won't help.
2) Once you do go through the paperwork stuff (particularly registration and licensing with the state and/or county), you're going to be deluged with marketing from folks who want to sell you business-oriented stuff. If you can, you may want to get a voicemail number, and list that as your "official" business number on all government paperwork.