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Ask HN: How to make quick $$ with front-end skills during paternity leave?

8 points by react_burger38 ↗ HN
My wife and I recently had our second baby. Despite having an HMO insurance plan, we got hit with a bill that was for thousands more than we had saved for. I want to use some of my 6 week paternity leave to make some of that money to pay it off. I am a software engineer with React and Javascript knowledge and experience although by no means an expert.

What can I do over a period of about a month (plan to take 2 weeks relaxing with family) in order to generate $$ to pay the bill?

I have looked on upwork but it doesn't seem to be a good fit. They want skills like shopify or wordpress or environments I'm not familiar with. I know they might not be too hard to learn, but I don't have much time to learn a new thing.

13 comments

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throwaway082729
Can you take up a contractor role? There are lots of consulting companies that place contractors with companies and FE skills are frequently in demand. Just don't tell them that you are available only for a month.
shoo
assuming you are in the USA (i am not) i believe you should not take the bill at face value. you can attempt to negotiate either a discount, or a delayed payment schedule, or both. various people on the internet can recommend tactics for this.

some clues here: https://ask.metafilter.com/161024/Hospital-bill-over-a-year-...

and here: https://ask.metafilter.com/307259/Best-way-to-pay-a-medical-...

apologies for not answering your actual question if this isn't news to you

twunde
This is still worth trying (you do have to call in), but it's rarer to get a discount if you already have insurance (discounts are typically available only if you're a self-pay patient).
FlopV
Reach out to me I might have a job for you.
karmakaze
One place where I've found better work is with Topcoder Challenges[0]. I took a long break between jobs and worked on a wide range of jobs, mostly to try out new tech and get paid for some of my effort. I was planning to do it anyway. The rub is that you don't land a contract and rather do the work, submit it and if it's in the top 3 get a 1st, 2nd, 3rd prize. Some challenges are first to finish and only one gets paid. Often there will be units of work all for the same project so once you get familiar with the dev setup and codebase can be more productive. Remember that you're still competing globally with places having a much lower cost of living. The management of the process is very well organized with each challenge having a shared Q/A forum with posted materials and often provide VM access to dev/demo work.

I was mostly doing back-end work and dabbling in front-end, hybrid, or mobile dev. There are bigger tasks for UX and data science work but I'm less versed or productive there.

[0] https://www.topcoder.com/challenges

darepublic
Seems like a dev apocalypse.. a barren wasteland where you compete for scraps and only the strongest survive.
karmakaze
It's not nearly as movie-cool as that. Maybe the small problems have more than a handful of valid/correct solutions posted but the more interesting ones usually fall short then they go through a process of Q&A where selected qualifying entries can make their case and the final selected one may get an update.

There were some porting challenges to which I eagerly wrote a Swift/Java and Java/C++ translators to do the heavy lifting. The generated C++ used const return references & copying but the performance was actually quite good.

advarckcal
With only 6 weeks the greatest payoff will be to study leetcode and CS fundamentals. Reach out to your network and get some interviews. Due to the nature of the industry chances are you are leaving anywhere from 40-150k on the table by staying at your job.

The hardest part of freelancing is building out your network and getting clients. Sure you might be able to find a gig making $40-90/hr, but 4-6 weeks is just not enough time to really make much. I reccomend investing the time in your skills.

em-bee
the fact that you have paternity leave suggest that you are regularly employed.

in which country are you, and what are your employment terms? are you paid while on leave?

if the leave is unpaid, can you opt out and get back to your paid work?

if the leave is paid, are you even allowed to earn extra money on the side? check your contracts carefully. while it is conceivable that you are allowed to have two jobs, one which is giving you leave and another which is not. it is more likely that you are not allowed to work, or that doing so would make your current employer very unhappy.

i would certainly be unhappy if my employees use paid time off to moonlight and instead of getting a rest, work to make more money because that will affect their productivity when they come back.

afarrell
Are you asking for a way to make money without a bunch of job-search and ramp-up time?

https://codementor.io would let you offer your expertise to get other developers un-stuck or to give them design advice.

itronitron
You should push back on your HMO to cover the costs, and double check with your employer that your newborn has been added as one of your dependents in the plan.
perilunar
The tragedy of the US health system right here: working a second job during paternity leave to pay the medical bills.
macando
Somebody on Reddit called it a 'Battle Royale in real life'