Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?
I'm about to get laid off from a very nice job, but I have a couple of projects I'd like to focus on. Does anybody know of ANY job where I can sit at my desk and more or less hack away at what I really want to work on?
Jobs I've been looking at:
house sitting
night shift security
library desk
etc.
88 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadI wonder if you might be more productive by changing your habits. Get up and hack for two hours before going to a job that does not require creativity, then perhaps hack a bit more in the evening as life permits. The advantage here is that you will have plenty of thinking time between execution periods and it will support the quality of your work.
I know an author that does just this, his problem though is that he is too conscientious and competent and keeps getting promoted to positions that require too much creativity. At that point he has to change jobs.
Since my friend dropped out of college, and his prior experience was working in a toy store and a couple of video rental stores, I would think anyone with a pulse could obtain such a job (he's pretty charming, though, so maybe he did have to interview well to end up running the machines rather than running the register at the concession or cleaning the aisles).
But then you have to start it right on time, check if everything is sharp and framed well, then come back 5 minutes later to check again and preferable come back yet again after another 5 minutes. This is because sharpness, framing may vary or the automatic lens change between commercials and the movie may screw things up.
I worked in a small theater with only 4 screens, but it was hectic none the less. Sure you have some time between films, but usually management finds more jobs for to do. I also often helped behind the snacks counter or had to clean the seats and alleys after a screening.
The cost of film is on the distributors and studios, but the cost of moving to digital is twice a film projector and falls on the theatre owner (who already has working film equipment). So the distributors (who aren't technically needed in the digital era) are trying to find a way to stay relevant and the studios have been subsidizing the cost of digital installations, so it has been very slow going.
Building robots seriously seems like it's incredibly fun and interesting.
Not sure you'd find the same thing...just another data point.
Also, the title "Librarian" requires an MLS.
I lived in a condo once, next to a construction site. The noise started at 8 am and finished at 4pm. I ran into a woman in the elevator, crying because she couldn't sleep and she worked a night shift.
One option to stay under the radar: use virtual machine to do your coding in. It's not that you have to hide what you're doing, but you might not want to keep answering questions or might otherwise just rather stay underground.
I'm in the position of working full-time and starting a company part-time, and am very careful to keep my two worlds separate, even though I'm 99.999% sure that my employer has no interest in attempting to take ownership the product I'm building.
;-)) lol
System administration positions often have a lot of downtime, since if you're doing your job well, nothing is urgent and everything just hums along real pretty-like. Night watch in a hosting data center would probably be a great choice. If you're still in school, night shift in a university tech center would probably be a good choice, too (assuming it's open 24 hours...I think most large universities do have at least one center that is open all night).
Finally, have you considered contract work? This is a different model altogether. Instead of taking a job where you can half-ass it, and work on what you really want to most of the time, you take jobs every few weeks where you work your ass off, get paid a metric ass ton (like $100-$150 per hour), and finish the project in a week or two. Then you're free to hack for pleasure for a few weeks before taking on another paying gig. This has mostly been what I've done since leaving college and the television station. I usually billed $1000/day plus all expenses, if travel or whatever was involved, and often made more than my friends who worked full-time at regular jobs...it only takes a few projects for that math to work out.
However, there are still positions where you spend a lot of time sitting in the studio with not a lot to do. Many stations run "network" programming which is delivered via satellite or ISDN from a central hub and employ a "tech op", usually a wannabe DJ who's still in school, to oversee it and make sure the network feed and local ads or other inserts go out on air. It's a job with a lot of downtime and you're sitting in a room full of computers. What could be better?!
The jobs you mention can't pay much more than $1500/month, which is 30 hours at $50/hour (or much less if you bill higher). One freelance project per month will fund your hacker lifestyle, and will probably look much better on your resumé later on in life.
"Since I have no elance reputation, I am willing to work for free and receive payment after the work is completed and satisfactory."
I never got ripped off, but even if I had, so what? Most elance jobs (the ones I've done) are fixed fee, and the buyer doesn't have to know how many hours (or minutes) I spend. ;-)
I spend 3 days a week as a sys admin, and 2 days a week freelance/working on startup. (was freelance mostly, now mostly startup)
sys admin is good work - i'm particularly lucky - my company is very flexible, and Mac OS X.
The worst is usually the same people get the calls about the primary app server being down as someone's windows box having too many popups.
My wife had this job when we first got married. When she was pregnant, the hotel actually let me cover some shifts for her. It was awesome. I'd bring my laptop and once the check-in rush was over (6pm-ish), it was real quiet and I could hack away.
Then, at least in Britain, they send you on pretty patronising courses about how to read job adverts, how to go to interviews and so on along with making you go in once a week and give proof that you've been "jobseeking". The job centre'll put you forward for any work going, regardless of whether it's a good match for your skills. If you refuse, no benefits. And for all this, you get the princely sum of £60 a week. Not enough to feed, heat and house yourself, let alone travel the globe.
It's not a free ride by any means, and if you've been through it through no fault of your own it's a pretty demoralising and humiliating system.
In Switzerland, the last time I was unemployed, I got about 80% of my salary, and they would have paid it for two years. You have to 'prove' you are looking for a job, but not getting hired when you have interviews is probably not that difficult. Someone showed me applications from people who obviously didn't want to get hired, they were very colourful and with lots of drawings.
In Belgium I heard you don't even have to prove you're looking, and there's no time limit for staying unemployed.
In France there is the rmi, revenu minimum d'insertion, that gives you money, apparently not even expecting you to find a job. That policy is not as stupid as it sounds, there are serious economists defending it, they call it the negative income tax. It's really not very much money, but I've met plenty of people living from it.
The people who do this are usually not very proud of it and get out of it when they can.
All those systems are being slowly scrapped or made less attractive everywhere. They are leftovers from better times.
If you're looking for a moral justification, what about this: the baby-boomers set up a social security system that 'conveniently' collapses after they are long dead. The younger generations will not reap the benefits of this system, they will only carry the burden.
So why don't you take some of your tax money back and get a little retirement right now? Or better yet: do something productive outside of the system.
The UK's just as much a part of Europe as Belgium or any other European Union state--in fact, we're one of the few net contributors to the EU. I'm happy here and I'm not planning on going and, erm, sponging off the Belgian welfare state, so I'll respectfully ignore your request that I relocate (!)
I was never taught that going on benefits was a particularly socially acceptable thing to do. I'm glad the system is there for people who are genuinely down on their luck and can't find work, but personally I'd rather take a low-ranking supermarket job than go on jobseekers'. Having something to get up for in the morning makes all the difference, even if it's a rubbish job.
By the way, I do contribute to free software, and enjoy doing so a great deal:
http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/
(Unfortunately the patches/ and files/ bits aren't working due to issues with mod_rails)
My issue is with the idea that I should under no circumstances work on proprietary software.
Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com
I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far.
Eventually, users will be able to track their vertical and lift ride data online and purchase Alta Cards using "ticket vending machines".
However, I do wonder sometimes if the offsite windows are economical.
I'm going to make a few more tweaks tonight and try to get some more feedback from HN.
After having used your service for a bit, I wanted to say that the single biggest pain is that title of a feed item looks identical to the description text of the feed above it, so it kind of looks like the description text just has a line break and some more text, not like a new item has started. So the items all seem to bleed into one another.
Perhaps get rid of the "Link" and make the title a link to the item itself? Or seperate each item with an <hr>?
One other thing. Is there a better way to store feeds than feedstomper.com/82.xml? I imagine that will be a ton of processing power and data necessary to store if a lot of people start using your service. And I'm not sure how you handle multiple requests for the same feed, or look to see if people stop subscribing to a certain feed.
Why not something more like feedstomper.com/?feed=http://www.reddit.com/.rss or something? But if you switch to that, will everyone who is already subscribed to 43.xml and 95.xml find that their feeds get broken?
Also, it means that I can just browse around and take a look at 32.xml or 15.xml and check out what everyone else is reading, which might be problematic if people are submitting personal feeds, from say, "friend's shared items" from google reader.
And what about a "when do you want this feed updated" option? Ideally I want it to update just before I (arbitrarily) decide to access it, so the feed is as current as possible despite having only updated once that day.
It's possible that I'm being pre-emptive and you have already thought of these things. You did specifically ask for problems, rather than feature requests.
But I like the service; the few alternatives I know of are not nearly as elegant.
For every 4 hour shift, there was maybe 30 minutes of work.
During "work" was when I discovered/experimented with Ruby on Rails, got interested in start ups, read a lot of PG essays, starting hacking on side projects, etc...
Actually, that job is probably why I'm not working for a BigCo.
I have at various times applied for work at movie theaters, Kinko's, video rental places, etc. I have not yet ended up working a side job, but I have done contracting work (programming and sys admin) that I ordinarily would not take (windows stuff) when desparate. My impression is that these types of side jobs are harder to get than you think, because employers like someone whose main focus is this job, who is likely to stick around, and who cares enough about the job to try hard not to get fired.
As a result, at one time I thought hard for a while about how to make jobs that were more suited to my needs. Rather than be able to work on my stuff at work, which I suspected would not work, I tried to think of a way I could make rent plus ramen money working one long 12 hour day per week.
The useful result of that exercise is that I thought long and hard about how much money I really, really needed to survive, and cut down my expenses considerably.
The more entertaining result was that I came up with a number of crazy "part-time business" ideas. The one which I partly did and made money on was finding old books at garage sales to sell online. (Very little money.) The one which people like to talk about is my "human powered lawn care" idea: Every Saturday, I and 4 or more one-day-a-weekers would meet up, ride on bikes to our rich green-freak hippy clients, and mow their lawn in a "carbon neutral" fasion, with reel push mowers and other hand-powered implements. I had this pretty well figured out, from the hauling of implements with bike trailers to having one bike with generator you put the back wheel on, to power a single weed-wacker (weed-wackers being indispensible tools of modern lawn care). People like to talk about that idea, but no one wanted to do it with me.
Another strategy would be to seek out a job that is by it's nature part-time, and thus maybe undesireable to the people who would normally do it -- such as assisting in managing a farmer's market stand, which would limited to one day a week. If you severly limit your expenses, you can survive and then invest the rest of your time in your startup idea.