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Ask HN: How to get some money on the side using my SRE and DevOps experience?

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Ask HN: How to get some money on the side using my SRE and DevOps experience?

#1

Post by catanama »

Hi, I worked as a System Administrator and DevOps for last 10 years, but right now I experienced burnout and had to quit my job. My savings are running out but I still don't feel I'll be able to work full time without it detrimentally affecting my mental health. I was thinking about doing some tutoring and did some of that for my friends studying IT, and for my mental health it seems optimal, as I like doing it and don't feel mental strain associated with doing my job. I also wrote a Linux tutorial long ago and was thinking about doing more of this as it turns out that I really like to teach, but life and full time job interfered with those plans. For those interested my tutorial is saved here: https://archive.is/xDb8o

Please tell me if you know how I can earn some money doing Linux tutoring and maybe mentoring, maybe through some companies or communities interested in that. I have a decade of experience working with Linux, FreeBSD, computers networks, and so on and so forth up to modern things and practices like Chaos Engineering, AWS, CI/CD, Ansible and so on.

Also I might be able to do some part-time jobs with load of several hours per day, if you know where I should seek for those I'd be grateful too.

Re: Ask HN: How to get some money on the side using my SRE and DevOps experience?

#2

Post by hcrean »

Running your own private discount web hosting used to be fun and lucrative, less so with AWS nowadays and it takes time to build up a customer base. Still fun though.

Short term project contracting is what got me out of my burnout. As did learning music on the side and just treating work like a day job rather than a calling.

You can also probably speak to some recruitment consultants about pitching you to companies as part time. So much work going one is bound to be happy with that.

Re: Ask HN: How to get some money on the side using my SRE and DevOps experience?

#4

Post by radiojasper »

Go do something else, as this job clearly burned you out. Just because you spent a lot of time on it, it doesn't mean it's good. I'm a burned out web designer with 2 decades of experience and applied for a job as an operator for a taxi company. Why? Because I can communicate properly, I speak multiple languages, I have experience with taxi companies from a previous job I had ages ago and the best of all: It's not fucking web design. I am sure you can dig a little deeper to find a skill you can use in a completely different job! And if you don't like it after all, just leave. You need money, not a path to your retirement.

In your case, I would apply for an IT job at a primary school. Literally everything is slow-paced on primary schools (trust me, I made websites for them for 15 years) and with your experience, you'll probably be on of the most valuable assets in their team while at the same time you can enjoy school hours, long vacations, no overtime and you work with a bunch of dorks who have no clue what they're doing. You won't get burned out from telling people to right-click a page and click on 'print'. It's easy.

Re: Ask HN: How to get some money on the side using my SRE and DevOps experience?

#5

Post by devKnight »

maybe something like codementor[0] Also for part time work, try posting in next months who wants to be hired and freelnacer posts. Say you want to do part time work, im sure you'll get alot of people needing part time help

[0]https://www.codementor.io/

Re: Ask HN: How to get some money on the side using my SRE and DevOps experience?

#8

Post by Beaver117 »

hcrean wrote: post #2

Running your own private discount web hosting used to be fun and lucrative, less so with AWS nowadays and it takes time to build up a customer base. Still fun though. Short term project contracting is what got me out of my burnout. As did learning music on the side and just treating work like a day job rather than a calling. You can also probably speak to some recruitment consultants about pitching you to companies a…

How short is short term? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months?
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