Ask HN: Non-programming part time jobs?

Best non-programming job I ever had was a waiter in a fine dining restaurant. I made great cash and met lots of interesting people. I also got eat very well and learned a lot about food and wine, something I still very much enjoy today. Also, keep in mind that fine dining is nothing like Outback or Applebees.

I happened to be in college at the time, but many of my co-workers were people who waited tables on the side of their regular jobs. IIRC, one guy was a minister, another owned a catering business, and another was a teacher.

Another big plus if you're not married is that you meet tons of girls :)

You make a couple good points/ideas.

I like the carbon free lawn service idea. My current mower is actually an American lawn reel mower. Coincidentally, I bought it on craigslist for $35. It's from 72, and still cuts like a champ as long as your willing to maintain it. The "carbon free" service would work great in my area where there is a high density of people in town homes with small front lawns.

Maybe YMMV on the small lawn mowers. But I have had extremely good luck with them. I think that most of the problem people have with mowers is failing to maintain them properly. In my experience, if you can buy a used mower that will start quickly without much hassle it can generally be kept in decent working order for a long time. But purchasing one of these used mowers was why I said the idea scales. It's pretty easy to get enough work out of a used mower to buy a better quality mower.

Thanks for sharing your insight. I hope someone jumps on the reel mower service.

Firstly, I would get and idea of what your minimum living expenses really are. You say you'd love to work a few days a week in a cafe or book shop, but worry that it would not pay well enough -- you should figure out how much you need so you know. You may need to adjust your lifestyle - it is far easier to not spend a dollar than it is to get a dollar.

You may find it hard to get a part-time job to start off with. It may be easier to work a full time job for a few months, and then ask to cut back. If you save money in the mean time, you can quit if they refuse and seek out a better position.

There are a lot of posts here about the best kinds of part-time jobs. In reality, you are probably not going to be able to pick out the ultimate pay-the-rent-while-I-code-my-startup job; you are going to end up with one of the first few you actually find, and finding that job itself may be a full time effort for a while.

In that light, I'd like to suggest that the actual job and environment doesn't matter so much as you'd think, and that the fact that it is DIFFERENT is what matters.

Ideas for good products come from experience, not from cloistered ivory tower environments. You might come with a great product after working with several different inventory or point-of-sale systems, or observing how an independent roofing contractor maintains all his contacts on his phone, or whatever.

All the great American writers first learned by writing about real life things - Steinbeck filed many short newspaper stories on dust bowl refugees before he wrote the Grapes of Wrath, Clemens did the same and wrote of real experience in "Roughing It" before his masterpieces.

Here's my advice: 1) know your expences and cut them where appropriate; 2) get a job, and quit it within the first 2 weeks if it obviously sucks, and then get another one; 3) while working, agressively attend meetups and similar events so you don't become socially isolated; 4) after 3 months, ask your boss if you can cut back to part time if you need to do that - if he says no, work another 3 months and ask again; 5) if he still says no, quit, re-evaluate working a corporate development job, and start over again at step 1 if that's what you need to do.

> So your comment cheered me up at least a little bit :-)

I should probably taper my words with some warning then.

I'm the kind of programmer that has always thought about methodology, design, and best practice. And after thinking about that for years, and talking with other programmers like me (only smarter) and learning from them too, I can tell you not only is it really really hard but the pursuit of the nicest possible programming experience (clarity, simplicity, lack of repetition) can make you very unproductive.

The guy who spends all day writing frameworks, testing tools, and language abstractions is rarely the guy getting the most done. Unless he's a super-genius.

Only recently I was trying to apply TDD to a really extreme level. I didn't work. I ended up throwing loads of useless tests and suddenly was much more productive. But I probably lost weeks because of that.

But there is some good news: My hardcore desire to make everything wonderful barely exhibits when I program in Haskell. I think this is because the lack of side-effects, strong type-checking, and high-order functions give you such a good baseline and I don't feel like I need to write lots of abstractions and complicated things just to feel like I've got a handle on the situation. But then I'm unproductive because of inexperience with Haskell and FP in general. But that's a temporary thing.

Don't discount what you can learn from working for "the man" as a programmer. Pay attention to what's happening on the business side of things. Ask questions, show interest that you want to know more. If you ultimately want to have your own business, there's way more than just programming a cool idea to make that happen. You have to understand what it means to run a company and the types of decisions that go along with that. If you can't get that from your current job, use your programming skills to get in somewhere else that offers you that opportunity.

I'm on my third full-time job working for "the man" in 10 years and have learned a ton about what is involved beyond the code. I still very much have aspirations to put all that knowledge and experience to use for my own endeavors.

Best of luck!