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Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#51

Post by bestes »

davidw wrote: post #30

Incidentally, this is RMS' (Stallman, of course, not our own 'rms') suggestion for those who are unable to find a day job doing free software: do something unrelated to software (with the idea being the avoidance of contributing to proprietary software) that gives you free time. Hearing that in person from RMS was the beginning of the end of my interest in RMS style free software.

I'll be you use a lot of RMS-style free software, though! Just because you don't want to contribute, doesn't mean free software isn't a good thing.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#52

Post by timr »

callmeed wrote: post #28

Front desk at a small hotel. 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.

I worked the desk at a mid-sized hotel (50-ish rooms), and it was the worst job I've ever had. The checkin/checkout rushes were bad, but then we had to reconcile the accounts, set wake-up calls, answer the phones, etc. There definitely wasn't any time to relax.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#53

Post by pg »

hugs wrote: post #48
icey wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually kind of surprises me. I saw Trevor at CES and he looked like a proud parent over his robot. Building robots seriously seems like it's incredibly fun and interesting.

That's my dream - robot building. I look forward to the day that "robot startups" are as trendy and commonplace as "web startups". :-/

I've been encouraging Trevor to make this happen, by making his new QA into an Apple II of robots that people can bolt their own stuff onto. So far it's not happening though: the thing only has one hole in its exterior case, for the charger to plug into.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#55

Post by andyking »

c1sc0 wrote: post #29

Well if you're in Europe, what about: 'unemployed'? 80% of your current paycheck for the first 6 months, then you really should start looking for something that resembles a job. I know people who travelled the world on 'unemployment'. If you're looking for quiet time, why don't you just skip the social obligation of 'having a job'?

Here's something else from (this part of) Europe: 'bollocks'. For a start, each country has its own rules on unemployment benefits and I've no idea where they pay 80% of your current pay.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#56

Post by omouse »

myelin wrote: post #22

Or, you could pick up a part time job doing what you're good at (hacking), earn as much money as a full time "mostly idle" type job, and use your actual free time for your projects. 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…

Where can you find a freelance gig that isn't a total rip though? I'm sure the parent doesn't want to get paid $14/hr hacking on a Windows clone for someone on ELance or Craigslist.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#57

Post by andyking »

SwellJoe wrote: post #16

When I was in college I worked the night shift at a television station in the tape room, and spent most of my time, four to five hours each eight hour shift, learning UNIX system administration, shell and Perl programming, or writing songs. However, last I heard, stations had started automating away most tape duties and merging the master control and tape operator jobs into one. Master control is not a "lot of downti…

Radio stations have also become increasingly automated over the past few years and mostly have no-one in the building overnight. (In days gone by, they'd sometimes employ a DJ to play music without talking through the night!)

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?!

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#58

Post by RobGR »

I'm surprised no one threw out some crap about the Four Hour Work Week.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#59

Post by zupatol »

andyking wrote: post #55
c1sc0 wrote: post #29

Well if you're in Europe, what about: 'unemployed'? 80% of your current paycheck for the first 6 months, then you really should start looking for something that resembles a job. I know people who travelled the world on 'unemployment'. If you're looking for quiet time, why don't you just skip the social obligation of 'having a job'?

Here's something else from (this part of) Europe: 'bollocks'. For a start, each country has its own rules on unemployment benefits and I've no idea where they pay 80% of your current pay. 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 ce…

It depends a lot on the country you're in.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#60

Post by mynameishere »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #12
brl wrote: post #8

Night security at some office building sounds like a dream job to me. I would do it for free and maybe I would even pay to do it since I would get more (computer) work done there than working out of my apartment.

It sounds neat, but don't underestimate the long-term dangers of sleep-deprivation. You really would need to sleep during the day. Before trying something like this, spend some time at home during work hours to make sure that you haven't been missing out on annoying neighbours and noises while you're away. I lived in a condo once, next to a construction site. The noise started at 8 am and finished at 4pm. I ran into…

I've done night work and found it easy to sleep during the day. People who have problems almost always make the same mistake: Reverting to a night-sleep schedule on the weekend.
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