Ask HN: How can a technical person trade work for money without a full-time job? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can a technical person trade work for money without a full-time job?

6 pointsinefficientm9 comments

Many companies are willing to pay me a high salary, but they all require a tedious interview process and a commitment to spend every daylight hour working exclusively for them.

Is there any way to trade programming work for money in a way that doesn't suck? I would happily take less money for a more pleasurable way of working.

If contracting is the best answer, is there any way of finding clients that isn't painful and time-consuming?

Thanks HN.

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Tutoring generally works well, especially if you've got formal qualification (and even more so if it's in Math).

Past that, see what you can negotiate for in exchange for a lower salary. Maybe it's three months of paid vacation per year, or a four (or three) day work-week, or something along those lines.

Remote work might solve some of your problems as well.

When you are hired by a company for your technical expertise, it isn't your technical expertise alone that makes you valuable to the company. It is also your commitment to leveraging your expertise and problem-solving acumen to helping the company/organization accomplish its mission.

Being a contractor is even worse, because it is understood that you don't really care about the organization's mission so you're work is evaluated at a higher bar than everyone else's.

All-in-all technical expertise alone doesn't actually count for much in this world, unless you use it to make other peoples' lives easier in some way.

I just wanted to chime in and say that I have exactly the same problem. I'm working on my own software project, and don't want to go to work full-time. It's my dream to turn my project into a little business that will support me. I've worked on it for a couple of years and I still can't figure out how to make that happen.

Based on prior experience, I could devote a few months to interviewing (which we agree is no fun!) and find a full-time job with a good salary and benefits. That would also lock me in to working all the time, with a couple of weeks of vacation per year. If I pushed it, maybe I could get 1 month of vacation.

The salary associated with a full-time job is very attractive, but far more than I need at this point in life.

A few years ago, I found contract work using craigslist. I've been able to generate about $2K/year on that (Boston area is not good for craigslist tech gigs). Other than that, I've found it impossible to make the ~ $20K/year that I need for my living expenses.

I wish I could advise you. I've heard you can make a low-stress "lifestyle business" that requires moderate work, but I have yet to figure out one that works. For example, the "retire early extreme" guy reported that he spent 4 hours per week typesetting articles in LaTex - http://earlyretirementextreme.com/my-4-hour-work-week.html I could do this! But I've never seen work like this offered. I've looked for similar opportunities (mostly on craigslist) but never saw anything like that.

I've heard you can work on open-source projects and find nice contracts that way. I'm sure it happens, but does it happen reliably enough to just pick some OSS project, start working, and wait for clients to call? I don't have the time put a lot of work into a project, and then after months find it does not lead to contract work. If you have time to burn like this, you may want to try it.

There are people here at hacker news who sell ebooks and info services and seem to do very well. But for every one who is successful, I suspect there are tens or hundreds of others who did poorly. So, it's something you can try... but like OSS work, it seems to have a high risk of failure.

The usual response for getting contract work seems to be to "network". I have a very small network of people that I know and trust. This network has helped me find FT work in the past, but it has never generated contract work.

I wish I could be more positive, sorry!

By coincidence I just did a couple of CNC cutting gigs. It just came out of nowhere. It's not programming but still interesting and really refreshing since it's tangible. You can learn simple stuff quickly.

I have to disappoint you. Finding clients is always time-consuming. Not really painful but sometimes can be hard and you feel like there are 1m thick steel walls everywhere.

Did you go into the CNC gigs with some experience, or were you brand new to it?

Was and still am a complete newbie. Over coffee a friend told me they got some new tooling (tool on the CNC table - vacuum holding it down) and they needed someone quickly to set it up. I just grabbed the opportunity not knowing what I was getting myself into. Read machine manual and went on to read about G-code. In 48 hours I was able to produce working G-code and off we went cutting. Shorty after I landed another simple gig and now the third is around the corner.

Mind you this is simple, practically 2D cutting process.

I would target employment agencies providing workforce for project companies. Look at the main players active in your field. This would give you the flexibility to work part time and/or work from home for a defined period of time. This would allow you to avoid the client acquisition job.

Finding clients in literally anything is painful.

That's what interviewing is, selling yourself to a client.

Even more, contracting is primarily about finding clients and getting paid, not the technical work.

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