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If you can learn to compose well-written proposals and stay relatively positive, you can always do contracting (assuming you have skills that are in demand). Take a look at Guru.com. You'll be bidding against third world countries, but you wouldn't want the sort of employer that would hire them anyway, and there are ones looking for quality over cost.

Try moving to web development. PHP is a very easy move from C (it's basically weakly-typed C without pointers), and if that turns you off, Python and Ruby shouldn't be that much more difficult to learn. You could also try contracting; there are many sites that probably still have quite a few gigs for C such as Guru, and you can sidestep the whole ageism thing since they usually won't even see your face. In any case, good luck with your job search.

An interesting discussion has been going on about this on Guru.com, a freelance networking site. At least with sites like Guru, you can do well (I've gotten multiple returning clients at a reasonable rate), but you do end up with idiots posting projects who believe they can get work for free.

Inevitably they get the quality they pay for.

Guru.com is the best freelancing site I've seen so far. They seem to genuinely respect both sides of the equation, the clients and the freelancers. Compare that to, say, Elance, which seems to treat us like interchangeable cogs. And the built-in escrow is also very nice.

Brush up on your English. A well-written bid makes you stand out among the rest, especially when the rest come from east Europe, for example. This isn't to say that all businesses there are bad, but some most definitely lack decent writing skills, and if your bid is easier to read, it makes you look more professional, and thus makes the client more likely to choose you.

Bill by the hour on all but the smallest projects until you are actually running a business where it's more than just yourself and you have an idea of how much things will end up costing in the long run. Legitimate companies won't take this as a bad thing if you provide an estimate at the same time.

Build payment times into your contract. If at all possible, get all your pay up front in escrow, but if that's not possible, make sure you state something like Net 30 days as your payment terms in the initial contract. If not, you could get shafted really easily when a client takes three months to pay you.

Encourage repeat business. Get into a discussion with your clients about their business, and suggest areas where you could help them achieve their aims. A versatile web developer can do many things for a business.

Place what you'll do into the contract. I don't think you need a lawyer like some of the sibling posts here as long as you're specific. Scope creep can really, really suck if you let it happen.

Oh, and if you happen to need any help with PHP development, give me a shout. ;^)

This is what you do... You start your own consulting business and do freelance work in the evenings and weekends as a side job. You get a couple of books in the language you need/want to know, and you start your own little projects to support your business (like a time tracking app, or a billing application, etc...). So now you have a business, language experience, an application, and business experience under your built while still working your day job. Now you goto freelance websites looking for small jobs and gradually grow to larger ones.

After a year or two of this, you'll have a lot of diverse experience in a wide range of areas that you can legitimately add to your resume.

I say this because this is exactly what I did... and I went from a software engineer to the director of the IT department in 14 months because of my independent work and foundation I made for myself.

Just don't call your company something stupid like Jackhole Studios...

No.

You're missing the point.

I'm saying he shouldn't omit his tech support background. I don't think that's the problem that's preventing him from being hired.

I think he should start doing some individual gigs while looking for a job. Get some feedback from those companies for whom he's doing projects. Often they'll be able to provide references that he can then put on his resume.

But omitting the one job you've had? Bad news, especially if you can't explain away the two years in the meantime between college and now.

If I couldn't find anyone with work experience, I would likely hire him as he at least has the degree. But even in IT, my guess is that there would be many people with at least some relevant experience and the degree, and I'd hire those people first, likely to the exclusion of the OP.

It's not personal, it's just business, as they say.

PS: If you're looking for these gigs I mentioned, try Guru.com. They don't talk down to you like a lot of other freelancing sites (*cough*Elance*cough*) and actually allow you to bid market rates and still get hired to do projects. Often (almost always?), if you do a good job for one company, they'll have more work for you as well, so it can actually let you make as much or more than a normal job, and it gives you experience running a business in the meantime. If you do particularly well, you can bypass the whole getting a job thing altogether, hire some developers of your own, and make way more than you would with a normal job.

as I cannot read your resume. I also don't have your references.

Sometimes to get a good IT job you need experience in that area, it is an IT Catch-22.

For example I worked on help desks and computer repair shops before I became a programmer. What helped me was getting a job in the college computer lab and since I was taking classes in programming, they had me do some programming projects for them.

Maybe what you need to do is some Guru work and some short term IT contracts. You also could join an open source programming project and start out documenting code and work your way to a programmer. But being a free lancer will get your foot in the door of a company quicker than an OSS project.

If you have help desk skills you can easily turn it into computer repair and training skills. Do consulting with friends and family for a small fee and put on your resume a DBA (Doing Business As) a company name that you will found later. Make sure you get some good references from those jobs.

Don't lie on your resume, they will spot that and disqualify you if they think you lied. Be truthful but show them that you are willing to learn new skills and can undergo training, and maybe you need to get a certificate or associates degree from a community college to complement your other degree to specialize in some field. For example if you want to work for lawyers get a legal assistant degree, if you want to enter data get a data entry degree, if you want to develop web sites get a web development certificate. Community college does not cost as much as a four year or higher college and it will help you specialize in some area.

What you really need is a career coach or some HR services company or recruiter to go over your options. Asking Slashdot might not work as you are asking people who might be competing with you for those IT jobs and they might give you a wrong answer or have problems finding work and give you what worked for them but it doesn't fit your resume.

I'll second a lot of this from my experiences with guru.com. For example, from one $300 project I ended up with a $30k+ followup project. For those of us without big teams of programmers behind us, it doesn't take many larger projects like that to keep us busy.

However, the signal to noise ratio of most of these sites seems to be high enough that once I get busy, I don't bother bidding any more. I do still very occasionally get people contacting me from guru.com though, because I have a good rating from when I did use it. If I ever have time, I'll go back and maybe cherry pick some of the better projects to bid on, but of course I'd rather not have the time to do that...

I'd check out guru.com. It's a good site for finding programming jobs of all sizes and in all fields. I've taken several jobs from the site while in between jobs and on the side.

A few months ago I took a good look around to see what was available for this sort of thing, and the best I found was "IT Moonlighter", which has changed its name to http://www.guru.com/

The thing that struck me most was that it was well thought out; the way you can register a profile, search for work packages, and the escrow service to get paid - particularly valuable to me as I am in the UK and the things I was looking for were mainly in the USA.

Having said all that, my day job suddenly got better and I only ended up applying for a few very interested jobs but they picked people who were clearly happy with a very low wage!

I would not be surprised if these business-2-programmer direct sites attract a lot of freelance Indian programmers.

So lemme get this straight...

You're excited about what's possible if you could find the right people? ... and they'd work for you?

...and you're frustrated you can't find available visionaries?

You are describing nothing special, unique or unusual. You have money, experience and ideas... and you want very talented people to help you execute those ideas.

Join. The. Crowd.

And since you know that ideas are fucking worthless, here's some links to help you execute, IE, find some talent....

Search google for headhunters

Guru

Elance

Idea: Purchase ads in various publications likely to be read by people you want.

Good luck. I hope you can find who you're looking for. (and by that I mean, "It's hard to find good help."

Surf the net for indie game houses. A lot of them post 'how to be an indie developer' pages, and a lot of indie developers outsource their art and sound development to russia, romania, india, pakistan, vietnam, guatemala, etc.

Post a project on rentacoder or guru and the 'low end' artists from those countries will come to you to bid on your project in droves. Pennies on the dollar, my friend.

Did find this:

"I don't call this copying piracy, because that is a propaganda word. I don't think it is wrong to copy and share information. Governments can pass laws against it, but that does not make it wrong, just illegal." -RMS from here

Guru.com has something else to say. They say if you are not an employee, you keep the copyright to the code. The people who pay you to develop it are granted a nonexclusive right to use what you've created. The fact that they get something that accomplishes their goal is their monetary investment coming back to them. Not the right to sell and resell the code to make millions while paying you a few thousand.

That's just what guru.com says, and it is always best to have everything in writing, and it is always best to consult a lawyer, not a site like guru.com (or even slashdot.org, although we all love pointing out this fact every time this question arises over and over!)

Something like
http://elance.com
or
http://guru.com
?

Guru.com
Techrepublic.Com

I'm giving you top links rather than deep ones because these sites have a LOT of other good info which it would behoove you to run across on your way to finding them. :)

I found her PDF on how to Market Your Consulting Services very helpful in my own practice - and she's got a lot of tips that I don't mention on my own marketing tips page above (while I have some she doesn't mention).

I've also found that Janet has been quite helpful and responsive in answering the occasional questions I've emailed to her.

In general, I prefer the resume sites which do not require a fee for the end client to search and get meaningful contact information from. Some of these require a small but very reasonable fee from the consultant, some are supported by advertising.

You'll probably find as I do that the sites that require the client to pay a few are frequented mostly by headhunters, and they also often don't allow search engines to index them, so your clients won't find you.

Other sites I recommend are The Software Contractor's Guild and Guru.com - know any others?

Finally, read alt.computer.consultants.moderated - but be sure to read the moderated newsgroup, the unmoderated one has gone all to hell.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Check out allfreelance.com and especially eLance.com and guru.com. There is tons of contract programmer work out there.

When switching to contracting you get to choose a tradeoff between responsibility and reward (extra flexibility, diversity, profit). The more responsibility you take on, the better the reward. Some of the extra skills that are desirable in freelancers are: software project management, marketing yourself, learning about software intellectual property and contract law, communication skills, business skills, and ancillary skill sets (e.g. web design, system administration, marketing). Freelancers with these skills are worth more, can pick from larger and broader contracts, and have more control over how they work (e.g. telecommuting).

A lot of freelancers get started by leaving their job and working for that company on a contract basis until they start bringing in outside work. Joining a consulting company is a good option in that you can focus on programming and you get to work with like-minded people. (The down side is that you rarely get to pick what you work on and you only get half of what the client is paying for you.)

Personally, I took the road less travelled. A year and a half ago I had just about given up on freelancing when I landed a large contract developing the back end for Worldisround.com. I work 30 hours a week from home and since I am the only techie I have full control/responsibility over the site implementation and administration. The contract has a 'startup' feel to it, without the additional risk or long hours. The contract has been very challenging and rewarding in every way.

For more information on freelancing, I highly recommend checking out Guru.com. I don't know how many job connections Guru has been making but their articles are invaluable. It is also helpful to go through the process of creating a Guru profile and comparing your profile with others' as a sort of introduction to self-marketing. A recent Guru.com article, Independence Day, might be a good place to get started.

When switching to contracting you get to choose a tradeoff between responsibility and reward (extra flexibility, diversity, profit). The more responsibility you take on, the better the reward. Some of the extra skills that are desirable in freelancers are: software project management, marketing yourself, learning about software intellectual property and contract law, communication skills, business skills, and ancillary skill sets (e.g. web design, system administration, marketing). Freelancers with these skills are worth more, can pick from larger and broader contracts, and have more control over how they work (e.g. telecommuting).

A lot of freelancers get started by leaving their job and working for that company on a contract basis until they start bringing in outside work. Joining a consulting company is a good option in that you can focus on programming and you get to work with like-minded people. (The down side is that you rarely get to pick what you work on and you only get half of what the client is paying for you.)

Personally, I took the road less travelled. A year and a half ago I had just about given up on freelancing when I landed a large contract developing the back end for Worldisround.com. I work 30 hours a week from home and since I am the only techie I have full control/responsibility over the site implementation and administration. The contract has a 'startup' feel to it, without the additional risk or long hours. The contract has been very challenging and rewarding in every way.

For more information on freelancing, I highly recommend checking out Guru.com. I don't know how many job connections Guru has been making but their articles are invaluable. It is also helpful to go through the process of creating a Guru profile and comparing your profile with others' as a sort of introduction to self-marketing. A recent Guru.com article, Independence Day, might be a good place to get started.