Slashdot Mirror
Jobs for Moonlighting Geeks?
BreadWinner asks: "My wife and I are adopting a baby in 2003 and it's very expensive. I work for a non-profit that can't pay me what I feel I'm worth. However, I really like my job, my boss, the time off, and my co-workers. So I'm considering moonlighting. I've done private contracting, but I don't think I can do my private clients justice when I'm working full-time. So what kind of job can I find that: I can leave at the job; maximize my $/hour? Anybody done commission-based electronics sales? I'm not an uber-geek, but I'm interested in whatever you folks at Slashdot can suggest."
You could do consulting, but not for development. You could do something that takes lots of time, but not lots of hours, such as HCI (Human-computer Interaction) analasys. Consult for owners of websites and/or small application developers to perform various levels of HCI evaluation, such as analysis and testing. Some clients may want just a detail of obvious (to an HCI designer) problem areas, others will want results obtainable by user testing, and some of them will want designs.
The first suggestion, simple evaluations, can take you only a few hours at a time to do, and then another couple hours writing a report of suggestions to the client. User testing can be a bit more hairy, but the rule of thumb is for each round of user testing, you'll find all the snags with 4 test subjects, and tests should be 30 minutes or less per subject. Then you use about the same amount of time analyzing the results as the above option. The design-work can take many, many hours of designing, prototyping, and testing, but not every client wants immediate results. Some actually feel better if it takes you a couple months; they feel as if you'd been spending all that time musing over it and tweaking it.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Darkness Productions spoke the following out of his ass...
"Best Buy might be an option. The money isn't the best (about $7 to start), but they get 90% of the stuff in the store at 5% over cost. Which means a cheap plasma TV..."
If you read the actual question he was asking, he's looking opportunities that will allow him to bring in extra income, not ways of spending an additional low-wage paycheck on material goods that he doesn't necessarily need. Someone who's thinking ahead and planning on how he can leverage his knowledge and skill set into a better life for his expanding family (and kudos to him for deciding to adopt instead of 'DIYing his own.') has better things to spend his money on that expensive trend-whore gadgets.
And yes, I posted this as a response, instead of just slapping you with (-1 offtopic).
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
Here's a service that could be useful. Keep yourself abreast of the latest version of OSS packages and build a database containing what your customers have installed and what version they're using. Whenever something significant comes up, e.g. security hole patched up in product X version Y, you can send mails to your customers who are effected, keeping them up to date. You really could save your customers some money if they're not big enough to have they're own technical staff. Call it technical insurance.
This not only benefits your wallet, but it also improves your professional skills (which is a great bonus if your employer gives you flack about moonlighting).
You could advertise your pc tinkering/fixing skills in the local newspaper. Plenty of people buy computers and do not have a clue - the going rate in the UK is 10-15UKP an hour or part of, approx 15-22 USD. Some of it's going to be routine and mundane ("I can't find my Bonzi Buddy...") but you get to meet loads of people and cut loose from the house for an hour at a time and i'd suspect most customers would come back again if you were good - i've never met anybody yet who only had an hours worth of questions about their computer...
And as we're coming up to Christmas, just think of all those computers that have been bought as presents and therefore the amount of stumped newbies on the 25th. You might be busy...
By the way, good luck with the new addition to the family, too!
seany
I was considering this for a while, the only problem being
What about ebay?
You get to buy electronics gear at 5% over a national chain's cost. I bet that for certain items that leaves you with a pretty healthy margin. Shop for fairly expensive items with good margins and you should be OK.
Let's say you can pay $500 for an item that normally sells for $800. Throw it on ebay and hopefully sell it for 600 to 700 bucks. For this example let's say you make an extra $150.
If you're only working at BB 10 hours a week, you just made an extra fifteen bucks an hour. Add on the original $7 per hour and you're looking at a gross of over $20 bucks an hour for the week. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Round here, $20/hour isn't all that great. However, in some areas, you could cover your mortgage doing this. There are better paying opportunities I'm sure, but this one comes with very little stress and a flexible schedule.
I work security at a night club on Friday and Saturday nights.
I have to tell you, it is a lot of fun. In a way it is like being able to live out the BOFH fantasy. I work at a pretty swanky place, and I get no end of catharsis through getting in the faces of executive-types.
I guess what I am saying is that variety is the spice of life. It is great that you are doing something that you enjoy doing during the day, but there might be something else you can do that you'd like just as much at night.
Good luck!
-Peter
Problem is that the big chains actually hire people to track this kind of stuff down. I used to work at Circuit City and there were people who got caught selling car audio equipment online through ebay, etc. Not a good thing to get caught.
You'd be amazed at the markup of car audio and any type of cable, like monster... >200% sometimes. If you're smart, you could get away with though and have a nice little profit. The assistant manager paid for a Ford Explorer this way.