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Growth Job Sector: Freelance Technical Support
An anonymous reader wrotes: "Over at World New York, they've posted excellent advice to the geek masses: If you're out of work and know how to use a computer, you can make a killing doing freelance technical support." Update: 07/25 20:00 GMT by M : The author has asked that we link to the article on homepage.mac.com due to server overload. :)
It's too much of a liability. Trust me, I know. I almost got sued because some ladies drive physically crashed after I worked on her Windowz problems (spyware locking up PC). So even if you have them sign a before and after contract, just the rigamaroll of having to go through all that is a pain in the ass. No thank you, I would have to be incorporated with a few other people. This is NOT something you want to do by yourself.
Life is not for the lazy.
That market is saturated pretty bad if you ask me.
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
That's how I got my current job ~2 years ago. Configuring 2 Cisco PIX firewalls on a contract basis. Now I'm full time and love it.
Trolling is a art,
I would see signs/ads, everywhere (literally), begging to have people hire them at prices that reached into the hundreds per hour. I'm a simple guy, without too many expenses, I buy a ton of games, and for me, $20 dollars an hour was great. I got to choose my own hours, and make myself profitable.
As for the "idiots to techs" ratio question, some people obviously haven't worked in the tech field [long enough]. Until the day they make a computer completely crash/idiot-proof, there will always be a need for a technician.
My two cents...
Technical support is a draining experience. I worked in techsupport for a while. The company I worked for had a 110% turn-over rate for employees. If they needed 20 people to keep the call-floor running, they would hire 22 people every quarter to keep up with the amount of quitting that happened: It's that miserable listening/talking-to people who are predisposed to hate everything related to computers (including you).
You can make a killing in tech support -- assuming you don't kill yourself before your first paycheck.
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
With so many thousands of fellow geeks out of work already for the last couple of years, this market is already saturated.
Besides, people aren't willing to pay the amount of money it takes to take care of stoopid Windoze problems- a reload on an average system can take 4-6 hours (with backups, new drivers, etc.)
Hard to get more than a couple systems a day through, then you've got to figure on all the time and energy spent on trying to get clients.
I'm making more money (sadly enough) as a convenience store manager than as a geek nowadays.
And now, as well, with even programming jobs being shopped overseas, the market for geek skills is even tougher.
Changing careers may be a better option than chasing after elusive (and non-existant) tech money.
peace,
r.
Aiieee! Death from above!
-
"No one in this world
... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. "
- H.L. MenckenRemember, this is the general public that doesn't understand why a monopoly in general-use operating systems is a Bad Thing (tm). Yeah, that's right... I had to throw some anti-Microsoft sentiment into this, so sue me.
--Mid
Im sure the majority of /. readers have done something like this, but the difference is that my spare wanderings supply the *majority* of my income. Simply by bringing up computers, or speaking to people at bars of cool technologies, ive found myself doing work for a reasonably large crowd. Once you've done work for someone, they almost ALWAYS have a friend that needs something, and that friend has a friend, and so forth. While its not the most stable work in the world, i always seem to do alright. (I would put it on par with waiting tables, the numbers always seem to end up partially in your favor). The best part? You can charge $50/hour showing some nitwit how to install kazaa, and hes all the happier. And they love you :)
While I'm not sure suing you is a viable business plan, I have been wondering what the geek world thought of starting a home computer leasing program where regular users would lease a computer (running GNU/Linux, of course) from my (as yet hypothetical) business for a regular monthly fee. In addition to low initial costs for the users, minimal configuration computer is free with a 12 month contract kinda thing, I would think knowing that someone out there was obligated to help with tech support would be very comforting. Basically take how the typical cell phone plan works and apply that to GNU/Linux system leasing and service support. Would it work?
I do not have a signature
From an actual call from my wife and later me (both engineers):
Wife: Our channels went out during a storm and we're only getting about half of them now.
Tech: Turn off your receiver, pull out the SmartCard, wait 10 seconds, reinsert it and turn it on.
Wife: I already did that, it didn't work.
Tech: It's probably the cabling.
Wife: How? We're getting half the channels perfectly clear. In fact, it's only the even transponder channels that aren't working.
Tech: According to my database, it's probably the cables. Do you know if you have RG6 cables?
Wife: I don't know, my husband installed it.
Tech: Have your husband call us back when he gets home.
When I got home, I called. While on hold for about 15 minutes, I surfed through the onscreen setup and came to a page that listed satellite and transponders. Everything was X'ed out except one satellite was listed "Transponders: Odd". I ran the "Check Switch" option and it updated with two satellites and both odd and even transponders. Everything worked fine.
What kind of moron, or database, thinks the cables are the problem when half the channels are perfect? Dumbasses! They don't even know their own system setup or even basic electronics debugging.
Mod me down as off-topic, but I think this post is relevant to the nature of this thread. These forums are all doom and gloom these days. Is all of /.'s reader base unemployed? I guess this is what I get for reading in the middle of the work day, of course the only posters would be people who are out of work, or in school. ALL IT IS GOING OVERSEAS! NO GEEKS CAN MAKE MONEY! I'm not buying any of it. The numbers of returns for tech job searches on the likes of monster.com in the tech sector have never been higher than they are now. And I'm seeing jr. level programming positions advertising 60-70k/year. I'm in school and my programming internships (with 2 large companies) have paid better than what a lot of people are saying the average full-time salary is these days. Both companies have asked me to return after I graduate for full time positions starting at nice comfortable salaries. I'm no super genius either, I'm a good programmer who works hard. And it's not location, because I've worked in 3 states already. I dunno, maybe I'm young and stupid and not seeing the big picture.