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What Do People in the IT Field Do for Side Jobs?
Flagg0204 asks: "Growing up in a primarily white collar household I wasn't exposed to 'side-jobs' until I met my girlfriend whose family was mostly blue collar. This got me to thinking. What do people in the IT field do for side jobs? Electricians, plumbers, HVAC, mechanic, these fields have many opportunities for a little extra cash on the side. What are some IT/IS side jobs that Slashdot readers do for extra money?"
it depends what kind of IT skills you have.
i am working for few online games like iclod and xmoo, they generate a bit of incomes and open up opportunities for other jobs.
the advantage is i don't need to be there physically to carry out works, but with that advantage, i also get the disadvantage of having thousand of similarly skilled people fighting for the same work.
i believe hardware-IT may have more opportunities. just post an ads on local newspaper to "Fix Your Computer Problems At Home" and there bound to be some elderly people who would rather get a local service from a local person at home.
Play iCLOD
Because the company I work for owns everything I think and do, according to my employment agreement. Nothing is considered "side-work."
--Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
and spam from people in the neighborhood.
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I have started my own IT consulting business for home PC users. I advertise locally in the neighbor hood and work nights and weekends.
I find that it's a very fun, and profitable, hobby to have on the side. I'm playing enough now that I do consider it a side job... in fact, I make a better hourly wage than at my real job! The best part about it is, I can play whenever I have a spare hour or two... I don't have to schedule it in.
I've started getting all of my other friends in IT hooked on it as well :)
I spend my spare time writing open source software.
I proofread books, both treeware and e-books for three different publishers, including doing scan-and-proof of old books for electronic republication. It's a great way to relax and put my computer skills to use without having to dive into the details of the bits-and-bytes after hours.
Many universities cater to people who work a 9-5 ...
I hope that you see the obvious side job for the white collar worker: teach an evening course at the local community college. Of course, you'll be making less per hour than the janitor, but it is white collar.
See what I've been reading.
I preach for money. (many churches look to seminary students or former seminary student to do fill in preaching - they call it pulpit supply - when a pastor is on vacation) I've been tempted to put together a business card with that side job on it, "Serving God and mammon since 1997." Also, I work in a children's home. The overnight shift at the home allows me to work online during downtime. And then sometimes I do the freelance gig too. Who doesn't?
yes. that's all I'm going to say in all comments from now on.
By day I work for IBM as an engineer. By night, I'm an investigator for my wife's private investigations company http://www.travisinvestigations.com/ . I get to help spy on cheating wives and husbands, catch people in insurance fraud and other such things. Probably the part I enjoy the most is when I get to make use of new electronic tools like covert GPS tracking devices etc... What I dislike are the long nights surveiling some cheating spouse or watching someone to see if they are poor parents in custody cases. Of course I also take care of the company computers (mostly Macs believe it or not).
The speaker was, for the first time in his pathetic life, speechless. No one had ever challenged him on the issue of Tibet.
n my experience, the nature of IT work tends to rule out being able to hold down a side job. The biggest obstacle is the fact that almost all IT work (or salaried work in general, really) tends to have at least one or two "crunch times" per year where you have to work weird hours.
I think this is spot on. A lot of IT jobs are salaried, and there is a huge difference between hourly wages and salary. Waged employment usually has a very fixed set of hours you are expected to work, and any work outside of that is overtime and more expensive for the employer, so it's discouraged. You are being paid for a fixed set of hours, so time outside that is your own, allowing for work on the side. On the other hand salaried work is essentially paying you to "get the job done" regardless of hours. They're paying you up front for as much of your time as it takes. Side jobs just don't come into it.
Having worked both waged (as a baker) and salaried (as a research mathematician) jobs, that's exactly how it generally worked for me. Both have their advantages, and side jobs is simply one of the advantages of waged employment.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
The moment they know you're in I.T. everyone in your family, and all your mother's friends, want you to fix their PCs
I had to give up my family and friend side job of building them computers. I now reference them to the small business section of www.dell.com (much better deals then the regular home section) and www.slickdeals.net for references to Dell SB deals. I've had enough of giving out lifetime free tech support. I traveled to my home town for Thanksgiving and spent about 10 hours of my long weekend fixing computers for friends and family. Sure, I will still help them with spyware and such but I am now the second phone call after Dell for those I've pointed in that direction and not the first. Sorry for the diehard white box builders but I had to get out. Not worth it to me.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
One side job that doesn't have the problem of clashing with office hours is writing. Over the past few years, I have co-authored two O'Reilly books: "SSH, The Secure Shell (The Definitive Guide)" and "The Linux Security Cookbook." In addition to a substantial second income, I have had several follow-on writing and consulting opportunities (white papers, articles, etc.). Of course, there's the question of whether you want to spend even more time sitting in front of a computer in your off hours...
While it's obvious the original poster seemed more interested in IT-only side jobs, I think non-IT side jobs are worth a mention. I worked in room service in Las Vegas for a few years after college to help pay off my IT schooling. I finished paying it off just this last September so I promptly gave my two weeks notice.
Though honestly I do really miss it at times. My job is computers, my hobby is computers, it was nice to make some cash and spend my time on something other than sitting in front of a computer.
And up until my most recent IT job, I was making far more money doing room service.
"Excellence in Mediocrity"
I don't really have a side job. Instead, I go out and help build houses for Habitat for Humanity. I'm a computer nerd by trade but I'm a carpenter by heart. I love to build things and building for those who otherwise would never own a home is very rewarding. I also do the occasional church raising out in the rural areas.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Maybe he should. When I get home, I know that I loathe opening up a programming environment. I've thought about some various side projects and stuff, but I never follow through on them. The reason is that I get paid to program. I think it's fun, but I don't find recreation in it.
I also have quite a bit of IT knowledge: fixing up computers, abolishing ad-ware, fixing user accounts, training, getting things to "work..." I hate it when my aunt says to me, "Mike, I've got a problem with my computer. My scanner..." First off, I dislike the headache I get when trying to fix things, when I could be doing something fun (i.e. playing pool). Second, I hate that I feel an obligation to work because she's my aunt.
A good side job is what I had a couple of years ago. I was a barista in a coffee shop. I could relax, talk to the customers, shoot the breeze with my co-workers, and generally not think about computers at all. I came home tired, but happy. I was refreshed in the morning as well.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
I trade shares for hobby and at the current rate that hobby will pay enough for me to quit by high paying day job (senior computer systems engineer in a defense company) in 3-5 years (I've been doing it for 2 years). This takes aabout an hour a week (value investing, not day trading).
I also went back to study phsychology and ended up as a qualified counsellor where a see a couple of clients a week to help keep me in touch with real humans. I also do some tutoring work for counselling students (which is all weekend and evenings). This takes a few hours a week plus 8-16 hours when I'm tutoring.
I write written scripts (have done two cartoon episodes for The Toons: Where are they now?) and am working on a self help book and a novel. Not to make money but because I like writing. This is usually only a 1-2 hrs a week (averaged over a year)
Because my day job in IT is so senior I don't get to do interesting technical/creative stuff I do little PC setup jobs for friends and write php/mysql apps for friends businesses (currently doing a 1.5TB image management and workflow system). This is about 10hrs a week at the moment.
I'm also developing some self help workshops which I hope to start running early next year. This takes 2-3 hrs a week (at the moment).
This is on top of my 50hr a week job, a wife and 4 children. I do as much extra stuff as I can after everyone else is in bed (eg 10pm onwards) and sleep about 5 hrs a night (with the occassional 10hr night to catch up).
The idea is to develop paying work that has a very high hourly rate so I can work less hours. The share trading is best, earning several hundred dollars an hour and in future for the same effort this will increase as profits are simpy reinvested and not consumed. Secondly the counselling is experience towards doing the workshops, where you can charge 30 ppl $200 for a weekend workshop (16hrs) to give a similar hourly rate (minus overheads and prep time).
Currently all this augments my income by about 30% (up from 10% last year) so I'm on track to retire within 5 years.
I also used to play in a band (did 3 albums) which was an aweful lot of fun but an aweful waste of time. Once kids came along that something had to give!
The best way to relax is playing with the kids, programming and writing (for me at least).
I still toss around ideas of high tech startups (I had one in the late 90s with angel funding but we never got to the big venture capital stage) but nothing is as assured as 1) value investing with shares, and 2) a 9-5 job.
If money and creating spare time weren't a concern I would probably just counsel people and write, but I wouldn't make a good living out of it (well, I might but it's unlikely - I'm not abuot to plan on an improbably income stream when I have a mortgage and kids!).
pithy comment
I used to use a single box for everything at home. Pentium 133, with 128MB of ram. It was my jukebox, firewall, mailserver, database server, web server, etc. Worked fine, but I didn't like having a single point of failure.
These days, that box *was* my mail server (just now replaced it with a P2 550), and I have a separate firewall, and 'everything else' server (PIII ... forget the speed). The 'everything else' box is hooked to the tv, and has web browsing, Xine, Xmms, and such. (I'm too lazy to build a real mythtv box :) In addition it is doing dhcp, mysql, apache, etc.
Right now, I am using a P75 with 16MB of ram as a smoothwall firewall (that will be the P133's new function), and of course the other two servers I mentioned.
So, yeah, I know what you mean about older hardware. It's great being able to use it. Heck the stuff I have is way overpowered for the amount of work it has to do (watching videos being the exception).
I also own a Toshiba Libretto...now that thing is 'low power'. I have it overclocked to 266MHz, and it can play Mpeg-1 videos pretty well. It runs firefox respectably too. The real bottlenecks seem to be the non-DMA drive in it, and the 64MByte memory limit. But it is a great little box to use as a car jukebox, wireless stumbler, photo repository, and browser when I need it. I put a 20Gig drive in it, and partitioned the LVM so that I can still hibernate it (the bios dumps hibernation right at the 4 Gig mark).
My girlfriend's dad is a highly skilled plumber - he was hired at the nuclear power plant for some special work there. He definitely knows what he's doing.
Nonetheless, when the pipes freeze or a toilet clogs, he, without fail, always calls someone else to do it.
I'm a western man living in Beijing. Westerners are often used here as foreign experts in TV commercials to lend some additional semblance of credibility to the product pitch. I have played a doctor, an Australian scientist, and suit & tie businessmen. Products have included breast enlargement kits, hi-tech underwear, and chinese herbal medicine (the Strong Bones Particles of Six Flavors). Usually I just have to mouth some words because they'll do a voiceover in Chinese later, but occasionally I have to speak - and translate very bad English into something a real person might actually say. Its not very lucrative but it is diverting.
In my Sociology 101 book I found some interesting facts.
When they are at home, blue collar workers don't do anything. They usually watch TV and do small tasks. Thats because their work is so physically hard that they are exhausted when they arrive at home.
White collar workers when at home usually do some hobby unrelated to their actual work. They do some sport or any other hobby.
Managers (or the upper class) usually do the same job when they come home. In a way they do the same job the whole day. That is because their work is not physically demanding so they can work the whole day.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.