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Is Finding Part Time Work In IT Unrealistic?
I like my current job writes "Having worked full-time in IT for the past 12 years, I would really like to work less and focus on other goals and priorities in my life. I asked my current employer and was shot down. It seems like everyone I know in IT works full-time except for entry-level help desk staff. Striking out on my own seems to be the only way to control the ball and chain around my ankle. However, my experience with independent consulting is a 'feast or famine' situation, with work coming all at once, thus making part-time impossible, or the other extreme (which is even more likely). Is part-time work a pipe dream in IT? Maybe a career in toilet cleaning is calling me."
I've seen or heard so many ridiculous demands on IT personnel and their off time that it pretty much showed me that I don't want to work in the industry. The management tends to lean HARD on the person with the most knowledge.
For example, I was once pulling a Sunday watch and one of our LAN's went down, and considering it was a LAN that is hardly used I reasoned that if I couldn't solve the problem we would get to it in the morning when the senior administrator came into work. My boss tells me to call him into work, knowing full well he was enjoying one of his few days off with his girlfriend, and was several hundred miles away at Disneyland - not to mention he lives about 60 miles from work. Understandably, he didn't pick up his phone and my boss decided to have me call him every five minutes until he picked up, which turned into me calling every five minutes to remind him not to pick up his phone. I continued to troubleshoot and traced the problem to the router and my boss says:
"Oh, I know what to do." and hard reboots the modem, problem solved...
On a more helpful note, I know two people who's skills allow them to make money when they need it, and they otherwise do what they want for extended periods of time. One is a graphic designer who will seek out commissions, and spends his free time making music and performing live, hardware hacking, and travelling. The other is an engineer who started out with a PCI-based encryption card, sold it to the NSA(IIRC), and does similar things when he needs work. He spends his free time traveling, usually finding his way into some kind of shenanigans and other tomfoolery, even being told not to return to certain countries only to fly his plane back into them covertly.
Sounds like kick ass lives to me.
Usa is a small town in Japan. Or are you not old enough to remember that?