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Getting Started With Part-Time Development Work?
fortapocalypse writes "I'm getting paid a good salary as a Java developer and the hours are great. It is also very stable, which means something in today's economy, especially with a family to feed. However, I'm very unmotivated both because of the work that I do, which is boring, and because the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability. I've done what I could to try to change things at work and have pretty much given up on that. I want to go out on my own, either starting my own company or just working as a contractor doing Java development, but I'm not sure of the best way to get started, and my family needs the stability of my current job. I'd really like to start out part-time at 5-15 hours a week to use it as supplemental income (which my family could really use at the moment), but I really don't know where to start. I doubt many contracting agencies would be interested in a part-time worker. What would you suggest for someone in my position?"
I'm not sure what part-time work is available in the IT industry: contracting would probably be the most representative of what you're requiring.
Failing that, try and get qualifications and see if your current employer will support you financially (training, certification, degree?). If you're improving your CV, they may be more inclined to give you different work.
ilovegeorgebush
Just don't.
What you're saying pretty much translates into 'I want to work more and get paid less.'
If that is exactly what you're looking for, then be my guest.
Otherwise... like I said, don't. If you're tired, get a vacation, for chrissake.
.. I'm very unmotivated both because of the work that I do, which is boring, and because the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability.
You've just described every job I ever had.
We're at the beginning of the Second Great Depression. If you have a job that you think will survive the depression, keep it. Even if it sucks. Ten years ago, you could have moved to a hot job at a fun dot-com in a week. Not now. Google just had a layoff. Microsoft is rumored to be laying off 17,000 people.
US manufacturing activity is now down to its lowest level since 1948. That's right, we've lost 60 years of growth. It's going to be a long recession. Japan's housing bubble popped in 1989, and twenty years later, Japan still hasn't recovered. The Nikkei index is around a quarter of its peak in the 1980s. That's what a crash in housing looks like. Japan also has a better "safety net" than the US does in the post-Reagan era.
If you're bored, code something in your spare time. Read books on dealing with dysfunctional organizations; over time, you might be able to improve the place.
All the independent work I've ever done has been because someone knew someone who knew someone. It started with a helping a friend out with some trouble they were having at their work, which lead to helping out more friends of friends, and then other businesses who heard friends of friends talking.
But trying to work a full time job and make time for my side work was sucking the life out of me. I don't like to leave work unfinished, which makes me a hell of a work horse, but only by pulling time away from every else. And once there was no time left to cut I just started sleeping less. So after only a few months I left my steady and well paying job to go solo for awhile.
If I were more motivated, I might still be trying to fly solo, but I really didn't like all the extra work. Not the extra development work, which I loved. It was all the other work. As a corporate drone I spent a lot of my time in development. Working for myself, I also had to be the salesdroid, and the accountant, and the business manager, and health care consultant, and all the rest of the hats that needed wearing. I also could never really enjoy my 'time off' since I was never sure where or when my next paycheck might be coming.
So after a few years I went back to a steady and well paying job. Which, right now, I'm pretty thankful to have. And these days I just actively work to fix some of those annoying bureaucratic problems. Which can certainly involve wearing a few of those extra hats I didn't like... but we all learn to pick and choose which battles are worth fighting. And I guess for me, it's in the corporate trenches.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
This is NOT a very good time to take risks with your employment.
Dude, he's just showing a website/service he made. He's proud of it, and it sounds like it would actually be helpful in this instance. Why call him out? Just get over it.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Part time work doesn't pay the bills unless you're getting more than about $35 an hour
Freelance PHP coders (of which I know several) can easily make $75 / hr, $125 with some experience and a decent customer base. I'd be surprised if java coders couldn't beat that quite easily. The trick is building a customer base, which starts to take care of itself after a while if you do a good job.
Rent-a-coder is a joke. Crap developers writing crap code for clients who think $200 for a full CRM is a reasonable price. Hell no.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
If software already sold itself, then sure, what a great tool, but software is hard to sell enough as it is. Heck, most software is free. Only a very few companies get our money.
Unless you have a platform like the iPhone, the internet is so abundant of generous programmers' contributions, that everything useful has already been done, done well, and made available for free. Even the big and difficult stuff like... operating systems.
So I'd say add tools for iPhone and Android sellers and build around those markets. The internet is not really a good market for software.
Just some thoughts...
.. of course I haven't got a family or an evil mortgage company to drain my income. What I did was save up enough cash to see me through three months of expenses (you might get redundancy!) and then I went freelance. Lots of time off, spend a lot of time with friends and relatives and going to music festivals, and really enjoy my work when I get it. Basically I've retired early. ;)
Sounds like you're as p****ed off with employers as I was - now I'm happy and free.
With any luck your employers will be looking to lay some people off and offering severance.
Your family? Well your wife can work and your kids can get paper rounds (if they're old enough). Why should you be the only one putting up will all the crap?
Read 4 Hour Work Week and Covey's Seven Habits - not as life changing as the authors would have you believe but do let you into a few secrets.
If you do this then I'll buy you a beer at Glastonbury this year
My company needs Java developers. We're looking to build a list of available contractors to do work over the next year as demand for our services grows. If you want to work in S. Florida, e-mail me.
I'm sure there are similar opportunities elsewhere. You just have to find them. A recruiter might be a good place to start.
Why does he have to work in south florida? Can't he work anywhere? He's writing software, not painting houses.
For software development, and a lot of other professions, we really need to get out of this location based mind-set. It's totally unnecessary. It's a waste of time commuting. It's a waste of energy commuting. It's a waste of gas, office space, the expense of computers in the office, space on public transportation, business clothes. It goes on and on. We should all be working from home.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Freelance PHP coders (of which I know several) can easily make $75 / hr, $125 with some experience and a decent customer base. I'd be surprised if java coders couldn't beat that quite easily. The trick is building a customer base, which starts to take care of itself after a while if you do a good job.
The H1s have devastated java. The only way to get $100+ doing java is if you're the architect.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
There are several things you can do to get started and there are plenty of places where you can make very good money working part-time. Here are some of the important points I've found working both as a contractor as well as an employer who hires contractors.
#1 Learn the business as well as the development.
You can be a great developer and not make money (see any of the previous "Contracting sucks" posts). Improve your networking skills and just start talking to people, be willing to fail occasionally in order to succeed.
#2 Start with online sites.
It sounds like you're not ready to make a move from your current job (see #3), so you may want to start with some online sites. I use ODesk to look for potential contractors and have considered using it for jobs. There are plenty of sites out there which help facilitate matching developer skills with company needs.
#3 Be willing to move when the time is right. :-)
Most of my clients came from full-time contracts or previous employers I had worked with. If you're good, you just need ways for people to see that and you'll never go hungry again
#4 Don't be afraid to raise your rate.
This is actually a two-way street. If you set a low rate, I assume you suck. You are also not happy b/c after a while you realize 15 hours probably *is* worth more than $150 (before taxes). If you don't know what others are charging, do some research and ask questions. Don't be a jerk, but don't be afraid of the social faux pas of asking money questions. Ask employers what they pay an average Java developer with your experience. Generally, I charge an 80% to 100% premium over a salary for hourly work (i.e., 100,000 / yr = $48/hr. $100,000 salary would instead charge an $86 - $96 hourly rate). YMMV
And finally, try to spend less time reading our posts (loosely known as "advice") and more time building your clientele! ;-)
-geis
P.S. This advice is not for developers who suck. If you suck, unsuck (read, learn, do, repeat) first.
It's time for the social conservative movement to die. Bush was your big chance and you people totally fucked everything up. You cannot make sound economic/political decisions based on a bunch of mythological crap. Your willingness to mold your religious bullshit into law causes my blood to boil. You people clamored around Palin's teenage daughter for not getting an abortion, without realizing how idiotic it was that her mother couldn't teach her to use birth control. Oh, wait, birth control is against your religion too. You thoroughly make me want to vomit until my kidneys come popping out of my throat. But go ahead, idolize your retarded kids that get pregnant at 15. Keep it up, blame the economy on sinners (oh, wait, was she married, fuck, I guess you all ain't perfect after all), rather than the fact that you keep pushing the belief that dinosaurs did not actually exist and that prayers will solve all the world's problems. Seriously, GO FUCK YOURSELF!
Small businesses are a pain in the ass even if you are your own boss. There are plenty of things to do and worry about and since you will likely be looking to more than 5-15 hours a week I would recommend taking that extra 5 hours and spending it with your kids. Infact, don't kid yourself, most clients expect a great deal of work for as little as possible. What happens when a client needs to contact you during 'normal' working hours? Your current employer won't be happy when they figure out what you are doing. I had a part time contract with a full time employer and even though the technology between the two was completely different I ended up loosing the job with the full time employer because they thought I was cutting their company. Be prepared to be overwhelmed. I couldn't imagine doing this work with a family. If you are looking for something to do then why not get a hobby or build a useful application and sell it for $30-40. How much work can you really do in 5 hours? Clients want 50 hours a week not 5!
Just my 2 cents.
What you're missing is that they can get that work done for $250 or less. I played around on RAC but I'm not going to compete with people in the Third World who'll work for $5 an hour. Unless you're willing to work for Third World wages, sites in RAC are a waste of time.
Advice: on VPS providers
What you're missing is that they can get that work done for $250 or less.
No, they can't. Not even outsourcing to (competent) people in lower-paying countries would get you close to that. But since the average person posting a job spec on sites like that thinks they've got the world's best idea but will drop it as soon as they realise they're being wildly unrealistic, it doesn't really cost anyone anything.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It's totally unnecessary. It's a waste of time commuting. It's a waste of energy commuting. It's a waste of gas, office space, the expense of computers in the office, space on public transportation, business clothes. It goes on and on. We should all be working from home.
That may sound like a nice ideal, but there are many reasons that working from home isn't (yet?) a given.
I think you underestimate the importance of being able to walk up to a colleague and work with them face-to-face. The trouble with your ideal is that "work", in this context, rarely - if ever - just means writing code: it can mean giving someone a helping hand with a bit of debugging, going over design documents, giving feedback on a demo, performing knowledge transfer, or simply taking a break and having a chat. These things needn't be as formal as they sound: I quite often offer to help just because I can hear someone else's cries of anguish, or get asked to cast an eye over something for a minute or two simply because I'm there and my opinions are valued. A lot of this stuff just wouldn't happen if we weren't sat in the same building.
Coming back to that throwaway comment regarding opinions, how do you create an accurate picture of a person's abilities - especially those which may be of use, but are not part of their job description - without spending time with them?
There are also pure practical concerns. Being able to look over someone's shoulder at their monitor/piece of paper; body language; the ability to physically show someone what you mean during moments of confusion because they're *there*.
On the other side of the coin, there are also reasons why somebody may not want to work from home. I enjoy having the option to go to lunch with my co-workers; I like knowing who people are at meetings and release parties; I don't like my one year old daughter coming over to pester me and can't move my computer out of the living room because I can't afford anywhere bigger than this crappy two-bedroom flat; VMware over a VPN sucks. I have worked from home and I don't enjoy it.
If you could honestly do your job just as well as you do it now without physical contact with any of your colleagues, you aren't doing it right, you work for a "software factory", and/or your office environment is all wrong.
In closing, I'd like to offer up the idea that perhaps this thread isn't as off-topic as it may at first seem. The whole concept of part-time development work (which, if you're still holding down a full-time job, I assume means working from home) being somehow more satisfying than full-time work is slightly alien to me: unless you're writing cookie-cutter code, so well-defined as to be rather boring to churn out, it will take the majority of those 15 hours a week simply dealing with the practicalities of getting to know the code and other developers you're working with. You really think working this way could be more organised, more accountable and less political?