Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Money-Making Home-Based Tech Skills?
New submitter ThatGamerChick writes "I'm a stay-at-home mom, but I'd like to be a work-at-home mom. I've done a few writing gigs, but I'm not a really good writer and cannot charge the fees needed for it to be worth my time. I'm just looking for something that I can teach myself in a few months and start taking small projects and working my way up from there. I've found that PHP, HTML and CSS to be the most demanded skills on sites like Elance, but the talent pool is flooded with overseas workers and Americans with so much more experience than me. Even when I was offering writing and virtual admin services on Elance I was having a hard time against them. So I'm asking here, because I think most of you may have a good insight on this type of thing as an employer of freelancers or as the freelancer themselves." What success have you had, either working from home, or employing those who do?
There's an article in Cracked about why homemade porn tends to fail: good makeup, lighting, camera work, editing, writing of the frame story, and marketing all cost money.
Because it's a stupid question that's offensive and lacks common sense. She thinks she can learn some magical wizard skill that is not location based, but will allow her to make money without overseas competition, or people that are way more skilled.
I'd say camming is the best bet (it used to pay decent anyway).
Competing locally on WordPress/drupal websites may work too, but the marketing is going to take significant out of house time. I'd suspect one could learn to make decent websites in a couple months, sell them for $600, half week's work, but again, you'll have to seek customers locally.
Would you really want to pay anything to get PHP written by somebody that learned it in a few months?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Based on what I've seen and heard the customers you'll find on Elance, rent-a-coder and similar are the ones you want to avoid like the plague. Seriously.
Forget about learning PHP in a few months unless you want to deliver the crap that so many already are delivering (SQL injections, etc.). Also, PHP itself is not enough, you have to learn some things about Apache (web server), MySQL, etc.
Start with HTML & CSS and read some good books on design, accessibly, and usability. A (female) friend of mine started several years back with providing accessible HTML and CSS coding services and she's now successful. Be prepared for at least 3 years of hard time.
As for local: she works mostly (as far as I know) with customers overseas (UK). :-D), Europe, even Japan. While local makes it possible to visit in person and hence break the ice and maybe sell yourself easier, I don't think it's really needed for my line of work, and maybe not for web design either. Personally, I think personal conversations (skype or in person) are a gigantic waste of time; email works way better (in my case and in my opinion).
As for myself: I am a freelance Perl programmer -- type it in Google and you got me: SEO is a skill you should learn as well -- living in Mexico. I don't work local because the pay would be 6 times (or more) less and I don't speak Spanish (can understand it, though). So I have customers in the USA (yes, I am one of those curry lovers stealing your jobs
To summarize:
* forget about PHP in a few months: that's long term and requires study of PHP and at least MySQL, Apache, and several other things.
* make yourself visible on the Internet
* forget about eLance and rent-a-coder: the customers you'll get there suck and you can't compete with the others
* learn HTML, CSS, usability, accessibility and SEO: I would recommend at least 1 hour of study, 3 days a week. And don't learn
those things from "learn online" sites. It's very hard to find ones that actually know what they are talking about (more so with PHP)
get yourself 5 good books and read w3c.org
Good luck,
John
For the most part, I agree. However, I can think of three things which can be done well, from home (possibly with a little training) in the tech/industry fields with which I've seen done.
* Documentation writer. You mentioned you don't write well, but consider how poorly most documentation is written. I'm not talking about product sleeve documentation or anything like that, but more in the systems/development realm. Granted, you'd have to find an employer who is open to this non-traditional approach. This one has quite a few caveats, though: are you technically inclined? Can you read code well enough to tell what it does (having someone go through and double-check code for stupid mistakes while documenting is often useful, and doesn't necessarily take a lot of skill)?
* Video production tasks - editing, conversion, and encoding. I have roughly 20 hours of video which I need to have taken from a raw DV format, edited, and converted into H264, and posted onto a public site roughly twice a month. We've got someone who does this on the side for us, at home. The video is for archival/educational/historic purposes. The only caveat is that you'd have to be able to be in close proximity to an operation similar to this and be able to follow detailed instructions on what needs to be done.
* Medical coding/transcriptionist. I know this is a very common work-from-home job, though it requires a fair amount of relatively expensive training. It pays roughly as well as a junior level sysadmin job in many areas, I've noticed. You can work from home, usually at odd hours (doctors need their notes transcribed at all hours of the day), with a fair amount of flexibility for things like "the kids need dinner". You'd have to be able to type fairly quickly, know the coding of medications, and things like that. I'm not sure about the costs or time requirements associated with the training, however. Anywhere with a regional hospital nearby is going to need quite a few people to do this (a 100-workstation private practice I'm familiar with had 6+ doing this).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
* Medical coding/transcriptionist. I know this is a very common work-from-home job, though it requires a fair amount of relatively expensive training. It pays roughly as well as a junior level sysadmin job in many areas, I've noticed. You can work from home, usually at odd hours (doctors need their notes transcribed at all hours of the day), with a fair amount of flexibility for things like "the kids need dinner". You'd have to be able to type fairly quickly, know the coding of medications, and things like that. I'm not sure about the costs or time requirements associated with the training, however. Anywhere with a regional hospital nearby is going to need quite a few people to do this (a 100-workstation private practice I'm familiar with had 6+ doing this).
I work for a relatively small hospital in a relatively rural area and we just got through outsourcing/cutting out our transcriptionists: some of them are still working for the hospital but now employed by an off-shore company while the doctors are apparently going to be using "Dragon Medical" speech dictation software. Point is this option's future my have a shelf life.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie