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?
The cheaper internet competitors from other places cannot enter this market.
Lots of software companies will either hire you on staff or contract with you as a freelancer to do remote quality assurance on their products.
You can pitch your writing & communication skills as an asset here. Instead of saying: this doesn't work, you can write reasonable, reproducible, clear defect and quality reports.
If you are interested in learning a web development language, use that skills to work on a idea for your own sites. When I started learning web development, I created a small on-line tool that people can use. Every time I learned a new language, I've re-written the web app in that particular language as an exercise. So my little webapp went from Perl, PHP, Python WSGI to the current Python Django. Now after a few years, I'm getting 1.5K visitors a day and earning about $300 a month for doing nothing. So instead of working for someone else at $100 per project, I starting on some new ideas and seeing if I can earn more recurring income while sipping on a beer. The only hard part is finding the idea to work on.
Pay particular attention to zaydana's recommendation to do a significant pet project. Tangible, proven skills even in an otherwise toy problem are one aspect of breaking into the software business, no matter where you ultimately work.
Conversely, if one doesn't have the personal inclination or passion to actually come up with such a project, one perhaps should consider something other than a life in software.
Why is it that just about every time a women posts something on the internet someone has to immediately turn the topic to sex???
What other people think of me is none of my business
I guess porn was mentioned here because there are actually no well paying work-from-home jobs that you can get in 2-3 months. If it can be done from home, it can be done from India as well.
Yeah, that's why there are few women who post here, and even fewer who identify that they are women. The frat club atmosphere needs to change, and we need to be welcoming to women geeks here.