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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.
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.
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.
I've tried what you've tried. I was on Rent A Coder, Moonlighter, Guru, and a few others.
First of all, with a '0' zero score, it will be extrememely difficult to get work - even if you offer your services for $1 or whatever the minimum is these days. Those sites are saturated with people. And many folks posting jobs actually have geographical restrictions: if you're not in a Third World country, you can't even bid.
Local business?
Again. Depending are on where you are matters, but here in Metro Atlanta, things are saturated. There have been a large amount of lay-offs and many folks are trying to do what you're doing out of desperation. Every Tom, Dick, Harry, Larry and Mary are in web development, support and PC repair. And contrary to the opinion here, they're not all screw-ups or mediocre - there are quite a few talented people out of work. Many of them had real jobs doing those things and got canned during economic meltdown. I constantly see signs on the side of the road from folks trying to get web design, coding, PC repair, and support work.
Retrain?
Good luck. Without paid experience it is also very hard. Folks want to talk to previous clients and see what other work you have done. And even then ... Out of desperaton, I tried putting up my own websites under different company names to use as "references" but my measely two websites werent' enough or I just sucked - I don't know because I never got feedback from people who mattered. Sure, all my friends said they looked great but apparently they weren't good enough.
I do know someone who did do well - as a graphic artist. She had a following at her old job and when she quit, the folks who liked her recommended her and when they changed jobs, they hired her - that way she didn't get into trouble for poaching people.
tl;dr Starting in this day and age as a freelancer is extremely difficult. All the folks I know who are making a living as freelancers were doing it since the 90's early '00s.
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.
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
Hi, OP here. I would also like to thank everyone for the tips and suggestions. I'm still doing my own research, and this thread has given me more to think about. I just wanted to address a few things. I know I'm not going to be a complete master at the end of 2-3 months. I was hoping that, like some other fields, you can learn a bit and then start working. Like programming scripts to automate tedious tasks, or gather info from the web, etc. I figured that I could offer something small and reasonably priced. At first, I thought about learning a piece of specialized software like ACT for real estate agents, or how to set up and write scripts for Ubot. There's just so much out there, I'm not sure where to focus on. Also, I am and will always be a full-time Mom. They come first and is the main reason I'm staying at home. But the household does need a few extra bucks a month. I'm not looking for the equivalent of a full-time job. So, thanks again for all the comments :)
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
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.
* 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