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If You Want To Code From Home, Learn JavaScript
itwbennett writes "Earlier this month, remote-work cheerleader and Basecamp developer 37signals launched a job board called WeWorkRemotely.com that is, you guessed it, devoted to telecommuting jobs. At present there are only a couple hundred jobs listed on the site, so you'll still have to use other job boards as well. (Dice, SimplyHired, and Craigslist all have filters for finding remote working jobs.) But here's another thing that will help you land a work-from-home gig: Learn JavaScript. ITworld's Phil Johnson looked at a number of job postings for software developers open to people wanting to work remotely and then compared the frequency with which a number of popular programming languages and technologies were mentioned by the postings to determine the top tech skills for telecommuting jobs. Not surprisingly, the ubiquitous JavaScript topped the list, being mentioned in just over 20% of these listings. Other languages and tools used for the web are high up the list as well: jQuery at #3 (12.5%), PHP at #5 (9.5%) in the fifth spot, iOS at #8 (5.6%)."
Get on those sites, and you are competing with 3rd world wages.
But you can work from home, for $2 an hour.
If I'm going to damn my soul, I'd rather find other ways
Its a job, that actually is paying quite well, during a poor economy. Don't knock it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well no one is going to hire you for 120k a year because you read a LEARN C++ in 24 hours book.
You need many years of experience and a computer science degree or mathematics to back you up with 5 managerial references minimum! Those who want to reply back or mod me how they didn't need that? Fine, how much are you making? I bet it aint 120k without all if not 2 out of the 3 of these.
For 120k a better have all as I can hire 2 developers for the same price or more if I want to have someone inexperienced in India.
http://saveie6.com/
So, you've chosen Java as the way to damn your soul?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Because nothing damns your soul as much as assisting an organization that provides huge amounts of disaster relief in a catastrophe.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
*turns entire countries into catastrophes
Harder for them to outsource you, if the job involves a security clearance. Harder for you to work from home, however.
It doesn't matter when the landlord knows he can charge $5,000 a month and have renters all out bidding each other for that one bedroom in an attic.
So get creative. Buy a used van conversion in decent condition, get a gym membership and live out of your van until you can get on your feet. Many in Silicon Valley have done this and even crazier things to make it. Always remember that it's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, so don't be a prisoner to rules that were created by landlords and others like them to keep you down. Your advantage over them is that you have less to loose and are willing to do things that they didn't believe you would or could to survive. As a young person, getting ahead these days requires cunning and deceit. Do not fail to use these methods when necessary.
I'm a UNIX systems administrator with 30 years of continuous industrial-strength experience in Silicon Valley.
I've been living outside the San Francisco Bay Area since 2005 - when it became too expensive to raise a family with just two incomes.
I've been sleeping in my van and showering at a gym for EIGHT !@#$ years. And driving 300 miles, each way, every weekend, to see my kids ands wife and bask in the warmth of my family.
Recently I've been seeing hourly wages for contractors fall to a level I have not personally seen since the early to mid 1990s - twenty years ago.
- $35/hour for people with 3-5 years experience and multidisciplinary skills
- $50/hour for people with 5-10 years experience, etc
This, despite the cost of gas, food and rent having escalated dramatically - I would conservatively estimate the cost of everything *else* has doubled.
There is no question in my mind that the value of DOWNTIME has not decreased over the past twenty years. The value of the work I do is as valuable as it ever was - maybe moreso.
From this I infer that the compensation I should be receiving for the work I am doing should be substantially greater than it actually is.
Were I to be brutally honest with myself I would be forced to admit that I have saved my employers millions of dollars in cumulative downtime every year.
I'm tired of being cheated and I am angry at those whom are doing the stealing. They are criminals. Why am I being punished?
Lowering the price of gas will not dissuade my anger. It only increases my anger - because the control over gas prices only reaffirms the thievery, anew.
I speak for many.
Most of those useless people got weeded out when the tech stock bubble collapsed, but I've noticed a new generation of them making their way back, now. Companies are lowering their standards and letting HR do the screening, interviewing and the hiring. HR departments seem to be mostly unable to distinguish between good programmers and bad ones and tend to take the view that one programmer is as good as another and they can be replaced with no impact to the company. My personal observations are that (in general) it takes a year for a new person to become familiar enough with a company's code base and processes to be able to be able to contribute at 100% productivity. One guy who knows your business at 120K is easily worth 3 or 4 contractors at 60K who need to be trained. On average one or two of those contractors will be completely useless and contribute at best nothing of value to your company, 3 or 4 of them will be gone in 6 months just as they're starting to get familiar with how your business works and all of them are going to impact the productivity of your other employees with their training needs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
He took a list of 10 languages, added another list of languages, then looked for those ...
Ie, there could well be other languages that he didn't look for that are more in demand than the one he looked for.
I don't know exactly how he handled only 'programmer' jobs for Dice.com ... but they've got 31 jobs that match 'perl'. Add that to the 3 from the other site, and we're looking at 4.4% (behind Python, above, C++, VB, TSQL, etc.
Of course, this is always going to be a point-in-time study. (I found 63 'Ruby' jobs (out of 745), which would put it at 8.4%, above his 7.2%) You really need to look at long-term trends. (and you need to make sure to not count the same jobs from week after week ... although the fact that they can't find someone to fill a job might be a sign that's skill's in more demand, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's good to learn that language if employability is your goal)
The really sad thing is that ASP is above Python (33+10=5.8%), and SQL's not on his list but mentioned in 27.8% (155+52) of the jobs. And Postgres (which he didn't check) has more mentions than Hadoop (which he did)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
So true. There are plenty of places with a cost of living far below a place like DC or Silicon Valley which pay decently enough that you end up way ahead.
For comparison, CNN's site has a cost of living calculator, and the US census site has several pages about cost of living worth looking at.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."