In my experience, the easiest way to find good programming contacting jobs is to ask around with your group of geek friends and see if any of their companies have short-term programming needs. This only works, of course, if you have a group of geek friends who work for different companies -- but it can be a good deal if that's the case. Even if your friends' companies think they're only interested in hiring full-time employees, you may be able to convince them otherwise.
Participating in the contract programming market, however, means that you'll necessarily be signing at least one contract. Contracts are tricky things, and can range from fairly loose to absurdly restrictive. Since you mention that you already have a job, that means you've probably signed some sort of employment agreement with the company you work for. You might want to take a close look at that agreement, since it may include a clause that says the company owns any intellectual property you produce during the term you work for them, including work completely unrelated to your job that you do on your own time and with your own resources. If your current company owns everything you do, they'll have a problem with you working as a contractor for anyone else.
If you find a contract job and get to the point of having a contract in your hand, I strongly urge you to have a lawyer look it over (at least the first time or two, while you're still getting used to the language). The few hundred bucks you pay the lawyer will be paltry compared to the pain a bad contract could cause you. For example, who's held accountable if a bug in your code is responsible for something bad that happens two years from now? Does the contract state that you indemnify? Because that could really suck for you, and if you don't know contract-speak, you might not even know what you're getting yourself into when you sign the contract.
-laura
Re:Why are there so few blacks in high tech?
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Racism At Microsoft?
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· Score: 1
Ellen Spertus, a former MIT CS grad student and current CS professor at Mills College, maintains an excellent body of information on women and minorities in computer science and engineering at http://www.ellenspertus.com/
I haven't read everything in the 'racial minorities' section, but I can say that Ellen's report "Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?" is excellent.
Slashdot Mirror
Participating in the contract programming market, however, means that you'll necessarily be signing at least one contract. Contracts are tricky things, and can range from fairly loose to absurdly restrictive. Since you mention that you already have a job, that means you've probably signed some sort of employment agreement with the company you work for. You might want to take a close look at that agreement, since it may include a clause that says the company owns any intellectual property you produce during the term you work for them, including work completely unrelated to your job that you do on your own time and with your own resources. If your current company owns everything you do, they'll have a problem with you working as a contractor for anyone else.
If you find a contract job and get to the point of having a contract in your hand, I strongly urge you to have a lawyer look it over (at least the first time or two, while you're still getting used to the language). The few hundred bucks you pay the lawyer will be paltry compared to the pain a bad contract could cause you. For example, who's held accountable if a bug in your code is responsible for something bad that happens two years from now? Does the contract state that you indemnify? Because that could really suck for you, and if you don't know contract-speak, you might not even know what you're getting yourself into when you sign the contract.
-laura
I haven't read everything in the 'racial minorities' section, but I can say that Ellen's report "Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?" is excellent.
-laura