Successful Moonlighting For Geeks? 448
Lawksamussy writes "Having just bought a really old house that's on the verge of falling down, I'm now trying to find a way to pay to fix it up. I have a great job in software development that pays the bills, but I'm looking to earn some extra cash in my spare time. Whatever I end up doing has to be reasonably lucrative (or at least have the potential to be so), not require any specific time commitment, and be doable equally well from home or from a hotel room. I'm also keen that it should be sufficiently different to my day job to keep my interest up, so the most obvious things like bidding for programming projects on Rentacoder.com, or fixing up neighbors' PCs, aren't really on. Above all, it should appeal to my inner geek, otherwise my low boredom threshold will doom it to failure before I even start! So, I wonder if any of my fellow Slashdotters run little part-time ventures that they find more of an inspiration than a chore... and if they are willing to share what they do and perhaps even how much money they make doing it?"
Stay up late and watch informercials (Score:5, Insightful)
They all seem to be selling the get rich quick without spending any time and from any where you want using the Internet plans.
The secret however is not to buy them, its to sell them.
Re:Fix the house, skip the 2nd job (Score:5, Insightful)
Barter (Score:4, Insightful)
Write an iPhone App (Score:4, Insightful)
women? (Score:2, Insightful)
uhh, only men hire prostitutes, even male ones.
Re:women? (Score:2, Insightful)
uhh, only men hire prostitutes, even male ones.
Yeah, keep thinking that.
Re:Fix the house, skip the 2nd job (Score:5, Insightful)
As a former reno-carpenter, I'd have to suggest doing it yourself too. You're not going to make enough money moonlighting to pay for the kind of work that needs doing in anything like equal hours.
That said... I don't know you, & thus how well you'll learn what needs to be done. You could take to this like a duck to water and have an excellent balance for your keyboard day job. And you could have a relationship-breaking disaster.
And this just gives me chills: "Having just bought a really old house that's on the verge of falling down".
You have no idea how big the hole is you're looking at. A moderately old house that seems pretty good to the amateur can be an enormous money pit. Gear up your humour and character, because you've bought yourself a gelatinous cube. (And I /do/ love the old houses. There's been a lot of hard lessons on the way to being the sort of guy who'll tell you to just knock it down and start over. But it's your adventure -- just realize it is an adventure, and it's going to be for the next several years. Good luck.)
Re:women? (Score:1, Insightful)
Bullshit. I know a French prostitute who met the chick she does threesomes with by hiring her for leisure first and being impressed.
Also, this same prostitute (they call themselves "providers" in the biz) was called by a woman who was disabled and loved her husband so much she was hiring one for him.
Not that you can find a bi-sexual nympho chick around every corner, but women certainly do hire prostitutes, much to my fascination.
Hmm...which meme is appropriate for this?
"In Soviet Russia, prostit..." nah
"I, for one, welcome our new whor..." nah
Oh oh I know! "Dude, if you don't think women hire prostitutes, swing by your mom's place on any given Friday night."
Re:Fix the house, skip the 2nd job (Score:4, Insightful)
Skip the chicks, the pickings are better on the other side of the fence.
My geek cooks, cleans, helps with outside chores and house maintenance, and lets me kick his ass in various multi-player games AND doesn't require expensive flowers.
Re:tutor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:lol (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that about sums it up.
I kept hearing my dad's voice in my head while reading this:
"That's why it's called 'work', son."
Re:Fix the house, skip the 2nd job (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What would Tyler Durden do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually this is a very good suggestion. A friend of mine recently opened her own soap business and she is making money hand over fist. She mostly sells soap at trade shows, fairs, etc, but I helped her set up her e-commerce site and business is really picking up for her. Soap is relatively easy to make, and creating large batches of it at a time can lead to great economies of scale. You could do worse as far as side-businesses go.
Re:Fix the house, skip the 2nd job (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll be flamed for this, but: I think it's better to just do it yourself.
I've owned two houses, both of them ancient. The first, which was small, appeared to be done; new flooring throughout, new paint inside, good siding outside, all new plumbing, new exterior doors, some new windows, mostly new wiring... Everything looked good. So we bought it and moved in.
The drain for the kitchen sink ran uphill. The water heater (complete with recent inspection sticker) was plumbed backward. There was no attempt at plumbing venting. The office had 3-prong outlets, which lead to 2-conductor wire. The living room also had 3-prong outlets, which did appear to be actually grounded, but which were miswired somewhere, such that 60-cycle hum would emanate from the stereo -unless- the clothes drier was running, which I still haven't figured out. The new vinyl windows in the kitchen were overstuffed with insulation, such that the frame bowed to such an extent that it was nearly impossible to fully close and latch the things.
This was all done, supposedly, by professionals.
The second house is a bit different. About the same price, about the same age, the same quality of neighborhood, much larger (used to be a triplex), and totally trashed inside. Scary wiring, bad plumbing (every single pipe leaked, every single one), no heat upstairs, tired floor coverings, lousy exterior doors, etc. So we bought it, and began work. Once we had a functional bathroom and shower, we moved in.
It's been an adventure, but at least I have an opportunity to do everything right the first time, instead of finding and fixing a million things that were done wrong. Including, of course, wiring, basement stairs, plumbing, flooring, kitchen cabinets, plaster where needed, drywall where practical...
Plumbing is easy. I ripped out all of the old copper, galvanized, and black iron drain pipe, since it was all shit. Running new pressure lines is bloody easy these days thanks to the virtue of snap-on PEX fittings and manifolds with individual outlets for each room or fixture -- it's pretty hard to fuck up a line to a sink if it only has two connections. The drain lines are also pretty easy to figure out (shit goes downhill). Venting is harder to get right, but still not bad.
Electrical wiring is easy. Drill up from below, or down from above, into the stud cavity. Pull the romex in. Black wire to the little side of the outlet, white to the big, and copper to the ground screw. Give the fridge and the sump pump their own circuits, so that something else in the house failing short and blowing a breaker doesn't result in a freezer full of spoiled food or a flood. Permanent lighting gets its own circuits, so that tripping a breaker doesn't result in darkness. Don't daisy-chain too many outlets, don't send too many wires into a single junction box, and always use a GFCI wherever there might ever be water, always ground metal boxes... So on, so forth. It's easy to overbuild with lots of independent circuits, and so one might as well do so.
Even cutting in a 36" (up from 30") front door was easy.
And real, honest-to-God 3/4"-thick solid oak flooring is both cheap to buy and easy (even fun) to install and finish, and truly wonderful when done.
I've run ductwork professionally in the past, which is about the most braindead task in the world even with correct size reductions and consideration for laminar flow, and will probably tackle installing a high-efficiency gas furnace upstairs in the next month or two (before it gets really cold out).
There's no way I'd have been able to hire someone else to do all of this work. And, given the quality of the "improvements" at the last last house, there's still no way I'd have hired any of it done even if I could afford to.
Now, I didn't go about any of this lightly. I spent a long time studying plumbing before I even considered doing it myself, but it's not at all rocket science. I also spent some time brushing up on the NEC bef
Re:Fix the house, skip the 2nd job (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you could ignore the permits as no one will ever know anyway. It's not really any of their business to begin with. American cities are epicenters of totalitarianism when it comes to wanting to charge you to install door frames or repaint your kitchen!
play poker (Score:1, Insightful)
i play poker for $10 an hour. read Dan Harrington's books.
Nobody cares like you do (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know that you really save money by doing it yourself, and it may actually end up costing you more when you figure in the price of your time and other non-obvious costs, but there is still one killer advantage to doing it yourself, which is that nobody will care as much as you do about getting it done right.
Over the years, I'd say 20% of the tradesmen I've hired have done a great job, 40% are mediocre, doing almost as good as I might do if I was in a hurry. The other 40% are chimpanzees, and it can cost a lot of time and grief to unroll their messes. Unfortunately I'm not very good at prospectively telling the difference between these groups.
Re:Fix the house, skip the 2nd job (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm. I've never heard of any place where you needed a permit to repaint your kitchen. Where would that be?
It depends on what sort of work and what sort of building. If it won't burn down the house, make it collapse, or flood the neighborhood if you mess up, ok.
But in a city or rowhouses, if you fsck up structural work, you can take out your neighbors' houses too. Been a lot of that in Baltimore lately [google.com].
Screwed-up electrical or gas work can not just burn down or blow up your place, but could start a fire that spreads to other house - or could lie in wait and kill the next owner of your house. And water from a burst pipe - or sewer line - doesn't respect property lines.
Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize that you're not even beating inflation, right?
Answer: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:play poker (Score:4, Insightful)
Um... is this your first, by any chance? :)
Re:Let me think... (Score:1, Insightful)
I think that means "yes".
Re:Fix the house, skip the 2nd job (Score:1, Insightful)
I want to add to this. Make sure you have serious friggin health insurance. One of the things that stopped me doing fun stuff like rock climbing when I was a reno-carpenter was realizing how a relatively minor injury would cost me days off work. Turn that around and consider what your evening DIY adventure can do to your hands for instance.
Doesn't have to be spectacular (I'll spare you my graphic examples) -- it can be a simple slip with the pry bar lunching some fingers for a few days. Like the advice below about buying commercial grade tools, don't scrimp on the full safety kit, including masks, and then be absolutely methodical about wearing it and taking no shortcuts. Always be ready to fire yourself for the shift when you find you're goofing from fatigue, or have simple jobs like drywall sanding & painting alongside that you can do instead.
And get your tetnus shot up to date. You do /not/ want to have to go wait in line in emergency to do that after you've goofed in the evening. (No, you can't do it in the morning. Lockjaw doesn't wait.)
Sorry for the downer, but that's all something you have to have a plan in place for.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exposure. (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Reasonably lucrative
2. No specific time requirements (which can be read as no deadlines)
3. Interesting
4. Cannot be tied to a specific office since he wants to be able to work from home or hotel room
And of course presumptively within his skill set. I have known many people in IT that have gotten moonlighting jobs with some of those criteria, but I've never known anyone to pull off all of them simultaneously.
To the poster, if you find something that meets all 4 and you need a sidekick, send me an e-mail.
As for my 2 cents on achieving it(or coming close), you may want to keep all 4 as goals, but be willing to accept something that does not meet all of them. There are plenty of technical training institutes that need teachers and that meets criteria 1 and 3 (4 as well if you limit yourself to online classes), and plenty of places that hire people on for special projects, but most of those will have deadlines and many will need you to come into their office at least occasionally.
Also, have you considered something like the National Gaurd as a Commo officer? They pay reasonably well, are very interesting and very different from your day job, and while they do require a time and space commitment, Federal Law will help protect that time from other demands to a degree.
Re:Exposure. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, real fun and exciting. You do know that we have a shortage of troops, and the fact is "the draft" is a phrase that shall not be spoken. As a result, joining the National Guard today almost guarantees you will do one or more rotations in Iraq/Afghanistan [slashdot.org] .
As a National Guardsman, I would agree that you can expect to be sent overseas. However, before you can be mobilized, you must be fully trained in your job (MOS), which means completing the associated required schooling. I would guess that by the time that is completed, things will be winding down. This assumes another hot spot doesn't appear, of course.
Yeah, supposedly they're not involved in combat patrols (mostly guard duty), but that doesn't mean the violence can't find them.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean:
a) national guard units are not involved with combat patrols (not true)
b) a signal officer doing guard duty - typically does not happpen, but could under rare circumstances. I (as a field grade officer) have pulled security shifts during night patrol base halts in Afghanistan, but that was primarly due to manning of my team.
Your end point is absolutely valid. The violence can find you anywhere.
Yeah, real fun and exciting.
I've been doing this for over 21 years, have been mobilized twice, including once to Afghanistan (returned this past spring). There have been many moments of fun and excitement, to include the good kind from successfully accomplishing a challenging task to the non-so fun kind from stuff that happens in a combat zone. I've been a pallbearer for a very good friend and have been at several send-offs of colleagues onto a C-130 for the last flight home. On two ocassions, I (very) briefly wondered if I was going to see the end of that particular mission.
I've found it to be very rewarding at times and very frustrating at other times. I also expect that I will be going somewhere again within 2-3 years.
Having said all of this, I haven't kept up with the details with current age limits, so he may be too old. However, there may be others who are thinking about it.
Re:I run a global software company (Score:2, Insightful)
Speaking as a developer in a team which is split into both US and Indian resources, I don't think it's the accent that is troublesome. It is the barrier of actual understanding that is an issue. Sometimes, they just don't get it no matter how many times you explain it to them.
And as for actually fixing the problem, have you ever had to maintain anything fixed by Indians? I have nightmares about it. It is at times atrocious. And this isn't b/c they're not talented developers; most of the time it's because they don't understand the concepts we are trying to use and why we are using them. All in all, when I go back to fix another defect that is introduced into a section where an Indian resource has been working, it will take me twice as long.