Getting Started With Part-Time Development Work? 262
fortapocalypse writes "I'm getting paid a good salary as a Java developer and the hours are great. It is also very stable, which means something in today's economy, especially with a family to feed. However, I'm very unmotivated both because of the work that I do, which is boring, and because the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability. I've done what I could to try to change things at work and have pretty much given up on that. I want to go out on my own, either starting my own company or just working as a contractor doing Java development, but I'm not sure of the best way to get started, and my family needs the stability of my current job. I'd really like to start out part-time at 5-15 hours a week to use it as supplemental income (which my family could really use at the moment), but I really don't know where to start. I doubt many contracting agencies would be interested in a part-time worker. What would you suggest for someone in my position?"
Craigslist (Score:5, Interesting)
In all seriousness, I started, and continue to run, a moderately successful dev company on my own via 100% Craigslist clients. I began by building up a small, but consistent client base while still at my 9-5, and then, when the time was right, I struck out on my own.
I would advise against places like rentacoder and getafreelancer and elance, etc... More often than not, with those joints, you're competing against Eastern European or Indian programming companies that charge like $8/hr, and the client base on those sites is more cost-conscious than quality-conscious. You'll waste a ton of time.
Also, for what it's worth, _never_ utilize the services of a site that makes you pay for it. More often than not, they're not worth the money you spend on them.
Just do a little freelance work. (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I've never messed with any of them, there are plenty of freelance, contractor type sites out there.
Also, and I know it must sound seedy, but sitting around in a (fairly upscale) bar that has frequent business travelers works pretty well. I know it is kind of "red-lighting" it, but I've scored a few software jobs just from sitting in front of a beer and chatting it up with complete strangers on Wed or Thurs nights (often, their free night before their flight the next day).
Like a previous poster said, don't quit your day job. It isn't worth losing your insurance because of boredom.
The truth about side projects (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried for years to pick up side jobs, but here's what I discovered.
The people who are paying for the side projects, are looking for people to work for nothing. I currently make the equivalent of $70 an hour ($140k per year), I get to keep only 58% of that after taxes. Most of the people balk at paying $20 an hour, in their mind software developers already get paid an outrageous amount of money so making a few extra bucks must be a windfall, it's not. My time and sanity is worth far more than $11.60 an hour. And it's not even that clear cut, you can give these people an honest estimate and they act like you've padded the hours, then even if they accept it, they'll constantly change the requirements and pretend like that should just be part of the original agreement. When you stand firm as any one in their right mind should, they act like they were doing you a favor and pull out.
The only real way to make the jump from corporate slavery is to start your own project, and hence your own business. Otherwise you are moving from one headache to another type of headache, and you'll find yourself yearning for the corporate environment you left. With a product in hand you can develop a "need" in the market place, and you'll find that once they "need" you they can and will pay the kind of money you are looking for.
Before anyone speaks up, yes I know successful independent consultants. But guess what? I make more money then them even though they make a higher hourly wage, take for example a database admin friend of mine, he makes $85 an hour, but he has to pay his own health care, no 401(k) matching, no holiday's, no vacations, he also has a lot of paperwork to do and pays an accountant. With all of his overhead, and paying his own half of the employment tax, I'm ahead by $20k a year. Oh and I only work a max of 45 hours a week, he gets woken at 2am randomly any day of the week, and instead of racking in the overtime they ask him to leave early on the days he has to fix an emergency in the middle of the night. Some consultants might make the $125+ an hour that it takes to be worth it, but most do not.
Bad idea on many levels (Score:5, Interesting)
I have not done this myself because some of my friends have. When I saw what they were going through I decided to avoid the idea altogether for several reasons.
First of all, if your job is stable you may want to read the contract or the NDA that the company had you sign when you became employed. Many companies forbid you from working for profit or working at all. Wanna risk your well paid job? Be my guest.
Another good reason for not accepting the second job is because it is not going to be a second job for you. In the eyes of your client, your second job is going to be his primary or the only job. This means the client will not expect less from you by any means. Calls at work during business hours, meeting during weekends and weekdays, etc. Are you ready for it? And if you for some reason manage your time well and actually get both of the jobs done then say good-bye to your free time.
I have observed a friend of mine who made a good hourly rate at his part time job. No time to relax led to constant family troubles which are NOT worth anything in the long run. The extra money that he had made on the side essentially went to family therapy of the 21st century: Shopping sprees, vacations one can barely afford, etc. The net income was zero if you don't count the lost nerve cells. That's why I recommend you to look the other way and if you do need to save some money review your family budget.
Finally somewhere in your post you mentioned that your current organization is not the best fit for you. Are you sure you want to get a part-time gig? It sounds like you are bored and you'd like a new job. Why not get a new position that pays more? I know that we are in a recession but if you're any good I am sure there will be a job opening. If anything, I'd consider doing some Open Source development work and that way you can put something on your resume later on. At least that way you will have to work on your schedule without having to answer to a pissed off client.
Welcome to the real world (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I'm very unmotivated both because of the work that I do, which is boring, and because the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability. I've done what I could to try to change things at work and have pretty much given up on that.
Well, that pretty much sums it up for the rest of us.
Anything new here?
Re:Mix Fun and Fair (Score:4, Interesting)
Since when did bragging become /. spamming?
Um, since the very dawn of Slashdot.
Another job is suicide (Score:1, Interesting)
If you want more money you can work more or you can work better. Think about the future because years pass quickly. Everyone can use some extra cash, but once you get them, it's hard to turn back.
Part-time contract work doesn't work out (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking from experience. Get another non-IT related job. Pet sitting. Working at Radio Shack. Washing dishes. You'll make more money and it may be a good way to blow off stress from IT/programming work. It will also have better defined work hours and working conditions. Once you punch that time clock, you're done for the day and can go home.
Also, consider the fact that if your employer catches programming you they may fire you for competing with them or conflict of interest. If the boss finds you working at the local Radio Shack or book store, it looks a a bit better, you can say "I'm just paying off a few Xmas bills. Hey! Check out this signed first edition we just received!"
Re:Mix Fun and Fair (Score:2, Interesting)
How long until someone finishes a project to fix the public fairsoftware.net site for users with Javascript disabled? :)
I find it downright hilarious every time I see <a href="#" onclick="...> used for a basic link.
From the glass-is-half-full perspective... (Score:3, Interesting)
We're at the beginning of the Second Great Depression.
The situation is actually a lot worse than you realize, although I don't want to go that far off-topic.
But even though the glass is half-empty, it's also half-full.
The greatest return on investment is always made from starting small, at the very bottom of an economic slump, just as the economy kicks in and begins to grow again.
And if you remember any of your college calculus, the economy actually starts to accelerate again after passing through that inflection point on the way down - which inflection point is probably not such a bad time to be starting a new venture.
What you don't want to do is invest a ton of money into some project right at the peak of the good times - that's what all the fools do [i.e. buy high and, ultimately, sell low].
Start Small (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know if it is what you are looking for, but I have found some success doing small informal websites for local businesses; mostly from refferals for a reasonable price. (Usually $300-$500 for a 5 page site + $100/year hosting) The nice part is that it is fairly simple work, and opens the door for higher-wage projects if they decide to do anything more advanced such as CRM or online sales from the site. The other advantage is that the customers are local; so if they screw you, you aren't trying to get money from a voice over the phone you've never met states away, and can often settle a dispute in the local small claims court.
The great part is its usually 1 sit down session where you give the speil, usually during my lunch hour, maybe a second to get all the facutal/content information you need and the rest of the time I send design proposals on a "beta" site for them to approve/disapprove. I get to control how much time I put into it by taking on as many clients as I want (and am willing to service), and for the remainder of the time, I just let the site chug along. It has been really nice where teaching was 25hr/wk or nothing, and was very inflexible, and made it almost impossible to take vacation.
All that being said, don't box yourself into a corner where the second job will be a black mark on your work performance if you decide the second gig is just too much and are tempted to quit at a bad place in the project or when they won't give you vacation times that line up with your 9-5 (or give you less time than your 9-5). Be wary of burnout, and I'd say start small on a contract basis for a short term contract and see if you are willing (and even able) to keep your life in check. For me, 25 was way too much to still enjoy living.
Re:Craigslist (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't been to rentacoder since 2004, so maybe they've changed, but memory tells me that 90% of the projects listed there are either someone's homework assignment that they'll pay you an effective $3/hour to do, or the projects expect far too much work for far too little pay (e.g. a whole CMS for $200, as others have mentioned).
I used to know of three or four other equivalent sites, but they were all just as filled with crap as rentacoder. Has the situation improved any?
Re:Bad idea on many levels (Score:3, Interesting)
The state of the economy has little to do with the fact that things need to be done. The number of job openings will always be greater than the number of competent people who have enough skills to perform these jobs. Don't believe me? Take a look at your co-workers and see how many of them are really worth their salaries. If anything recession is a great time for consultants. Most of the time companies shred "fancy suits" and other workers who were not needed to begin with. Of course, I am an optimist. The rest of you can run around screaming about the end of the world. But if you really really want a new gig, you will do something about it.
Re:Bad idea on many levels (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't have any trouble whatsoever finding a full-time job; I graduate this coming April with a Bachelor's in CS, and the only company to which I applied hired me. Had I bothered applying to more places I'm quite sure I would have had more offers (and in fact I know several people who were sitting on four or five offers).
Anyway, I have trouble believing there aren't any jobs out there, precisely because of how easy it was for me to get one. It seems to me that difficulty finding a job says more about the person's skill set than about the economy, at least right now...
That said, I am aware that some companies have enacted partial hiring freezes for the time being; however, "company X won't hire me!" is very different from "no company will hire me!".
Work for yourself (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to go out on my own, ...starting my own company ... doing Java development, but I'm not sure of the best way to get started, and my family needs the stability of my current job. I'd really like to start out part-time at 5-15 hours a week to use it as supplemental income (which my family could really use at the moment), but I really don't know where to start.
You say this yet most of the people focus on the part-time moonlighting consulting part. I agree with them that moonlighting can affect your present position negatively, kill your free time and make your family time and social life lessened and more stressful, and will likely not really give you much of an income supplement. On the other hand, it is a way to make contacts and improve your technical skills, so it's all what you want.
When the dot-com boom was happening, I had a server stored at a colo facility for free. In 1998-1999 I saw so many idiots getting $10-20 million VC I started a dot com site which nowadays would be called a "Web 2.0" site. I started to get a lot of traffic, and in early 2000 I was even scoping out disk arrays for the site (it used a lot of disk space). But then in spring of 2000 the dot com market crashed, and I gave up the idea - a few months later I stopped taking new users, and I closed the site up in late 2001. I am not a programmer yet I did all the programming on the site, so that's the main thing I gained from the experience.
Nowadays I have a side business as well. Unlike the earlier one, you see a lot more cash upfront. I sell things online. Not the sexiest thing in the world, but it makes money. I haven't tallied up revenues for last year but I know I ordered over $10k of stuff from one of my suppliers. One reason I don't have more revenue is I do not want more revenue at this point. An important point which I will go into. But anyhow, on the technical end I have an osCommerce (PHP) web site which I modify when I need or want to. Right now I sell everything off of it. I was selling off of FeeBay as well, but they raised their rates too high for me. My web site is registered on Google Base/Shopping and right now I am getting 99% of my hits from that, which is free. Via it, (looking now at my osCommerce screen I see) I have had 25 separate orders from December 10th to today, with an average price of about $50 (price and shipping). I used Google Ads previously, and still like them, but I am not trying to grow revenue currently. I also wrote a suite of screen scraper stuff in PERL so as to get me advantageous information. They are helpful, but they can be a pain to maintain by myself.
Anyhow - at the beginning of this year, I called my main supplier and asked for a good price on the item we sell the most of. He gave me a price and I ordered 70 of it, and 6 each of five similar items (100 in all). I called back a month later and said I was selling more of the five similar items and could I have a break on those prices as well. I got a break on all six. I promised I would order at least 100 every quarter (he had wanted me to commit to 100 every month but I said I couldn't do that). He also said if the manufacturer started charging more they'd raise the price. I was selling about $1500 a month on eBay, plus more from Google Ads and Shopping/Base on the web site. I was often shipping out 2 to 3 items a day. Between work, night school, and everything else, this shipping got to be a pain. Also I was only making one or two dollars on each shipment, and margins got tighter as time went on. In the summer, the supplier raised their prices on everything including this stuff. I used that as a point to stop ordering at the 100-a-quarter pace, as I didn't want to keep going at that rate, and it was a good excuse to end the deal we had. I learned that shipping is time-consuming and something I didn't want to spend time on. I was considering hiring a part-time person to do shipping for maybe an hour or two 5 times a