Ask Slashdot: Money-Making Home-Based Tech Skills? 332
Posted
by
timothy
from the remote-viewing-seems-best dept.
from the remote-viewing-seems-best dept.
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?
Do something local (Score:5, Insightful)
Quality Assurance (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Work for yourself, not others. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do something local (Score:3, Insightful)
Very true.
You can advertise is the local or regional papers.
You have 3 advantages:
1. You speak English as a native, and understand the culture.
2. Talent overseas is not always a bag of chips and then some. Cut rate offers means you get what you pay for and it doesn't work right.
3. The locals can spell and say your name.
Conversely, if you were to compete with AsiaPAC talent in their home land, they have the advantage locally.
If you can make sites... (Score:5, Insightful)
Real people like to deal with real people. Asking someone in India to do work for you feels like a bizarre gamble for your average business. That's your competitive advantage and you should use it.
Re:Quality Assurance (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll second this. I have received many surprising compliments on my bug reports. It takes some time to get used to thinking in terms of a detailed report, but once it's natural, developers will greatly appreciate thorough and clear reports. If your writing is detailed enough, there are companies where the developers will actually look forward to having you test the product. As a developer myself, I have seen far too many terrible reports to count, where the procedure wasn't clear, text was inaccurate, or the "steps to reproduce" didn't actually reproduce the problem (even on the user's machine).
High-quality QA is in demand, but many companies don't even realize it. They see their usual reports as "good enough" and spend countless extra hours trying to reproduce that one unwritten action that caused a problem.
Working from home not for the First World (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can work from home, you can work from Bangalore. And people working from Bangalore are cheaper.
Re:I was a freelancer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:3, Insightful)
You appear to be talking about someone that already knows how to write web apps learning PHP, I don't think that's what the article writer is, and it's not really what I meant.
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:5, Insightful)
She could probably also get on with one of the shady web scraping/placement operation/SEO, if she knew of any. I've met people with hardly any skill who make a fair amount of money doing this.
At that point, pornography is more ethical.
If you have scruples, you have a very linear, hard road to climb. Pay is proportional to skill and ability. The only time that seems to deviate is when gross ethical/moral misconduct is involved (whether the participants realize it or not).
Networking. Networking. Networking. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cherish the good friends you make over the years, because like you, they're rising in their careers, and some day they might have a contract or job bid to throw your way.
Never be afraid to meet people, hand out your business cards, and introduce yourself and your business. Even if they're not interested, give them TWO cards and ask them to pass one along to a friend (you'd be surprised how often they end up in the hand of a friend who's looking for such services.)
You can not win the game of life playing roulette with every other schmuck on the planet who thinks slinging code == programming. It's not. Programming is a broad-based skillset of analysis, debugging, design, and coming up with unorthodox ideas to solve everyday problems. A coder is a dime a dozen; a PROGRAMMER is a special breed.
Re:Only on Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Only on Slashdot does someone make a joke about doing home porn... just to have another person point them to relevant articles about why the idea is unsustainable.
And get modded up!
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:4, Insightful)
As a girl that came to read peoples views and their input on this women's situation I was offended to see that the very first comment was about sex. I had the feeling the topic would turn that direction when I saw she admitted to being a female, but i didn't realize it would be so immediate. I rarely post here, but the atmosphere really doesn't seem that women are treated with respect or equality. I thought this was the crowd of people that are usually accepting and above this behavior.
Re:Home porn videos? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Check the local Chamber of Commerce (Score:4, Insightful)
The goals vary from place to place -- I admit, some are more social clubs than anything else, some are lobbying cooperatives, etc ... but the goal isn't necessarily to join them ... use their directory listings to find all the local businesses to do your cold calling Then you get your foot in the door with one of them, who will then talk about their 'new website' with the others, and maybe push more work your way.
In my area, there's actually two county-wide chamber of commerces (one focusing on small and minority-owned businesses), a few smaller chambers of commerce focused around some of the more built-up areas, a 'business roundtable, and a number of regional 'business associations'. The thing that matters is (1) getting a list of small local businesses to contact and (2) getting a foothold into those business groups so the work comes to you and you don't have to do as much cold-calling.
Re:How about ... being a mom? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure I'll be called chauvanistic, old-fashioned and be modded into oblivion for saying this, but how about ... oh, I dunno, being a mom and raising your children?
Parenting is not a part-time job. I'm not going to pretend to know your situation (maybe daddy is out of the picture for whatever reason), but you'll contribute more to society by spending your time raising your kid(s) to be decent human beings.
And society shows how much it values it, by paying stay-at-home moms accordingly, right?