

Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time? - streo

I'm about to get laid off from a very  nice job, but I have a couple of projects I'd like to focus on.  Does anybody know of ANY job where I can sit at my desk and more or less hack away at what I really want to work on?<p>Jobs I've been looking at:<p>house sitting<p>night shift security<p>library desk<p>etc.
======
jraines
I sell lift tickets at a ski resort. Some of our ticket windows are not at the
main resort & get about 5 customers on a slow day.

Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com

I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome
so far.

~~~
fallentimes
That's awesome. Have you ever been caught working on your side projects? What
happened (if applicable)?

~~~
jraines
Actually they are cool with it. Me and one other guy request the slow windows,
everyone else hates them. He does consulting for restaurants, working up
business plans and processes.

~~~
gravitycop
Off-topic, but is there a reason they don't use ski-lift-ticket vending
machines, at least at the slow windows where the per-ticket labor cost of
manual vending must undoubtedly be rather high?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Ski_Area#Recent_developmen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Ski_Area#Recent_developments)

 _Eventually, users will be able to track their vertical and lift ride data
online and purchase Alta Cards using "ticket vending machines"._

~~~
jraines
We do have them, but a lot of people either don't notice them or would prefer
to buy from a person. We also sell lesson packages, redeem special discount
vouchers, do will-call, and answer questions.

However, I do wonder sometimes if the offsite windows are economical.

~~~
gravitycop
Based on what you said in that first paragraph, I predict that in five years
the average ski resort will have less than half as many employees as it does
today. People may tend to prefer to deal with in-person people, but this
competes against the value provided by automation and tele-help (e.g.
questions can be routed to centralized, inexpensive call-centers).

------
myelin
Or, you could pick up a part time job doing what you're good at (hacking),
earn as much money as a full time "mostly idle" type job, and use your
_actual_ free time for your projects.

The jobs you mention can't pay much more than $1500/month, which is 30 hours
at $50/hour (or much less if you bill higher). One freelance project per month
will fund your hacker lifestyle, and will probably look much better on your
resumé later on in life.

~~~
omouse
Where can you find a freelance gig that isn't a total rip though? I'm sure the
parent doesn't want to get paid $14/hr hacking on a Windows clone for someone
on ELance or Craigslist.

~~~
robertk
Very nice jobs can be found on elance if you're willing to look a little bit.
When I had no reputation, I would bid on the best-value projects (e.g., $500
for an hour's work) with something like:

"Since I have no elance reputation, I am willing to work for free and receive
payment after the work is completed and satisfactory."

I never got ripped off, but even if I had, so what? Most elance jobs (the ones
I've done) are fixed fee, and the buyer doesn't have to know how many hours
(or minutes) I spend. ;-)

------
SwellJoe
When I was in college I worked the night shift at a television station in the
tape room, and spent most of my time, four to five hours each eight hour
shift, learning UNIX system administration, shell and Perl programming, or
writing songs. However, last I heard, stations had started automating away
most tape duties and merging the master control and tape operator jobs into
one. Master control is not a "lot of downtime" kind of job--there are
interruptions every few minutes, though I imagine it's seen some automation
improvement since then.

System administration positions often have a lot of downtime, since if you're
doing your job well, nothing is urgent and everything just hums along real
pretty-like. Night watch in a hosting data center would probably be a great
choice. If you're still in school, night shift in a university tech center
would probably be a good choice, too (assuming it's open 24 hours...I think
most large universities do have at least one center that is open all night).

Finally, have you considered contract work? This is a different model
altogether. Instead of taking a job where you can half-ass it, and work on
what you really want to most of the time, you take jobs every few weeks where
you work your ass off, get paid a metric ass ton (like $100-$150 per hour),
and finish the project in a week or two. Then you're free to hack for pleasure
for a few weeks before taking on another paying gig. This has mostly been what
I've done since leaving college and the television station. I usually billed
$1000/day plus all expenses, if travel or whatever was involved, and often
made more than my friends who worked full-time at regular jobs...it only takes
a few projects for that math to work out.

~~~
andyking
Radio stations have also become increasingly automated over the past few years
and mostly have no-one in the building overnight. (In days gone by, they'd
sometimes employ a DJ to play music without talking through the night!)

However, there are still positions where you spend a lot of time sitting in
the studio with not a lot to do. Many stations run "network" programming which
is delivered via satellite or ISDN from a central hub and employ a "tech op",
usually a wannabe DJ who's still in school, to oversee it and make sure the
network feed and local ads or other inserts go out on air. It's a job with a
lot of downtime and you're sitting in a room full of computers. What could be
better?!

------
jws
Interruptions = Bugs

I wonder if you might be more productive by changing your habits. Get up and
hack for two hours before going to a job that does not require creativity,
then perhaps hack a bit more in the evening as life permits. The advantage
here is that you will have plenty of thinking time between execution periods
and it will support the quality of your work.

I know an author that does just this, his problem though is that he is too
conscientious and competent and keeps getting promoted to positions that
require too much creativity. At that point he has to change jobs.

------
davidw
Incidentally, this is RMS' (Stallman, of course, not our own 'rms') suggestion
for those who are unable to find a day job doing free software: do something
unrelated to software (with the idea being the avoidance of contributing to
proprietary software) that gives you free time. Hearing that in person from
RMS was the beginning of the end of my interest in RMS style free software.

~~~
bestes
I'll be you _use_ a lot of RMS-style free software, though! Just because you
don't want to contribute, doesn't mean free software isn't a good thing.

~~~
davidw
I certainly do use GPL licensed software. The GPL makes sense in various
situations, but that's a complicated and long topic.

By the way, I do contribute to free software, and enjoy doing so a great deal:

<http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/>

(Unfortunately the patches/ and files/ bits aren't working due to issues with
mod_rails)

My issue is with the idea that I should under no circumstances work on
proprietary software.

------
pg
Trevor has always said that his dream job was to be a projectionist in a movie
theater.

~~~
icey
That actually kind of surprises me. I saw Trevor at CES and he looked like a
proud parent over his robot.

Building robots seriously seems like it's incredibly fun and interesting.

~~~
hugs
That's my dream - robot building. I look forward to the day that "robot
startups" are as trendy and commonplace as "web startups". :-/

~~~
pg
I've been encouraging Trevor to make this happen, by making his new QA into an
Apple II of robots that people can bolt their own stuff onto. So far it's not
happening though: the thing only has one hole in its exterior case, for the
charger to plug into.

------
fallentimes
I worked at the University library and it was a dream. In a given 4 hour
period I probably did 20 minutes of work.

------
callmeed
Front desk at a small hotel.

My wife had this job when we first got married. When she was pregnant, the
hotel actually let me cover some shifts for her. It was awesome. I'd bring my
laptop and once the check-in rush was over (6pm-ish), it was real quiet and I
could hack away.

~~~
timr
I worked the desk at a mid-sized hotel (50-ish rooms), and it was the worst
job I've ever had. The checkin/checkout rushes were bad, but then we had to
reconcile the accounts, set wake-up calls, answer the phones, etc. There
definitely wasn't any time to relax.

------
enomar
In college, I worked 2nd and 3rd shift doing tier 2 tech support at an ISP. I
spent most of my time doing my CS homework. The guys working 1st shift didn't
have that luxury.

Not sure you'd find the same thing...just another data point.

~~~
aminuit
This is a pretty good idea. You could probably even get a night or weekend
shift in a NOC for a small to midsize ISP if you have the networking chops. It
usually goes something like this: wait for alarm from monitoring, run a few
circuit tests, call upstream provider so they can tell you that they are
working on it, inform customer, repeat. On an uneventful night, you can end up
with quite a bit of free time.

------
hbien
As a student, I worked as technical support at our libraries to help other
students with computer stuff.

For every 4 hour shift, there was maybe 30 minutes of work.

During "work" was when I discovered/experimented with Ruby on Rails, got
interested in start ups, read a lot of PG essays, starting hacking on side
projects, etc...

Actually, that job is probably why I'm not working for a BigCo.

------
RobGR
I'm surprised no one threw out some crap about the Four Hour Work Week.

I have at various times applied for work at movie theaters, Kinko's, video
rental places, etc. I have not yet ended up working a side job, but I have
done contracting work (programming and sys admin) that I ordinarily would not
take (windows stuff) when desparate. My impression is that these types of side
jobs are harder to get than you think, because employers like someone whose
main focus is this job, who is likely to stick around, and who cares enough
about the job to try hard not to get fired.

As a result, at one time I thought hard for a while about how to make jobs
that were more suited to my needs. Rather than be able to work on my stuff at
work, which I suspected would not work, I tried to think of a way I could make
rent plus ramen money working one long 12 hour day per week.

The useful result of that exercise is that I thought long and hard about how
much money I really, really needed to survive, and cut down my expenses
considerably.

The more entertaining result was that I came up with a number of crazy "part-
time business" ideas. The one which I partly did and made money on was finding
old books at garage sales to sell online. (Very little money.) The one which
people like to talk about is my "human powered lawn care" idea: Every
Saturday, I and 4 or more one-day-a-weekers would meet up, ride on bikes to
our rich green-freak hippy clients, and mow their lawn in a "carbon neutral"
fasion, with reel push mowers and other hand-powered implements. I had this
pretty well figured out, from the hauling of implements with bike trailers to
having one bike with generator you put the back wheel on, to power a single
weed-wacker (weed-wackers being indispensible tools of modern lawn care).
People like to talk about that idea, but no one wanted to do it with me.

Another strategy would be to seek out a job that is by it's nature part-time,
and thus maybe undesireable to the people who would normally do it -- such as
assisting in managing a farmer's market stand, which would limited to one day
a week. If you severly limit your expenses, you can survive and then invest
the rest of your time in your startup idea.

------
cdibona
Nothing food service related! Think your keyboard is dirty now? Wait until
your laptop has been on the salad station for a night or two. Seriously
though: The forest service has some -lonely- jobs watching for fires in the
national forests. Lighthouse keeper? Night watchman? Lots of night shift jobs
should be conducive to hacking.

Seriously consider also jobs that won't be conducive to hack but would be for
knowledge acquisition. Get a job at MIT that comes with course audit benefits.
A job that requires the hands, but allows you to consume audio lectures on
your ipod. Long haul trucker that listens to mit courseware?

~~~
cdibona
Some of my best times hacking have been on planes. A pal of mine used to fly
around the world, selling off upgrades and miles online to cover it. He spent
a lot of time reading, the slack...he could have been coding!

------
johnrob
Finding a job that pays the bills while allowing you to hack is an interesting
way to become 'ramen profitable'. That might be the ultimate way to hack the
funding process...

------
pclark
why not a sys admin? its fairly easy work 95% of the time ...

~~~
lallysingh
Really? All the sysadmins I've met worked their asses off all the time.
Firefighting with too much on the plate & too little time & resources to make
it all happen.

The worst is usually the same people get the calls about the primary app
server being down as someone's windows box having too many popups.

------
c1sc0
Well if you're in Europe, what about: 'unemployed'? 80% of your current
paycheck for the first 6 months, then you _really_ should start looking for
something that resembles a job. I know people who travelled the world on
'unemployment'. If you're looking for quiet time, why don't you just skip the
social obligation of 'having a job'?

~~~
andyking
Here's something else from (this part of) Europe: 'bollocks'. For a start,
each country has its own rules on unemployment benefits and I've no idea where
they pay 80% of your current pay.

Then, at least in Britain, they send you on pretty patronising courses about
how to read job adverts, how to go to interviews and so on along with making
you go in once a week and give proof that you've been "jobseeking". The job
centre'll put you forward for any work going, regardless of whether it's a
good match for your skills. If you refuse, no benefits. And for all this, you
get the princely sum of £60 a week. Not enough to feed, heat and house
yourself, let alone travel the globe.

It's not a free ride by any means, and if you've been through it through no
fault of your own it's a pretty demoralising and humiliating system.

~~~
c1sc0
UK != socialist Europe, I suggest you relocate first, I can only talk about
Belgium and I'm fairly sure you can game the system. Many countries do not
require these monthly/weekly/whatever checks. 60% - 80% of current pay is
pretty standard, but yes: every country has their own rules & after X months
you really need to get a job again.

If you're looking for a moral justification, what about this: the baby-boomers
set up a social security system that 'conveniently' collapses after they are
long dead. The younger generations will not reap the benefits of this system,
they will only carry the burden.

So why don't you take some of your tax money back and get a little retirement
_right now_? Or better yet: do something productive outside of the system.

~~~
andyking
"Socialist Europe"? What on earth are you babbling about? It sounds like a
fringe newspaper sold by scruffy types on street corners. Whatever your views,
Europe is a capitalist society.

The UK's just as much a part of Europe as Belgium or any other European Union
state--in fact, we're one of the few net contributors to the EU. I'm happy
here and I'm not planning on going and, erm, sponging off the Belgian welfare
state, so I'll respectfully ignore your request that I relocate (!)

I was never taught that going on benefits was a particularly socially
acceptable thing to do. I'm glad the system is there for people who are
genuinely down on their luck and can't find work, but personally I'd rather
take a low-ranking supermarket job than go on jobseekers'. Having something to
get up for in the morning makes all the difference, even if it's a rubbish
job.

------
tlrobinson
Whatever it is, _make sure_ it doesn't require an IP agreement. The ones you
mentioned obviously wouldn't.

------
brl
Night security at some office building sounds like a dream job to me. I would
do it for free and maybe I would even pay to do it since I would get more
(computer) work done there than working out of my apartment.

~~~
JabavuAdams
It sounds neat, but don't underestimate the long-term dangers of sleep-
deprivation. You really would need to sleep during the day. Before trying
something like this, spend some time at home during work hours to make sure
that you haven't been missing out on annoying neighbours and noises while
you're away.

I lived in a condo once, next to a construction site. The noise started at 8
am and finished at 4pm. I ran into a woman in the elevator, crying because she
couldn't sleep and she worked a night shift.

~~~
mynameishere
I've done night work and found it easy to sleep during the day. People who
have problems almost always make the same mistake: Reverting to a night-sleep
schedule on the weekend.

~~~
ralph
In the U.K. we don't have air-con. It can be hard to sleep during the summer
days.

------
hotpockets
I've sometimes thought about how I could get paid 2x, 3x, or more. As a
graduate student RA it wouldn't be that hard to get 2x. Just do my computer
research at a nightshift security job. But how about: RA+security+baby
sitting+baking in my portable easy bake oven!

------
markessien
Take care of paralysed people. They need round the clock watching, so you can
sit there nights, drink coffee and code. I used to do that, it made me a good
amount of money (from the code I produced during that time).

------
wicknicks
I used to work in a video store. Not many people used to turn up, so had a lot
of time to myself. You might want to just jump into the store next door. Would
be a good bet.

~~~
sokoloff
You mean the Quick Stop?

------
joshuarr
Dog-sitter?

------
ramchip
I sold tickets on the phone for a small-medium ticket company. Some nights
were busy, but usually I had plenty of free time.

------
jwilliams
Behind the desk at an Internet Cafe?

------
zackola
Librarian +1

~~~
carbon8
Maybe in a small town public library, but you will be dealing with kids all
the time. Otherwise, you won't have time. I spent years working in academic
libraries and you are always expected to be doing something. If you aren't
working a desk job, then it's basically like any other office job. Even if you
have some boring desk job you'll be expected to be filing or labeling
something or working on some part of a project assigned to you. Plus, you'll
be constantly interrupted. Remember, librarians take their jobs excessively
seriously and expect all library staff to do the same.

Also, the title "Librarian" requires an MLS.

------
sabat
Actually I've had that situation several times in _technology_ jobs. It's not
so much the job itself as it is the company. I had a great gig at a company in
Marin County (read: north of the Golden Gate, laid-back, hippies) where I was
able to learn Perl, the WWW, and Unix. Find a non-critical role in a company
that isn't audited heavily (non-public company, smaller division of a large
company) and hack away.

One option to stay under the radar: use virtual machine to do your coding in.
It's not that you have to hide what you're doing, but you might not want to
keep answering questions or might otherwise just rather stay underground.

~~~
donw
In this case, though, you need to be careful if you decide that you want to
turn around and sell your 'hacking' as a product. Because you used company
resources (at-work time and equipment) to produce it, there is a strong legal
precedent allowing your employer to claim ownership of your creation.

I'm in the position of working full-time and starting a company part-time, and
am very careful to keep my two worlds separate, even though I'm 99.999% sure
that my employer has no interest in attempting to take ownership the product
I'm building.

~~~
myelin
Too true; be careful. You're probably safe using company time to _learn_ (as
mentioned in the parent^2), which the company might not actually mind if you
put your skills to use for them as well, but if you use it to create your own
product, you're on thin ice.

