

Ask HN: Besides programming, what's a realistic "work from home" job? - stop

I'm starting to think I should quit programming as a career and just do it as a hobby.<p>I don't like going out to work every day and am wondering what other type of work I could do from home. (It doesn't need to pay as well as programming because I spend very little and have no family to support.)<p>Any suggestions?
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jaltucher
\- writing. plenty of places still paying for content.

\- use software like tradestation or wealth-lab to build a workable trading
system. trade from home.

\- background checks. with rise in VC investment is also new needs for doing
cheap background checks.

\- penny auction arbitrage. there's a new startup in penny auctions every day.
they start off unprofitable because not enough traffic. meaning, you can win
cheap ipads for almost nothing and then sell on ebay.

\- project management. people still need websites done. You can outsource to
india using scriptlance or elance and do the project management from home.

\- e-commerce. 1 idea: do a blog about living forever. when it starts to get
traffic start selling a nutraceutical package on it.

\- photography. do weddings cheap. you have to leave home but dont have to
work as many days.

I'll think of more if people like these ideas.

~~~
jaltucher
\- do a portal on class action lawsuits. almost everyone is applicable to win
some class action (e.g. eat french fries from Mcdonalds 10 yrs ago? you won a
class action. have an ipod in 2004, you won a class action, etc). High keyword
spending there. No portals are good.

\- buy up popular domain names with the words misspelled (e.g.
www.eatingdsorders.com, etc) - then do appropriate content (scrape sites) and
google ads. Put together a portfolio of these names for cheap and sell to
Demand Media

\- Write e-books. "100 Ways to Lose Weight". "40 stocks that can Double this
year". Use simple google ads to sell them. Write 10 books / mo to make decent
living and one might be a breakout. Traditional publishing dead. Get your
friends to write e-books. You'll market, they write, split 50-50.

\- Therapists charge over $150-200 /hr. Charge $10 / hr and offer to do
therapy over skype.

More coming.

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messel
Build relationships with companies that don't mind working with remote
consultants or employees. Writing was mentioned by jaltucher and is a great
place to start. If money isn't a huge issue, you could write squidoo lenses or
web pages full time adding your own ads. I wrote a few dozen lenses for
squidoo in 2008 early 2009 and they generated a steady $40-60 a month. Take
that concept and push it to a few hundred or thousand lenses or focused sites.

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amathew
Why do you want to quit programming? Are you tired of sitting in front of a
computer all day? or do you just dislike your current job?

I suggest answering these questions before considering any "work from home"
opportunities. If it's just a matter of your current job, why not look for
another employer.

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dstein
Day trading, and poker playing. Both require you to be of a type of person
that makes one a good entrepreneur - willing to put in long hours and
withstand a lot of pain.

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petervandijck
Translation.

~~~
stop
A friend of mine tried it and gave me the impression that, because you are
competing with a worldwide remote workforce for work that does not require an
on-site presence, translation work is extremely hard to come by, unless you
have exceptional language skills.

~~~
jdietrich
Exceptional language skills or specific domain knowledge. For many languages,
it is _incredibly_ difficult to find skilled translators with sufficient
knowledge to make sense of technical, legal and medical documents.

