Ask HN: Where to look for side work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where to look for side work?

16 pointsbartonfink7 comments

My wife and I are expecting in May, and for those of you who haven't checked recently, babies are expensive. While we aren't in dire straits - my day job will get my family where we want to be in 18 months without any fuss - I've been looking around for a part-time development job. I'm looking for something I can do on nights and weekends (say, 20 hours a week) to bring in some extra cash with a minimum of hassle. I have neither the time nor the inclination to build my own product, but I have no scruples about helping someone else build theirs as long as they pay me and respect what I'm looking for.

I found something on Craigslist about a month ago that I thought would work, but I did my job a little too well and the business owner said he wanted to bring me on full-time or not at all. This wasn't a great option, as I really love my day job and can't afford to give up the benefits it offers for the salary he was prepared to offer.

Anyone have any ideas how to find this sort of work and make it stick? Anywhere besides Craigslist that would be worth my time looking?

Your best bet may be with contacts in your existing social circle, or associates of associates. You may have luck working for strangers on Craigslist, but I suspect if you ask around (discreetly perhaps), you'll have better luck working for someone with some social connection to you.

Meant to point that out as well, but definitely within your own social circle or even your family social circle.

I did some work with Creative Circle (www.creativecircle.com) a few years back. They are a staffing agency for programmers, designers, etc. They usually have freelance, contract, or other short term jobs. Those were some of the most interesting jobs I did as a freelancer. One job was for Brash entertainment, and they needed 3 versions of an email template design in 24 hours to promote the release of Jumper: the Videogame. I pulled an all-nighter and paid that month's rent. If I didn't have a full-time job and a business, I would be doing freelance gigs with Creative Circle.

First thing I would do is create a portfolio of any work you have done.

You can try Freelancer.com, odesk, and other sites like that. Also keep tabs on Craigslist. There are many times quick jobs come up on there. One option with Craigslist is to check big cities, and not necessarily ones around you either. Many times there are listings there for freelance, remote workers for short-term projects.

What kind of development do you do?

My day job is with a defense contractor doing service integration for a surveillance system. This is cool, and highly stable (good for the kid), but probably not amenable as experience for part-time work. The night job I was doing for a while was for a company in Denver (my home) on an iPhone app they were writing as a prototype demonstration for their database sharding product dbShards. This was much cooler, but as I said above, not really an option going forward.

Paid work has been primarily in Java, with a fair bit of AJAX development for interfaces. Most work in my M.S. was in C++, but this hasn't gotten much traction from employers. I've done a handful of scripts and under-the-radar one-offs in Python, but nothing anyone would call an application. I try to believe in the idea that a competent developer should be able to learn any tool necessary, but an M.S. doesn't demonstrate learning ability or technical skill to most H.R. departments the way 10 years experience with HP printers does.

As suggested above, you'll need something to show prospective clients. This can be challenging when most of your work isn't publicly available, which necessitates building some portfolio pieces for show-and-tell.

For UI-capable developers this would be Web apps/sites, for systems-oriented programmers this could be libraries or utilities.

Also, can you use the business owner you mentioned as a reference (worst he can do is say "no")?

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