Ask HN: How to find online employment for a person with limited functionality | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to find online employment for a person with limited functionality

55 pointsayamabi40 comments

Hello HN, I am 35 years old and have 10+ years experience as a DevOps/Systems Engineer, but due to health related issues I'm out of work for 2 years.

Now I encountered a situation where urgently need some additional income of about $300/month to cover my basic needs as my country isn't willing to do that for me, but I'm only able to work about 2-3 hours per days.

I'm looking for some suggestions and experiences in this field, because I'm honestly at a loss here.

Please tell me if you know where it's possible to start looking to get some part-time online work. I'm open basically for any types of online work I can reasonably do as a computer-literate person.

Thanks

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Maybe a long-shot: Last year I did 15 hrs a week proofreading CS and Engineering journal papers. Got around $300 - $350 per month

- Company 1: https://cactusglobal.com/careers/freelance/

- Company 2: https://proofreading.org/about/careers/

Didn't need a certificate in Proofreading / Editing. You have to test edit a few sample papers to get employed. My backgound: software development (but have a Science degree too from years ago).

The work is remote, flexible (you can decline papers) but *not* highly paid. Also quite hard if you get a poorly written paper. I only did it as a stop-gap.

Also: don't know if GPT has finished this market...

(The below presumes you live in a mid- to high-income economy):

if you only need $300/month, and you can only do 2 hours a day, you're much more likely to find what you need locally by word of mouth (helping people fix their computers, setting up web accounts / etc). An hour or two a week would net you the $300/mo you need. It'll be easier to find that hour locally than on the internet.

making money on the internet doesn't necessarily scale down infinitely, for example you can't spend 6 minutes a day earning 4 dollars very easily; there's a minimum amount of time it takes to talk to people and arrange jobs etc.

I would look locally if I were you.

If it is possible without telling us any more about your conditions than you want us to know, it would help to know what the blocker is that prevents more than 2-3 hours of work per day. Because the answers to the type of work we recommend are going to be different if it is a physical limitation of being up and around vs. a mental limitation based on stress or cognitive endurance, etc. Answers will be different if you need 20 hours of recovery after 2-3 hours vs. 2 hours of recovery.

After some trauma I get tired cognitively really easily now, it's hard for me to concentrate for more than 2 hours.

could you manage two hours in the morning and two in the evening or are you done for the day? either way, two hours a day should be enough to earn 300$ a month if you can find work.

that's quite a low hourly rate, so you should even be able to find jobs at upwork and similar platforms.

apart from that, find sites where you can sign up and where people hiring can find you.

post on hackernews "who wants to be hired" https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

it may take a while to find something, but it's low effort. same goes for some other sites. sign up where you can and see if you get offers.

describe what work you can do, and tell that you are looking for only 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week of work. don't explain why. for a side job 2 hours a day is normal, so noone will consider it unusual that you can only do 2 hours. they don't need to know the real reason.

when you have the time and energy then go back to those same sites and actively look for work you could do.

codementor for example. it's easy to sign up and depending on the skills you offer you'll get people contacting you. i get about one request per month, which is not enough for me to live on, but it might just be enough for you.

and considering your situation, i would also look at mechanical turk. the pay is low, but the tasks are simple and they may just be the kind of thing that you can do without making you tired. i could be wrong, but give it a try.

Back of the envelope... $300 per month is $10 per day. At 2 hr. of work per day it's $5/hr. I don't know your urgency level, but you can trivially make that much on Fiverr by doing small scale work (setting up stuff on servers, developing simple scripts) once you establish yourself a bit.

What have you tried so far?

Not throwing any shade just don't want to be suggesting stuff you've already tried.

I just recently encountered the urgent necessity for the additional income, so I didn't really tried much until now. Another thing I'm thinking about it teaching kids computers and some mathematics, but I also don't know how to start here.

Ok have you tried freelancing? The freelancing sites like upwork and fiverr should be able to get you to that level of money per month.

I can't promise anything but could you please email me your resume? chris at orgmenta dot com

(or just any info you want to provide. I don't care about resumes themselves, and don't want you to waste your time on it for me)

First off, I want to commend you for reaching out and seeking solutions despite the hurdles you're facing. Your experience in DevOps and Systems Engineering is solid gold, even if you can only dedicate a few hours a day. There are several avenues you could explore to bring in that extra $300 a month without overwhelming yourself.

Considering your background, freelancing or consultancy gigs might be your best bet. Websites like Upwork, Freelancer, or even reaching out to small businesses directly could land you short-term projects or consultations in your field. Your expertise is valuable, so don't hesitate to put it out there!

This reads as a ChatGPT response.

Did you consider reselling or affiliate? We human spend our time and money on things constantly.

By selling things people actually want there is always money to be made. eBay, Etsy, classifieds & local alternatives.

While selling is kinda predictable you can also avoid handling products and go the affiliate route. Find products you care about, find a way to cheaply promote them, then put together a nice (actually helpful) website, write a few words and fill it with AI text.

A few hundred dollars per month are absolutely doable at 2-3 hours per week once you found things that work for you. So invest the 2-3 a day to find these things.

This sounds a bit out there. It seems like it would be very saturated to be able to do this by just making a website with AI text. I could only imagine someone being able to make money from it if they are a content creator with decent following who stands out with that.

OP could possibly make content of their struggle, but it would still require certain personality and passion to do that.

I am no affiliate marketer by any means. However you just need to be the last click in the chain of a buying decision.

If you have any kind of expertise in a area, no matter how niche or weird, a simple knowledge website can easily be that last click for someone. AI can just fill the blanks of your existing expertise.

There are millions of ways to approach this. Sure it doesn't happen over night, and you need to find 'tricks' that work for you and your products and audience.

But I am certain that anyone with enough time can find their piece of the cake that is our world of constant consumption.

(Stupid Example:// I just bought a repair part for my coffee machine, nobody dominates the affiliate market here. However I needed to research which additional parts I would need to open the machine, etc. I googled like 5 related phrases in my research, any targeted blog post would have shown up catched my interest and maybe would have lead to a sale. Let's say there are 1 million machines of that type that need that part every 5 years or so, maybe 10k would repair it themself or at least try to. They Google, see your article and maybe 10% actually buys the parts. 10k, so 2k per year. 10% buying from your links so 200 people, 200 X 5% of 30$ = 300$ a year. Now repeat with the next machine type, then next brand. Etc)

How do you get any traffic to your site in the first place?

You are already competing with tons of SEO spamming websites trying to trick people into affiliate purchases, and they've been in business for much longer.

Google is almost useless in many cases because of all of those SEO hacking websites.

Especially now with AI, so many websites generated using AI tools to target SEO, and you would have to compete with their practices.

I agree to 100% that Google is nearly useless at this point because of SEO hacking.

However Google is not that stupid. If your site is the only one users don't leave after 10 seconds Google knows that.

AI content works well, but only if you input the right things and there is hours of work and expertise as well to get that right, even if it's automated in the end. Each problem needs to be tackled specifically no recipe just transports properly to another niche.

IMO organic traffic & SEO is still king. A few Reddit posts or well placed blog comments are enough to establish a new domain. If users spend time on your site, because you share actual knowledge, traffic grows from its own. Even more if you grow with content as well. Sure it takes time, but I still earn my few hundred dollars once and then from things I built years ago and never touched again. Each of them tackling a niche problem I had, researched and then shared in a accessible format. My sites don't look like affiliate spam because they bring value and I target the traffic trough SEO looking for that exact value.

Google might wait 6 months until they rank your site higher (same as you mention some old websites). I think for a new website it would take a while to rank properly. This matches my experience with own domains too.

I would look at it and say this person does something full time but has 2-3 extra hours per day they would like to use to make some extra money.

Tutor CS/SWE students or something you can do with what you have available. Possibly bilingual, translation, or something like that? Cold call companies to make their websites. Find a website that revenue shares for writing articles. Start a social media channel. Bid on government contracts https://sam.gov/content/opportunities

> I'm only able to work about 2-3 hours per days

Is that a hard limit, or are you saying that under normal office hours you can only do 2-3 hours? Eg, could you do a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening?

I'm guessing that's not possible but if you could push it to 5-6 hours I suspect you'd have a much easier time at finding employment because then you say you're basically able to do what a full-timer is doing, you'd just need a little extra flexibility in terms of hours worked.

Can you give more details on your background as a DevOps/Systems Engineer? What languages you do know, what experience do you have?

You can check my last CV here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xwTW7DPPRb-B7DM1Oh4Vjqcq...

Right now I'm able to do some scripting, but I am at a loss how to leverage my knowledge given my current condition, because I'm used to be always employed full-time previously.

What's the current market like for technically orientated human eyeball verification of daily data intake ?

This may or may not be what the OP was looking for, but at one point it wasn't uncommon to have humans doing QC work on data streams.

Depending on the type of data and the cost of admitting errors it was known to sometimes pay well enough for the amount outlined.

2-3 hours per day is the amount of real work done at most corporate full-time positions, at best.

that may be true, but often not in one easy to schedule block.

getting a (or another) job is also not trivial, esp. if they're not in the US (which is true by the sounds of it)

Have you considered or tried platforms like Upwork? Or is it that the kind of work you’re capable of isn’t in demand on those kinds of platforms?

I’d have thought if you had fairly basic web development skills you could make more than $300/month from somewhere like that?

I've tried Upwork for some extra cash some years back. The competition from lower-wages-countries is such that makes it impossible to break into it. Unless you speak 'unique' language that you can leverage on, there will be someone in India that will do it for 1/5 of what you consider reasonable amount.

(with that said we don't know OP's location)

Exactly, and it's gotten even worse lately.

Unless you have a track record and reputation on the sites already, your proposals will simply be ignored anyway.

It's really a waste of time there unless you can offer something very unique, or can somehow undercut the developing-nation sweatshops - even then, you'll be mostly ignored with no track record.

Start growing your reputation on an online marketplace like upwork. Bid on small projects that don't take long. As your reputation grows, so will your earning ability.

Maybe some customer support? Development of prototypes and non-urgent functions?

I could do that, but the question is specifically how to find a company which will take me.

I don't have a good answer, but I have a French client who also employs an American guy whose health is very weak (but I think it's more bouts of 2 weeks without being able to work), and my client just patiently waits for him to be able to come back. He even gives him French healthcare perks out of (the corp.) pocket, because it'd be more complicated to involve an external insurance (in France the salary is insured too, not just the medical bills).

With only 2-3hrs of time what can you realistically achieve?

that's plenty of time to achieve a lot and have a decent income. problem is, no one is offering it, you gotta take it

I am also thinking to have a strategy/plan for something bigger in place.

You don't mention details of your health/medical situation, but while you get "the thing" that will NOW get you the $300 per month, perhaps you aim for $350 or $400, and in parallel start thinking on "what can I build that will generate (in two years?) a steady $300". So in 3-6 months you can use the extra generated ($50-$100 per month) to build some service, website, etc.?

I wonder what I could archive would I actively work with full passion just 2-3 hours every day.

Imo that's plenty

You may be overestimating the real amount of truly focused work that was done by many technical employees back in 2010s.

freelance QA/testing?

I could do that, but do you have any ideas where to start here?

sorry i have same issue

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