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Comment by johnrob | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone considered taking a day job that essentially involves loads of free time and no intellectual property constraints? Perhaps some sort of support or attendant role where your primary duty is to monitor and occasionally deal with incidents.

Assuming such a job existed (I have to believe it does), would this have most of the benefits of ramen profitability?

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Jack Kerouac took a job as a fire monitor once. It involved sitting alone in a cabin in the middle of a forest, watching for fires.

http://www.geocities.com/phoffman3/desolation/

In high school I worked as a library clerk. Our library was small with only a handful of patrons at a time. I spent the first couple hours of each shift shelving books and doing other data entry tasks, then the rest of the time I pretty much worked on whatever I wanted. The other lady that normally worked with me liked to spend her time reading books.

Working on stuff at the library can have other advantages too. It's a quiet workspace mostly free of distractions, and you have easy access to lots of reference material.

Night security guard at an office building.

EDIT: I haven't done this, though I did a lot of standing guard in the middle of the night overseas in the Navy, and you've got lots of time and solitude.

I had a friend who did this, with a goal not of starting a business, but of reading a ton of literature and philosophy. He ended up just being tired all the time.

It probably really depends on the person...I'm a natural night owl, so once I adjusted to the schedule, it wasn't a big deal. I got a ton of reading and school done during the six months I had that assignment.

During my co-op term, I had a job in a Canadian federal government department (Statistics Canada). I worked maybe one hour a day, and that was enough to get all my projects finished on time.

There were many jobs there that had loads of free time.

The rest of the time was spent surfing, working on little programming projects, and learning new languages. If only I could tell my younger self to direct all my free time and energy into a startup.

Of course, I had to sign away any intellectual property rights to belong to the government... but how enforceable is that? And no one would ever find out if you didn't mention anything anyways :-)

This strategy clearly lacks some of the benefits of ramen profitability, most obviously the demonstrated ability to get someone to pay for your product. However, I wonder if this approach could serve as a less risky way to pursue ramen profitability. Once you have enough customers, you quit the job.

A great job for this is hotel night auditor, where you look after the front desk, and do some accounting overnight, but have a lot of free time too. Not bad pay either generally.

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