Telecommuting programming jobs?
I find myself in a situation where I need to find gainful employment fairly soon. At the same time, I am working on my master's degree project, and the couple of jobs I have interviewed for here in my area have required some crazy amounts of overtime. I'm prepared to work a ton of overtime a year from now, after I have finished my master's work.
I've heard of more and more programmers telecommuting. I hadn't really thought of this before, but it sounds like it might be a potential answer to my problems. I don't need the world's greatest pay, I don't absolutely require benefits (I'm covered by my wife's except in the two summer months where she doesn't work), I just need a way of contributing some money to the household in this transitional time, while I finish the project work for my degree.
Is there a market out there for "fresh grad" telecommuting programmers? Or is it only for the hardened, experienced coding masters? I feel my education allows me to quickly get up to speed in anything asked of me, but I need an opportunity to start somewhere. And I'm not sure where to look.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. 
Am I barking up the wrong tree?
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Just a thought.
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Nope, there's a decent market for this kind of work if you look around. When my son was born my wife was looking for a way to work from home to be with him and while searching through the websites catering to that sort of thing we found a lot of programming related jobs out there. A bunch of the work was website/.NET maintenance related but there were also quick gigs where people just wanted custom built apps for their businesses or MS Office macros for processing large amounts of data. You could make a few hundred dollars a week easy just doing stuff like that if you could find steady work.
Also, you could call a headhunter agency and see what they could find for you.
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I do this. I don't like the lack of social contact, and I have yet to find a good wireless cafe.
Bug headhunters - they bug me all the time.
Mystic Violet wrote:
Thanks for the tip. Any tips on finding one? Half of the things that come up in web searches look like shady scams.
Anyone else with tips? I'm pretty sure I've heard about other people here that do this before.
Gaming / PC Tech Blog: www.blastprocessing.net
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You have to believe, we are magic.
Hmm, no tips here I'm afraid. The only telecommuting people I know are those who got their gigs through personal contacts.
I understand some contract work can be arranged to be done via telecommuting, but I've never done it myself. You might have better luck posting about this on the Joel on Software forums - it's full of micro ISVs and one-person shops.
Telecommuting rocks. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to go back to an office on a daily basis.
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I do both, and I love them both. Except for the fact that my webserver is in Wisconsin and I'm not. Makes troubleshooting configuration issues a bit of a bitch.
I got my telecommuting work via contacts, but I've also worked as a contractor. That might be right up your alley. Most contracts don't actually allow overtime, much less require it.
Don't look for contract agencies online. Look in the actual Yellow Pages and look for one that has a brick-and-mortar presence nearby. Or, even better, call up a couple companies of the sort you'd like to work for and find out who they deal with.
Also, some agencies only deal with certain types of people; make sure you ask about that when you're making your choice.
Duoae wrote:
Thanks for the tips! I appreciate all the info I can get.
Gaming / PC Tech Blog: www.blastprocessing.net
Xbox Live: Legion SB / PSN: Legion_SB / Steam: legion028 / Twitter: legion
You have to believe, we are magic.
I know some people who have hired programmers for small one-off web applications in PHP or .Net off of elance. Set yourself up as a contract programmer, and bid on jobs that fit your skillset and time. I don't know how hard you'd have to compete on price, but there seems to be enough there to keep you as busy as you want to be.