Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

I sell lift tickets at a ski resort. Some of our ticket windows are not at the main resort &#38; get about 5 customers on a slow day.<p>Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com<p>I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far.

Or, you could pick up a part time job doing what you're good at (hacking), earn as much money as a full time "mostly idle" type job, and use your <i>actual</i> free time for your projects.<p>The jobs you mention can't pay much more than $1500/month, which is 30 hours at $50/hour (or much less if you bill higher). One freelance project per month will fund your hacker lifestyle, and will probably look much better on your resumé later on in life.

When I was in college I worked the night shift at a television station in the tape room, and spent most of my time, four to five hours each eight hour shift, learning UNIX system administration, shell and Perl programming, or writing songs. However, last I heard, stations had started automating away most tape duties and merging the master control and tape operator jobs into one. Master control is not a "lot of downtime" kind of job--there are interruptions every few minutes, though I imagine it's seen some automation improvement since then.<p>System administration positions often have a lot of downtime, since if you're doing your job well, nothing is urgent and everything just hums along real pretty-like. Night watch in a hosting data center would probably be a great choice. If you're still in school, night shift in a university tech center would probably be a good choice, too (assuming it's open 24 hours...I think most large universities do have at least one center that is open all night).<p>Finally, have you considered contract work? This is a different model altogether. Instead of taking a job where you can half-ass it, and work on what you really want to most of the time, you take jobs every few weeks where you work your ass off, get paid a metric ass ton (like $100-$150 per hour), and finish the project in a week or two. Then you're free to hack for pleasure for a few weeks before taking on another paying gig. This has mostly been what I've done since leaving college and the television station. I usually billed $1000/day plus all expenses, if travel or whatever was involved, and often made more than my friends who worked full-time at regular jobs...it only takes a few projects for that math to work out.

Interruptions = Bugs<p>I wonder if you might be more productive by changing your habits. Get up and hack for two hours before going to a job that does not require creativity, then perhaps hack a bit more in the evening as life permits. The advantage here is that you will have plenty of thinking time between execution periods and it will support the quality of your work.<p>I know an author that does just this, his problem though is that he is too conscientious and competent and keeps getting promoted to positions that require too much creativity. At that point he has to change jobs.

Incidentally, this is RMS' (Stallman, of course, not our own 'rms') suggestion for those who are unable to find a day job doing free software: do something unrelated to software (with the idea being the avoidance of contributing to proprietary software) that gives you free time. Hearing that in person from RMS was the beginning of the end of my interest in RMS style free software.

Trevor has always said that his dream job was to be a projectionist in a movie theater.

I worked at the University library and it was a dream. In a given 4 hour period I probably did 20 minutes of work.

Front desk at a small hotel.<p>My wife had this job when we first got married. When she was pregnant, the hotel actually let me cover some shifts for her. It was awesome. I'd bring my laptop and once the check-in rush was over (6pm-ish), it was real quiet and I could hack away.

In college, I worked 2nd and 3rd shift doing tier 2 tech support at an ISP. I spent most of my time doing my CS homework. The guys working 1st shift didn't have that luxury.<p>Not sure you'd find the same thing...just another data point.

As a student, I worked as technical support at our libraries to help other students with computer stuff.<p>For every 4 hour shift, there was maybe 30 minutes of work.<p>During "work" was when I discovered/experimented with Ruby on Rails, got interested in start ups, read a lot of PG essays, starting hacking on side projects, etc...<p>Actually, that job is probably why I'm not working for a BigCo.

I'm surprised no one threw out some crap about the Four Hour Work Week.<p>I have at various times applied for work at movie theaters, Kinko's, video rental places, etc. I have not yet ended up working a side job, but I have done contracting work (programming and sys admin) that I ordinarily would not take (windows stuff) when desparate. My impression is that these types of side jobs are harder to get than you think, because employers like someone whose main focus is this job, who is likely to stick around, and who cares enough about the job to try hard not to get fired.<p>As a result, at one time I thought hard for a while about how to make jobs that were more suited to my needs. Rather than be able to work on my stuff at work, which I suspected would not work, I tried to think of a way I could make rent plus ramen money working one long 12 hour day per week.<p>The useful result of that exercise is that I thought long and hard about how much money I really, really needed to survive, and cut down my expenses considerably.<p>The more entertaining result was that I came up with a number of crazy "part-time business" ideas. The one which I partly did and made money on was finding old books at garage sales to sell online. (Very little money.) The one which people like to talk about is my "human powered lawn care" idea: Every Saturday, I and 4 or more one-day-a-weekers would meet up, ride on bikes to our rich green-freak hippy clients, and mow their lawn in a "carbon neutral" fasion, with reel push mowers and other hand-powered implements. I had this pretty well figured out, from the hauling of implements with bike trailers to having one bike with generator you put the back wheel on, to power a single weed-wacker (weed-wackers being indispensible tools of modern lawn care). People like to talk about that idea, but no one wanted to do it with me.<p>Another strategy would be to seek out a job that is by it's nature part-time, and thus maybe undesireable to the people who would normally do it -- such as assisting in managing a farmer's market stand, which would limited to one day a week. If you severly limit your expenses, you can survive and then invest the rest of your time in your startup idea.

Nothing food service related! Think your keyboard is dirty now? Wait until your laptop has been on the salad station for a night or two. Seriously though: The forest service has some -lonely- jobs watching for fires in the national forests. Lighthouse keeper? Night watchman? Lots of night shift jobs should be conducive to hacking.<p>Seriously consider also jobs that won't be conducive to hack but would be for knowledge acquisition. Get a job at MIT that comes with course audit benefits. A job that requires the hands, but allows you to consume audio lectures on your ipod. Long haul trucker that listens to mit courseware?

Finding a job that pays the bills while allowing you to hack is an interesting way to become 'ramen profitable'. That might be the ultimate way to hack the funding process...

why not a sys admin? its fairly easy work 95% of the time ...

Well if you're in Europe, what about: 'unemployed'? 80% of your current paycheck for the first 6 months, then you <i>really</i> should start looking for something that resembles a job. I know people who travelled the world on 'unemployment'. If you're looking for quiet time, why don't you just skip the social obligation of 'having a job'?

Whatever it is, <i>make sure</i> it doesn't require an IP agreement. The ones you mentioned obviously wouldn't.

Night security at some office building sounds like a dream job to me. I would do it for free and maybe I would even pay to do it since I would get more (computer) work done there than working out of my apartment.

I've sometimes thought about how I could get paid 2x, 3x, or more. As a graduate student RA it wouldn't be that hard to get 2x. Just do my computer research at a nightshift security job. But how about: RA+security+baby sitting+baking in my portable easy bake oven!

Take care of paralysed people. They need round the clock watching, so you can sit there nights, drink coffee and code. I used to do that, it made me a good amount of money (from the code I produced during that time).

I used to work in a video store. Not many people used to turn up, so had a lot of time to myself. You might want to just jump into the store next door. Would be a good bet.

Dog-sitter?

I sold tickets on the phone for a small-medium ticket company. Some nights were busy, but usually I had plenty of free time.

Behind the desk at an Internet Cafe?

Librarian +1

Actually I've had that situation several times in <i>technology</i> jobs. It's not so much the job itself as it is the company. I had a great gig at a company in Marin County (read: north of the Golden Gate, laid-back, hippies) where I was able to learn Perl, the WWW, and Unix. Find a non-critical role in a company that isn't audited heavily (non-public company, smaller division of a large company) and hack away.<p>One option to stay under the radar: use virtual machine to do your coding in. It's not that you have to hide what you're doing, but you might not want to keep answering questions or might otherwise just rather stay underground.