I imagine that finding a full-time job won't be hard. However, I have no idea where to approach this when it comes to short-term work. I have a lot of experience and I think I can be useful to a lot of teams, even in the short-term.
Do you have ideas on how I can approach this?
Update: I think either 2-4 week project or 2-3 hours a day for a longer period will work for me.
I'd like to expand the list of income sources where the worker has 100% control over their own schedule and is not beholden to a client, does anyone know of more?
* Donating plasma (upwards of $1000 per month due to pandemic)
* Uber/Lyft
You also get paid for "normal" blood donations, even though the payment is technically only a "compensation" for your time and trouble. The donation services like German Red Cross usually still make a profit, which is why some people make a point to donate directly to hospitals if possible.
Organ donation works the same way. It can be very profitable for the hospital and others involved. However we ban the sharing of those rewards with the people who actually provided the organ in that case.
It's boring work and customers are annoying and postal services really unreliable in some countries. Other than that, easy extra cash
Donations clear the blood of stuff like cholesterol and microplastics, so the first donation can leave one feeling better the next day. Donating twice a week can be more taxing on the body and result in stuff like a lower body temperature, slower heartbeat and lower blood pressure because the heart doesn't have to work so hard to pump thinner blood.
I'm mostly concerned about using up the body's regenerative ability, since nobody knows how many times that plasma can be synthesized over a lifetime. But many of the components in blood have a natural recycling rate anyway. I suspect that the body can't tell if it's building new plasma from old plasma or nutrients in food though.
Without more evidence, I feel that it's better to rely on the expertise of the medical community than speculation. Just my two cents, YMMV.
The last years, whenever I tried, I was just writing proposal after proposal and either I was to expensive or I heard nothing.
Maybe it's me, but my impression was that it got way harder to land proper paid jobs.
Also when setting your rate, be mindful that they (like most platforms) take 20%.
Maybe I'm just old and this space has been disrupted, I see this article from Upwork on it [0]. I would imagine your larger companies will still go through an agency.
I only did one short contract early on in my career, but I've known people who have done it for decades. They like the variety. Some contacts can be short, just a few weeks, while others can be for months or years. Some companies also do contract to hire... start as a contractor, then get hired in as a full time employee.
Which one may depend on your area and what kind of stuff you're looking to do. I can list some I've interacted with in some way over the years, but I can't speak much to how good or bad they are (maybe some others can). Here are a few to give you a jumping off point... TEKsystems, Robert Half, KellyMitchell, Kforce. You may also want to look up "IT Staffing", "Tech recruiting", stuff like that seems to be what they go by now.
Having someone next to you was wonderful for keeping me on task, and I really shined. Other situations where I was constantly helping people get unstuck also made me the office hero.
Otherwise I struggle like crazy.
I’ve also personally found focus more easily in framings along the lines of “survey the thoughts and options around X, then drive discussion toward picking a direction” or “here’s a numeric measure of how fast the thing currently is, iterate on making that number smaller”
Do you have a platform in mind?
Send me an email (in profile) and I can give some more specific recommendations or intros.
Put this in your HN bio: "I'm available for short-term MacOS / React consulting for $100/hr. Contact me at: <email>"
Obviously, adapt this to whatever technology / price is good for you. The point is: make it clear what you offer and at what price.
Do the same for every other place: GitHub bio, Twitter bio.
Put this as a banner bar on your website.
Add a page on your website where you sell yourself i.e. describe your relevant achievements.
Put a link to that page in your popular open source repos.
Every month HN has "who wants to be hired thread". Post there. Research all other freelance websites (upwork, fiverr, codementor, https://remoteok.com/ and many others) and post there if relevant.
Continue refining how to "sell yourself" i.e. how best to describe your skills and achievements to convince people to hire you.
You wrote open source libraries.
Write a blog post about each library, promote it on relevant reddit etc. forums, and at the bottom add "I'm available for contract work" and a link to that page on your website where you sell yourself.
This is now a process: write useful, technical blog posts, promote them at relevant social forums, add a link to your contracting offer at the bottom.
https://github.com/sponsors/astoilkov
I have one sponsor that's paying me $6 a month. That may be a viable option in the future.
