Jobs I've been looking at:
house sitting
night shift security
library desk
etc.
But then you have to start it right on time, check if everything is sharp and framed well, then come back 5 minutes later to check again and preferable come back yet again after another 5 minutes. This is because sharpness, framing may vary or the automatic lens change between commercials and the movie may screw things up.
I worked in a small theater with only 4 screens, but it was hectic none the less. Sure you have some time between films, but usually management finds more jobs for to do. I also often helped behind the snacks counter or had to clean the seats and alleys after a screening.
Building robots seriously seems like it's incredibly fun and interesting.
Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com
I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far.
I'm going to make a few more tweaks tonight and try to get some more feedback from HN.
Then, at least in Britain, they send you on pretty patronising courses about how to read job adverts, how to go to interviews and so on along with making you go in once a week and give proof that you've been "jobseeking". The job centre'll put you forward for any work going, regardless of whether it's a good match for your skills. If you refuse, no benefits. And for all this, you get the princely sum of £60 a week. Not enough to feed, heat and house yourself, let alone travel the globe.
It's not a free ride by any means, and if you've been through it through no fault of your own it's a pretty demoralising and humiliating system.
In Switzerland, the last time I was unemployed, I got about 80% of my salary, and they would have paid it for two years. You have to 'prove' you are looking for a job, but not getting hired when you have interviews is probably not that difficult. Someone showed me applications from people who obviously didn't want to get hired, they were very colourful and with lots of drawings.
In Belgium I heard you don't even have to prove you're looking, and there's no time limit for staying unemployed.
In France there is the rmi, revenu minimum d'insertion, that gives you money, apparently not even expecting you to find a job. That policy is not as stupid as it sounds, there are serious economists defending it, they call it the negative income tax. It's really not very much money, but I've met plenty of people living from it.
The people who do this are usually not very proud of it and get out of it when they can.
All those systems are being slowly scrapped or made less attractive everywhere. They are leftovers from better times.
If you're looking for a moral justification, what about this: the baby-boomers set up a social security system that 'conveniently' collapses after they are long dead. The younger generations will not reap the benefits of this system, they will only carry the burden.
So why don't you take some of your tax money back and get a little retirement right now? Or better yet: do something productive outside of the system.
The worst is usually the same people get the calls about the primary app server being down as someone's windows box having too many popups.
I spend 3 days a week as a sys admin, and 2 days a week freelance/working on startup. (was freelance mostly, now mostly startup)
sys admin is good work - i'm particularly lucky - my company is very flexible, and Mac OS X.
I lived in a condo once, next to a construction site. The noise started at 8 am and finished at 4pm. I ran into a woman in the elevator, crying because she couldn't sleep and she worked a night shift.
By the way, I do contribute to free software, and enjoy doing so a great deal:
http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/
(Unfortunately the patches/ and files/ bits aren't working due to issues with mod_rails)
My issue is with the idea that I should under no circumstances work on proprietary software.
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.
I'm in the position of working full-time and starting a company part-time, and am very careful to keep my two worlds separate, even though I'm 99.999% sure that my employer has no interest in attempting to take ownership the product I'm building.
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.
"Since I have no elance reputation, I am willing to work for free and receive payment after the work is completed and satisfactory."
I never got ripped off, but even if I had, so what? Most elance jobs (the ones I've done) are fixed fee, and the buyer doesn't have to know how many hours (or minutes) I spend. ;-)
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.
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).
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.
However, there are still positions where you spend a lot of time sitting in the studio with not a lot to do. Many stations run "network" programming which is delivered via satellite or ISDN from a central hub and employ a "tech op", usually a wannabe DJ who's still in school, to oversee it and make sure the network feed and local ads or other inserts go out on air. It's a job with a lot of downtime and you're sitting in a room full of computers. What could be better?!
Not sure you'd find the same thing...just another data point.
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?
Also, the title "Librarian" requires an MLS.
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.
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.
For every 4 hour shift, there was maybe 30 minutes of work.
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...
Actually, that job is probably why I'm not working for a BigCo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
