Solve : Can I work at home with my tech skills??

1.	Solve : Can I work at home with my tech skills??
Answer» As you might know, I am now 81 years old and living on Social Security. It is alright, but it so happens I live in California, among the most expensive states for cost of living. My Electric bill is beyond human understanding. So, I ahve been thinking. Can I work at home with my tech skills? Maybe some of you have and can give me honest answers. Some things I have tried and found that I had to spend money to make money. Not a great idea. Here is just one example I found in a search: These 10 hottest tech skills could pay off the most in 2020 Quote In today’s job market, technology skills are crucial. The demand for IT workers is high, pay for tech jobs is competitive, and more workers in nearly every line of work are putting effort into learning data and technology skills. But with the rapid rise of advanced technology, it can be difficult to pin exactly which skills will pay off the most in the long run. Yeah, but can I do any of that at home? I can not drive a car and I don't like to walk. My knees are weak. You may be able to find a job doing telephone tech support. I know 2 people that worked at those type of jobs. One (my niece) did software support for software she knew nothing about. They provided her with a large binder with scripts to run through for all the software they supported. She just ran through the script for that particular software application and if she got to the END of the script and the issue wasn't fixed, she passed the call off to the next level of support. I don't think she got paid very well since she didn't stay at that job very long. Another person I know is pretty technically knowledgeable and does phone tech support without a provided binder. I suppose he gets paid a decent salary since he's been doing that type of work for awhile. However, he seems to get laid off every 2-3 years. I know another person that does customer support from home for retail stores. When people call in with problems with something they purchased, he helps them and arranges for returns and refunds and things like that. Here's a link that might give you some leads for tech support jobs: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/tech-support-from-home-3542621 The last 10 years or so of my career, I worked mostly from home as a software engineer. Not sure if your skills are current enough to be able to do that. I am also retired and living in California. I can't imagine trying to live on what Social Security gives me per month. Good luck finding some gainful employment.Strollin, Thanks for the link. I will look at it and maybe I can do it. While not very tech, it might be worth checking into: A friend of mine got a job as a Taxi dispatcher and he is able to work from home. The business that hired him redirected their calls from their business number to his home where he also unable to get out of his home due to handicap, but he is capable of answering phone calls and dispatching the cabs to the customers. It doesn't pay crazy money but its a little above minimum wage. When waiting for calls he SURFS the internet playing games or WATCHING Dr Who etc. Then pauses the game or whatever he is doing to do the job. Not sure how much uber has hurt the business but he still works for them and gets paid to work from home as a cab/taxi service dispatcher. Maybe check with taxi companies in your area to see if they need any work from home dispatchers. He was one of 4 people who worked from home answering calls and setting up customers with cab drivers. He works in Toronto though Canada as far as location of the job he has.I work from home though I wasn't looking to do so when I was job-searching (about 6 and a half years now). I program desktop software in C# and do a little bit of support (mostly being brought in when the support staff can't fix something or to set up/configure something I worked on). I also man the after-hours (we advertise 24/7 support) in week long shifts with two others. (Which finally gave my smartphone a reason to exist) The more interesting aspect relevant to your expertise is that the bulk of the support work is dealing with an old OS called Theos Corona and software written in the 80's. (our "old" software). Which really brings about the point that many companies are running quite old software and therefore they will occasionally need people with expertise with the software stacks- to fix problems or bugs, fix crashed setups for which nobody remembers how it works, etc. As I understand you have Assembly, FORTRAN and COBOL experience which- if you look in the right places- can be a very high-demand skillset for older software setups that need maintenance. As a correlated example, sometime in the early 90's, somebody stole all the source code to the old software, quit, and then basically "forked" it and started to sell it under-the-table to companies in our industry, even poaching a few customers that were working with us. They made their own modifications to the programs for those customers. Well, a few years ago that guy literally died, and now those companies are scrambling because they literally have zero support. We can't help them because we aren't doing new installs of our old software, they weren't one of our customers anymore either so aside from not knowing what customizations they had, their features were never considered for the windows programs. In that scenario, A consultant with a strong grasp of THEOS Corona and it's VAX-11-like BASIC would be an incredibly valuable person to that company, as the company did have the source code- but couldn't find anybody who would work on it. Similar situations, I'm sure, play out across the globe for COBOL, FORTRAN, and perhaps even older embedded assembly stuff. At that level of "desperation" whether you would work remotely via a terminal link or remote desktop or whatever probably is less important than the fact that there is now hope that they can be brought back online. of course I suppose the trick would be finding those relevant to your skills and inserting yourself into the conversation somehow!The biggest problem you face is that in many online fields, you're competing with the whole world. And therefore with billions of people who can simply afford to work for far less than you can (living in one of the most expensive countries in the world). Therefore, whatever work you look for, you should look to make sure that it leverages the fact that you're in the US, know the country/area and can legally work there. That can be your competitive advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you play it. Good Luck Just realized one job to share here that pays from home is that there are websites that have forums that they want to keep the forums lively and so a friend of mine is paid in amazon gift cards by the website owner to moderate as well as logon as alias identities and when a subject gets slow and the forum needs more activity, he will go on as an alias and stir it up some. This way people will go back to the website to chat about whatever the subject is and the website owner gets paid money for the ad traffic from people visiting the website. Not money to get rich on, but EXTRA money that he is able to buy stuff on amazon and income tax free loop hole of gift cards because its not all that much money that he earns. He makes about $100 a month doing this and enjoys it. He just logs on once or twice a day to check on things and only has to spend time there when he has to give the forum a kick to get people to communicate etc or kick a trouble person out who is spamming etc. He found this job when searching for work at home moderator jobs. Hey, Just a thought. You could maybe put a listing for yourself in the local paper if it has a website. Get them to come to you to save yourself going out. Can't believe your 81. Hat of to you! You've helped lots of people including me in the past and your still going, so a big thank you for all your help to me and everyone now and forever. Hope something good comes your way, you deserve it! I read that BC said you had COBOL. This is on LinkedIn. It says "This is a nine month contract position and US Citizenship required" and it can be 100% remote. https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1676707330?trk=li_ziprecruiter_Global_careers_jobsgtm_job-dist&utm_medium=jobdist&utm_Thank you for the encouragement. That COBOL job that you found has already been filled & they wanted a full-time employee. And I am not familiar with the new variations on COBOL. But years ago I did do quite a bit of programming in what has now become all generically DB2 but no longer exists as the original product. It was a great product for its time and made it POSSIBLE to take CP/M computers and have them do stuff that ordinarily would of been done on a mainframe. That was cool. But nowadays I think I'm too old to do any real coding. I am so slow. It probably would take me one hour to write one line of useful code. That is supposed to be an inside joke. Somewhere somebody calculated that for each line of valid code it consumes one hour of somebody's time if you include the debugging, deploying and revising needed to keep it going. By the way, I am doing this using Dragon naturally speaking and it is not the newest version. After some effort I discovered how to make this version work with Windows 10. So maybe that is something I could to, I can show people how to take an older version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and use it with Windows 10. The older version can be purchased for a very attractive price. Maybe I should start up a little business offering night help to people that have trouble with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. End of my voice recognition.

Answer»

As you might know, I am now 81 years old and living on Social Security. It is alright, but it so happens I live in California, among the most expensive states for cost of living. My Electric bill is beyond human understanding.

So, I ahve been thinking. Can I work at home with my tech skills? Maybe some of you have and can give me honest answers. Some things I have tried and found that I had to spend money to make money. Not a great idea.

Here is just one example I found in a search:
These 10 hottest tech skills could pay off the most in 2020
Quote

In today’s job market, technology skills are crucial.
The demand for IT workers is high, pay for tech jobs is competitive, and more workers in nearly every line of work are putting effort into learning data and technology skills. But with the rapid rise of advanced technology, it can be difficult to pin exactly which skills will pay off the most in the long run.

Yeah, but can I do any of that at home?
I can not drive a car and I don't like to walk. My knees are weak.
You may be able to find a job doing telephone tech support. I know 2 people that worked at those type of jobs.

One (my niece) did software support for software she knew nothing about. They provided her with a large binder with scripts to run through for all the software they supported. She just ran through the script for that particular software application and if she got to the END of the script and the issue wasn't fixed, she passed the call off to the next level of support. I don't think she got paid very well since she didn't stay at that job very long.

Another person I know is pretty technically knowledgeable and does phone tech support without a provided binder. I suppose he gets paid a decent salary since he's been doing that type of work for awhile. However, he seems to get laid off every 2-3 years.

I know another person that does customer support from home for retail stores. When people call in with problems with something they purchased, he helps them and arranges for returns and refunds and things like that.

Here's a link that might give you some leads for tech support jobs: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/tech-support-from-home-3542621

The last 10 years or so of my career, I worked mostly from home as a software engineer. Not sure if your skills are current enough to be able to do that.

I am also retired and living in California. I can't imagine trying to live on what Social Security gives me per month. Good luck finding some gainful employment.Strollin,
Thanks for the link.
I will look at it and maybe I can do it.
While not very tech, it might be worth checking into:

A friend of mine got a job as a Taxi dispatcher and he is able to work from home. The business that hired him redirected their calls from their business number to his home where he also unable to get out of his home due to handicap, but he is capable of answering phone calls and dispatching the cabs to the customers. It doesn't pay crazy money but its a little above minimum wage. When waiting for calls he SURFS the internet playing games or WATCHING Dr Who etc. Then pauses the game or whatever he is doing to do the job.

Not sure how much uber has hurt the business but he still works for them and gets paid to work from home as a cab/taxi service dispatcher.

Maybe check with taxi companies in your area to see if they need any work from home dispatchers. He was one of 4 people who worked from home answering calls and setting up customers with cab drivers. He works in Toronto though Canada as far as location of the job he has.I work from home though I wasn't looking to do so when I was job-searching (about 6 and a half years now). I program desktop software in C# and do a little bit of support (mostly being brought in when the support staff can't fix something or to set up/configure something I worked on). I also man the after-hours (we advertise 24/7 support) in week long shifts with two others. (Which finally gave my smartphone a reason to exist)

The more interesting aspect relevant to your expertise is that the bulk of the support work is dealing with an old OS called Theos Corona and software written in the 80's. (our "old" software). Which really brings about the point that many companies are running quite old software and therefore they will occasionally need people with expertise with the software stacks- to fix problems or bugs, fix crashed setups for which nobody remembers how it works, etc.

As I understand you have Assembly, FORTRAN and COBOL experience which- if you look in the right places- can be a very high-demand skillset for older software setups that need maintenance.

As a correlated example, sometime in the early 90's, somebody stole all the source code to the old software, quit, and then basically "forked" it and started to sell it under-the-table to companies in our industry, even poaching a few customers that were working with us. They made their own modifications to the programs for those customers. Well, a few years ago that guy literally died, and now those companies are scrambling because they literally have zero support. We can't help them because we aren't doing new installs of our old software, they weren't one of our customers anymore either so aside from not knowing what customizations they had, their features were never considered for the windows programs.

In that scenario, A consultant with a strong grasp of THEOS Corona and it's VAX-11-like BASIC would be an incredibly valuable person to that company, as the company did have the source code- but couldn't find anybody who would work on it.

Similar situations, I'm sure, play out across the globe for COBOL, FORTRAN, and perhaps even older embedded assembly stuff. At that level of "desperation" whether you would work remotely via a terminal link or remote desktop or whatever probably is less important than the fact that there is now hope that they can be brought back online.

of course I suppose the trick would be finding those relevant to your skills and inserting yourself into the conversation somehow!The biggest problem you face is that in many online fields, you're competing with the whole world. And therefore with billions of people who can simply afford to work for far less than you can (living in one of the most expensive countries in the world).

Therefore, whatever work you look for, you should look to make sure that it leverages the fact that you're in the US, know the country/area and can legally work there. That can be your competitive advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you play it.

Good Luck Just realized one job to share here that pays from home is that there are websites that have forums that they want to keep the forums lively and so a friend of mine is paid in amazon gift cards by the website owner to moderate as well as logon as alias identities and when a subject gets slow and the forum needs more activity, he will go on as an alias and stir it up some. This way people will go back to the website to chat about whatever the subject is and the website owner gets paid money for the ad traffic from people visiting the website.

Not money to get rich on, but EXTRA money that he is able to buy stuff on amazon and income tax free loop hole of gift cards because its not all that much money that he earns. He makes about $100 a month doing this and enjoys it. He just logs on once or twice a day to check on things and only has to spend time there when he has to give the forum a kick to get people to communicate etc or kick a trouble person out who is spamming etc.

He found this job when searching for work at home moderator jobs.
Hey,

Just a thought. You could maybe put a listing for yourself in the local paper if it has a website. Get them to come to you to save yourself going out. Can't believe your 81. Hat of to you! You've helped lots of people including me in the past and your still going, so a big thank you for all your help to me and everyone now and forever. Hope something good comes your way, you deserve it!

I read that BC said you had COBOL. This is on LinkedIn. It says "This is a nine month contract position and US Citizenship required" and it can be 100% remote.

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1676707330?trk=li_ziprecruiter_Global_careers_jobsgtm_job-dist&utm_medium=jobdist&utm_Thank you for the encouragement.
That COBOL job that you found has already been filled & they wanted a full-time employee. And I am not familiar with the new variations on COBOL. But years ago I did do quite a bit of programming in what has now become all generically DB2 but no longer exists as the original product. It was a great product for its time and made it POSSIBLE to take CP/M computers and have them do stuff that ordinarily would of been done on a mainframe. That was cool.
But nowadays I think I'm too old to do any real coding. I am so slow. It probably would take me one hour to write one line of useful code. That is supposed to be an inside joke. Somewhere somebody calculated that for each line of valid code it consumes one hour of somebody's time if you include the debugging, deploying and revising needed to keep it going.
By the way, I am doing this using Dragon naturally speaking and it is not the newest version. After some effort I discovered how to make this version work with Windows 10. So maybe that is something I could to, I can show people how to take an older version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and use it with Windows 10. The older version can be purchased for a very attractive price. Maybe I should start up a little business offering night help to people that have trouble with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
End of my voice recognition.

Solve : Can I work at home with my tech skills??

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