Any Web Developers Here?

I've decided to go full-speed ahead with my plan to attend law school when I leave the Army in 10 months. So, now the quest begins to find a job I can do to help pay the bills during that time without racking up a huge student loan debt (GI Bill will cover most of my schooling, but I still have to feed the family while going to school full-time) or taking away huge chunks of necessary study time to do so.

Last week I was visiting my sister and her BF's brother was also visiting. He is a web developer. He was working remotely while on vacation and it got me thinking. If I could do something like that, I might be able to work from home, between classes, etc., and not place undue parenting burdens on my wife and neglect on my kids while in I'm in school. I questioned him about it and he pointed me to a pretty good training website (codeschool.com) that would have me programming in a relatively short amount of time.

So, it sounds good on paper, but I always like to have a reality check. Is this a feasable plan? Are remote web developer jobs readily available? How much is knowledge without experience going to set me back in this field? Is this something where it would be better to work for myself, or a company? Is there anything that I have negelected to notice?

Thanks in advance.

First question, have you done any programming before at all? Even writing a Windows batch file?

Some companies are offering remote web dev jobs as a perk, but not necessarily to junior people. Junior developers do need a fair amount of mentoring if you want them to grow and that's not that easy to do when they're working remotely. The "coding schools" that seem to spring up like mushrooms after a rain normally teach you enough to hopefully get your foot in the door, but they're not exactly cheap for what they offer IMHO.

My concern would be with doing this kind of work as a side job. Web development is a fast moving field and you (mostly) end up making decent money when you are up to speed with the very latest hip technologies - I'll spare you the getoffmylawn speech, but some parts of the web development community are really good at reinventing the octagonal wheel. Just keeping up with the usable technology is almost a full time second job. I'd be a little concerned that trying to do this kind of work between studying for law school won't do much for either your grades nor your income, because you'll mostly be picking up work that would otherwise be shipped to India, China or the South Pole.

I think to realistically make this work you'd need to do the school and a couple of years' full time work for someone else before going to law school.

Which brings us to the next point - as a junior developer, you'll learn most when working with other, good people. You don't do that, you don't know what you don't know and that'll hurt you. So I always recommend to people at the start of their careers to go pick up some experience working for a good company before you set off on your own.

Keep in mind this post is brought to you by large amounts of green tea and from someone who has been a developer and development manager for a couple of decades. I don't work for revenueless hipster companies down in Silly Valley so the advice is worth what you paid for it.

I do it, pay sucks for the amount of knowledge needed. If you're starting from scratch, I'll absolutely advise you to look elsewhere.

This is exactly why I posted. A possible good idea at first blush, but not practical or probable as a part-time gig. thank you for your input. I guess I will keep searching.

Ive been looking at this recently as it is SWMBOs profession also. She is a project manager for one of the big banks. I sometimes feel like I am being left behind just being a blue collar schlub. Ive always looked for something to interest me in the technology field and am thinking that right now with doing the homeschooling this may be perfect for me.

In reply to DustoffDave:

FWIW I became a SQL data analyst 2-years ago with zero experience(thanks to quite a bit of assistance from other members here!), and have the flexibility to work from home as-needed. We do have others who work remotely full-time though. I'll agree that you learn the most by working with your teammates, but in my case that person was ~1000 miles away, so I wouldn't say that physical proximity is a necessity.

The learning-curve for the language was steep at first, and there's still plenty more for me to learn should I choose to do so, but the one thing I like about my position is that it has a good blend of SQL mixed with knowledge of the business. I don't need to stay on top of all the latest SQL releases/features to do my job(although learning about them certainly helps).

So your concept may not be far off the mark, but I'd suggest you research SQL.

Or Python.

I'll just echo what others have said here. Unless it's a skill you already have it seems like a poor choice for a get-you-through-school job.

That said, I'd just like to clarify there is more than one type of "web developer", which is a pretty general term. There is the traditional developer/programmer, database admins, architects, designers, support roles like requirements analysts & project management, plus more I'm not thinking of at the moment. While there's overlap, each job has it's own specialized knowledge base.

^I think my job includes all of those

Hehe, yeah you can end up wearing a lot of those hats in relatively small operations, and sometimes big ones as well. Kudos to you for tackling it all, whether out of necessity or not! I used to spread myself out pretty thin trying to run my own company, but now I enjoy specializing in user interface design for a big corp. I enjoy it much more than I ever thought I would.