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I saw a great piece of advice in a recent story on U.S. News & World Report called 10 things to do on the day after you're laid off: "Write a thank-you note to your former boss." I like that. It can't hurt, and if your boss hears of openings elsewhere, you're now that much more likely to get the referral.
Geeks and other tech employees are a little different from the vanilla workforce, though, so I wanted to put together a list of specific things that people in our part of the economy might want to consider if they're let go. Here's the rundown.
Quoted passages in this story are from other CNET employees, many of whom, like me, have spent time among the alternatively employed.
1. Get involved in an open-source project
It's where the most interesting and influential products are being developed, and more importantly, many open-source projects are filled with people who are also connected to companies that pay their engineers. Plus, obviously, working on a development project will keep you sharp and expand your skill set.
2. Go to start-up fairs
Wherever people are pitching new businesses, be there. They're all hiring. If not now, then soon. I am partial to the Under the Radar series (I helped start them and moderate at many of them), and there are several a year. Update: I just talked with the organizers of the next UTR event, which focuses on mobility startups, and they've created a special pink slip discount: $200 off admission, includes entry to the opening night reception for even more networking. There are 20 tickets at this rate.
3. Get project work
You may not have a daily gig, but you still have your skills, and there are people who need them. Head over to a project marketplace like oDesk or eLance and pick up some work.
4. Update your profiles
Go to your pages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc., and let people know you are available for new projects. While you're at it, proactively send out notes to your trusted associates that you are looking for work. As we say here at CNET: "duh."
5. Learn some new skills
No, I don't mean to learn Rails if you're a Java guy. That's obvious. I mean cooking, rock climbing, riding a motorcycle--something that you didn't have the time to do while you were an FTE.
6. Answer some questions
Scan Friendfeed and Twitter Search for people asking questions in your areas of expertise, hang out in message boards on things you know stuff about. You'll see what's going on in the industry, you might be able to help people out (always worthwhile), and you might also land a tip for a gig.
7. Get a girlfriend or boyfriend
Don't let the fact that you have no job, per se, slow you down. You can still earn some dough. You will have more control over your schedule. And you can spend some of your newfound time with your new friend, assuming this friend doesn't have his or her own 18-hour-a-day engineering job.
Online jobs marketplace Elance is getting a big update next week, designed to bring more small businesspeople into the world of hiring workers they don't know and will never meet.
The service will layer in a workflow that should make the whole Elance process easier for newbies. There's a new time-tracker widget for contractors that automatically feeds data into the project page and the invoicing system. (It can be configured per job, if the contract is for piecework instead of time-based.) Elance, by the way, does not support keyboard logging or periodic screen capture of a worker's PC, as ODesk does.
Time served.
Also new: free voice and chat communication support for hiring managers and contractors. People will be able to place anonymous calls even to contractors they haven't yet hired, if they want to talk with them first. (The service will call both parties and connect them, protecting the caller from revealing his or her caller ID.)
Elance is also launching a skills testing program, much like ODesk's, that allows contractors to get certified for particular types of work.
As before, hiring managers must place some of the funds for a job into escrow accounts, from which Elance will pay contractors when work is delivered or time milestones are met.
All the tasks that are under way get their own status page where customer and provider can communicate on their project. The system enforces the creation of status reports and requires each page be flagged with either an "on schedule" or "problem" tag. The goal is to keep communication open and keep projects moving.
All these additions to the Elance product set are designed to make users more comfortable with the evolving service economy, although as CEO Fabio Rosati says, the train has already left the station: there's a "huge exodus of work that used to be done in offices and face-to-face, and it is starting to move online."
Rosati's goal is to make Elance into an "online workplace." By providing matchmaking tools, workflow helpers, and communications services he wants to make the site, essentially, into a virtual office building--not just the bulletin board Elance was before.
The business is certainly sound, and the timing is right for this push. Elance takes a cut of all contractor payouts (4 percent to 6 percent depending on the volume of business the hiring party is doing on the site). That's a small overhead to pay given the reticence businesses have now to hire new staff. Elance is about more than just that, of course, but in this economy, that's probably enough to get the attention of a whole new troupe of users.
You can check out any time you like.
See also: Crowdspring, Taskmarket, RentACoder.
As I've said before, in coverage of Satisfaction and SupportSpace, if you want to get good support for the products you own, your best bet is usually to skip calling the official support line and find other real users of your product. Somewhere out there, you can be sure, there's a geek who knows the ins and outs of the ice maker on your Frigidaire. Or at the very least, how to troubleshoot your HP Windows Home Server box.
And now, finally, someone's trying to bring those geeks back to the companies that could really use them. MinuteFix looks, at first, much like SupportSpace, a company that pays product experts to provide support to users. MinuteFix does that as well, but its real business model is to sell its service directly to the consumer product companies. It's competing with outsource service companies such as SlashSupport (which provides Vonage's support, for example).
MinuteFix certifies product experts around the world and pools them together into distributed call centers. The cost to companies is the same as for offshore-based support, but the support personnel are now local to the caller (in the same country, at least), sharing not just their language but cultural sensitivities. Plus, hopefully, their knowledge of the products they are supporting comes from enthusiasm and experience, not from a script.
MinuteFix certifies its support providers by testing them on customer service skills, language skills, and any relevant knowledge specific to their clients (similar to how oDesk certifies its providers). Ongoing quality is maintained through post-call caller satisfaction scoring (if a tech doesn't score well, he or she will stop getting calls). Also, the support techs have a channel they can use to communicate with each other during calls, even though they're not sitting near each other. CEO Diego Orjuela told me that techs can make $15 to $20 an hour when they are online taking calls. All the techs on MinuteFix connect via Skype. MinuteFix techs don't get access to sensitive data like billing records, but the company does integrate at least partially with its customers systems so its techs can do a bit more than just talk customers through issues.
Assuming the company gets its technology right, it has two big challenges: Getting good techs and getting customers. To the former, Orjuela told me that advertising on Craigslist has been highly successful, and that he's terminated some ads early since he's been overloaded with qualified candidates.
To the second point, getting customers, he's aware that Volkswagen is not likely to be one of his first customers. He's starting, instead, with the low-hanging fruit: He's going for companies that understand the power of community. His first relationship is with Skype: MinuteFix is the preferred partner in the IT division of Skype Prime; MinuteFix-certified provders earn more than if they are unaffiliated.
Orjuela also pitches more than just enthusiastic techs to his potential customers. His solution makes it easier for companies to set up support teams in different languages or timezones than using traditional call-center-based outsourcing.
MinuteFix is, basically, ChaCha with potential big-money customers. It will be difficult, though, for Orjuela to sell the service, since he'll be going up against the traditional centralized support model and entrenched sales relationships. But that's smart: He's not trying to invent a business model from whole cloth, like so many Web 2.0 start-ups. Instead, he's aiming Web 2.0 concepts at an established and lucrative market, where there are customers paying big bucks already and leaving their customers, to a large extent, unsatisfied. This is a good business model.
Two Microsoft research groups, Microsoft Research Asia and Microsoft Office Labs, have launched Task Market, an online marketplace for jobs that can be done on Office applications.
Like Elance, oDesk, and other piecework job sites, Task Market is a marketplace for people with skills and time--and those that need them.
Task Market is focused on very specific, and nontechnical jobs. At the moment, the only job categories allowed on the site are writing, editing, translation, and basic design. Why not programming or scripting or multimedia editing? Because, as the FAQ says, "By focusing on tasks accomplished using applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access, Task Market makes it quicker and easier for small businesses to get their job done."
Of course, Webware recommends Web-based productivity suites (like Google Docs) for team editing and collaboration, but there's as yet no marketplace service for Google like Task Market. Anybody want to build one?
Each job in Task Market has its own discussion thread, in which bidders for the job can communicate with the person who wants it done. There doesn't appear to be a way to contact individuals privately, though, which is odd. Users (both contractors and customers) get ratings--just like on eBay--once a task is complete.
Task Market is a simple and clear service for finding document-based tasks for hire.
Task Market lets employers specify the fee they're willing to pay for a job, and all payments go through eBay's PayPal.
Task Market's big benefit right now is that it is very simple to get into. It's easy to post a job, and it's easy to scan the available tasks. More mature services, such as oDesk, provide better job-tracking services, as well as more options for users to promote themselves and set up teams.
The site, still in "tech preview," and has few jobs on it.
It's worked for me.
A while ago I was interviewed by a TV news syndication service for a story on sites that let you sell your expertise online. The story showed, just briefly, screenshots of a few of the services. For completeness' sake, here's a list of 10 sites (plus a few bonus sites) you can use to monetize your down cycles, e.g., make money in your spare time from the stuff in your head.
1. BitWine has a large list of topics from which you can select your expertise. You set your own hourly rates. Calls from customers looking for your expertise come in to your computer, but people calling you can connect to the network via ordinary telephone. (See story.) See also Wengo, a European take on this concept.
2. Ether has a slick system to connect people to your phone line and charge them for the call. Its big difference is that there's no directory. You put a little "call me" widget on your own site or blog, where, as the company says, "trust already exists." (Review.)
3. Skype Prime is like Ether, but works over the Skype Internet Telephone (VoIP) service. Skype takes a large percentage of revenues for using this service (30 percent, compared to Ether's 15 percent). (Story.)
4. Talkbean is designed for language teachers. It escrows the lesson fees: Students pay up front, and tutors get taught once the lesson is complete. (Review.)
... Read more
The online service marketplace oDesk (previous oDesk coverage) has just added the capability for buyers to spec fixed-price jobs. Previously, all oDesk contracts were hourly. This move puts oDesk up against gig marketplaces like eLance and RentACoder, which are also based on fixed-price bids.
"The problem with the fixed price market is that it's not sticky," oDesk CEO Gary Swart told me. Many business relationships that start with one-price jobs evolve into working relationships where the pay is based on the time put in. Swart maintains that competing marketplaces don't foster (or let you manage) that changing relationship; and likewise, until now, oDesk wasn't able to kick off relationships that were best started as single gigs.
oDesk's toolkit, which includes the capability for service providers to "clock in," and for service buyers to monitor their work, is optional on fixed-price contracts.
The company will be presenting at the Web 2.0 Expo (which Webware is a media sponsor of), and also making a financial progress announcement.
From the Web 2.0 Conference:
(Credit:
oDesk)
oDesk is all about outsourcing. It's an online market where people can hire programmers and other information workers. In addition to making matches, the system also takes screen captures of contract workers at frequent intervals so that hiring managers can ensure they're billed only for actual work performed.
New at the Web 2.0 conference is a pretty new interface that should make it quicker and easier to search for workers with specific skills, experience, and fees. Also new: the official rollout of the company's skills tests and certification programs, which are helping oDesk become a real powerhouse as a programmer's matchmaker. The company is also releasing some data visualization tools to help service providers to price themselves competitively. For example, the tools will graphically show the price that particular programming skills could bring in different regions.
There are several new companies and products being unveiled at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week. I'll be reporting on as many of them as I can.
Only 13 companies were selected to participate in the "Launchpad" sessions on Tuesday. Chosen from more than 200 applicants (I'm trying to get ahold of that list), these are supposed to be the most promising of the current crop of Web 2.0 start-ups. I'm not sure they are hands-down the best the Web has to offer, but they are all very interesting. The 13 selected start-ups are: 3B, Adify, In the Chair, Instructables, oDesk, Omnidrive, Pidgin Technologies, Sharpcast, Sphere, Stikkit, TimeBridge, Turn, and Venyo.
Of these start-ups, I think the most important is Omnidrive [my take], since it has the potential to integrate disparate Web applications. But the most immediately useful may be Timebridge. Watch for my review.
Keep reading the Webware blog for impressions of these and other products as they are rolled out.
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