How hard is it to work from home.

For an already established company?

[casey133]

I hope I am posting this is the right section but please forgive me if I am not. I will make this very short in hopes of getting more answers.

I was dumb and did not finish high school, I got my GED this year.

I plan to start a community college Jan of 09 and will hope to get an Associates Degree in IT (web design, networking, etc).

I often see job listings starting in the web design field from $30k $ 40K per year, which to me would be absolutely great because as of now I am legally blind and have only been receiving disability benefits and have been getting around $8,000 per year.

I have been doing freelance design for about 7 years and feel right at home with Phtoshop, Dreamweaver and most networking so I am hoping the classes will not be that much of a shock to me.

My main question is, those companies who are looking for a webmaster and offering this kind of pay, do they often hire people in different states (possibly the same state) who would have a degree in that field and who can wok full time hours?

Thanks and feel free to ask any questions to help give better avice.

[LifeinAsia]

Most likely, not. Something like web development often requires a lot of interaction between clients and developers/designers, as well as collaboration between team members.

Soem may allow you to do some or even a lot of work at home, but I would expect that most would require a substantial amount of "office" time.

That said, I am sure there are a few companies out there willing to be flexible. However, with the eceonomy/job market being what it is, companies are probably more willing to go twith a candidate with whom they don't bneed to be flexible.

My $.02.

[StoutFiles]

Unless you're substantially better than every person you compete with for the job, they will obviously pick the person who can be there for face-to-face communication. Good luck though.

[DXL]

I plan to start a community college Jan of 09 and will hope to get an Associates Degree in IT (web design, networking, etc).

For what it's worth, most people I know who do web design have no formal education in it. It began as a hobby, and then the quality of work improved over time.

I often see job listings starting in the web design field from $30k $ 40K per year.

Where I live, web design jobs start at 25k, not to mention you're competing with every other person who graduated from a technical or community college. Firms are generally going to pay based on the quality of your work, and your experience level. I receive emails all the time from people looking for work, one of the many reasons why I stopped advertising in phone books (the only people that called were recent graduates).

[Gomvents]

casey133, I am really intrigued... how do you use software such as Photoshop which is so graphical without the ability to see? Is there special software that uses sounds to convey color? A blind friend of mine works at a web design firm but he only really does data entry and php programming, not graphics. He uses jaws to read his screen

[casey133]

Gomvents, legally blind is not quite completely blind.

Legally blind means that I have vision of 20/200 with correction and 20/400 without if I remember the eye doc correctly.

[Jane_Doe]

Have you tried making your own sites with Adsense or affiliate links on them? That is a way to work 100% from home. Or if you did contracting you could work from home. There are lots of small companies out there who need web sites but would not need someone full time and on site.

[Fortune Hunter]

Have you tried making your own sites with Adsense or affiliate links on them?

I agree, this is something I would look into as well. Do you have a topic of interest, hobby, anything that you know a lot about that others would find interesting and read your articles? If so creating an ad revenue based site may be easier than trying to get a tele-commuting web developer job. Also if your site does well you can incorporate other profit centers like information products or premium membership areas that you could charge fees for.

[earthsoft]

As someone who works from home and often hires contractors or developers that work from home (yeah I'm a "manager"), I can tell you it's pretty difficult though not impossible. Most developers I know either work from home part time or full time, things really seem to have moved in that direction lately.

What language you specialize in (work in multiple but you'll always be best at one) will make a difference in how easy or hard it will be to get a job. I would stay away from .Net as my first language simply because the market is saturated. Lots of jobs but also lots of developers. Java has great demand and it's always tough to find a decent Java developer. I know several ColdFusion developers that work from home, it's getting harder and harder to find ColdFusion people (though demand seems light). Also be careful of languages RoR and Groovy. You typically don't want those to be your primary.

If you're talking about front end web design then the best thing to do is become badass at CSS and really get to know Ajax (like it or not demand is moving that way). Designers that are awesome at CSS and take SEO into account when working are worth their weight in gold.

Pay is another thing. I'm kind of surprised at the numbers mentioned here as I don't know a single person making under 55k in web development. Most are around 65k and up. Maybe a bit different since most devs I know are Java guys and it typically pays more (think 70k+).

One last thing, don't worry about your education that much. I've had many software engineers with a MS fail my simple hiring programming test. Read a lot, program more and do work. Open source, volunteer, whatever it takes, just start working on a portfolio.

Anyways, not much more I can add. I wish you the best of luck.