Hi, I run a technology blog and am looking for part-time writers. The pay is anywhere from $200 - $500 a month depending on your skill level and availability. Please send me examples of your work when you message me. The blog has been live since 2005 and is very established. As we build a better relationship, your pay will also increase. You MUST be in the United States. You will be writing about gadgets and startups. Thanks
Your post contains numerous grammatical errors. I am looking for a qualified writer who I can build a long-standing professional relationship with. If you cannot even write a forum post correctly, how can I trust your ability to write on a well known technology blog?
I started out my career as a Spanish and ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in the early 90’s. It was a great job, but didn’t pay much. I went back to school to study technology; primarily network administration. That’s when I was first immersed into the world of the Geek language. It was like learning any new language. I smiled and pretended I knew what everyone was saying, and went back to my *Geek dictionary to piece together some semblance of the conversation. Fifteen years later and I am now an adequately-fluent and many-times-confused polylinguist. For those of you studying Geek or need to hire Geeks, here are a few pointers. The first thing to understand is there are many Geek dialects. Speaking Database Geek and Network Engineering Geek can be as different as speaking Spanish and Portuguese. This is a tough distinction for the monolingual, non-Geek speaker; a conversation about building an application or connecting two computers to an intranet can sound pretty much the same to most people. I have never met a Geek who can truly speak all Geek dialects. If you are hiring a Geek, make sure to have an interpreter who can help you hire the right Geek for the job. Believe it or not, acting like a Geek does not automatically qualify you as a fluent Geek. Understanding what skills are necessary, and accepting there is no single person who can effectively execute every technology need a business may require, will save you and potentially your clients a lot of turmoil. This is particularly dangerous when a project or resource manager doesn’t realize his database developer may not be the best lead on a project configuring network routers, even if he says he can probably figure it out. The reason this is so important is us Geeks have a nasty reputation of taking advantage of our employer’s foreign language deficit. The reputation is only known among us, kind of like a secret pact (I may get in trouble for divulging this). We gain and expand our employment simply by saying in broken English “No problem, I can do thatâ€. Then we go to Google, MSDN or other resource to look it up. On the positive side, Geeks do have an uncanny ability to figure things out and get by for a long time on virtual duct tape, and some actually become pretty competent in many Geek dialects. The rest of us lose gigabites of data in a botched backup we shouldn’t have been tasked with in the first place, and find creative ways of blaming someone or something else, like Tribbles. Unlike the cute and furry Tribbles, there are other less cuddly culprits you need to watch out for in the Geek world. These are the Manager Geeks who actually don’t speak Geek at all, at least not intelligibly. They are like the car salesman who can’t change his own oil, but talks about the engine as if he built it himself. In the Geek community, these are the ones that promise the client an application in a time frame that would require time travel and for the cost of a Big Mac and fries. OK, that’s an exaggeration; probably several Big Macs and a few shakes. I even heard one Manager Geek claim programmers prefer to work late at night, as if Geeks were also vampires. The real truth is their **EnGeek-speaking boss committed them to a delivery that means no sleep for the next several weeks. Those of you learning Geek, be sure to give an assuring “I know†nod when listening to your fellow crewmembers brag about their latest virtual conquest, but be careful to divulge not knowing how to increase a network’s bandwidth, or you may be cast off the Enterprise as a nincompoop. It’s best to pretend you know what they are talking about and Google it if you have doubts. PDA’s are great tools for Googling during a conversation, and if asked, just say you’re tweeting. The lesson to learn here is that technologists need to admit when they are not the right Geek for the job, and employers need to accept that magic wands do not really exist, even if your computer somehow fixes itself whenever your IT guy simply restarts your computer and everything is peachy again. And if you are learning Geek, don’t be afraid to say to another Geek, “I don’t know what the hell you just said. Can you please explain it in English?†If he has to tweet before answering, he is probably winging it just like you. * In the early days I carried around the “…for Dummies†books, but now I use Google. **EnGeek = English/Geek speaker – someone who doesn’t speak either language that well, but for the non-Geek sounds as much like Geek as any other Geek, or Tribble for that matter.