tl;dr: Some people on LW have a hard time finding worthwhile employment. Share advice and help them out!
Working sucks. I'd rather not work. But alas, a lot of the time, we have to choose between working and starvation. At the very least I'd like to minimize work. I'd like to work somewhere cheap and comfortable... you know, like on the beach in Thailand, like LW (ab)user Louie did. Then I could spend my spare time on things like self-improvement and ahem 'studying nootropics' all day. I'd like to travel, if possible, and not be chained to an iffy job. It'd be cool to have flexible hours. I've read The 4-Hour Work Week but it seemed kinda difficult and scary and... I just don't wanna do it. I can't code, and I'd rather not learn how to. At least, I'd rather not have my job depend on it. I never graduated from college. Hell, I never got my high school diploma, even. A team of medical experts has confirmed that my sleep cycle is of the Chaotic Evil variety. (For those who read HP:MoR, imagine Harry Potter Syndrome, except on crack. I bet a lot of people have similar sleep cycles.) I'm 18, and therefore automatically low status for employment purposes: I'm obviously much too young to make a good teacher, or store manager, or police officer. I can imagine having health problems, or severe social anxiety, or a nearly useless liberal arts degree, or just a general setback limiting my employment opportunities. And if it turned out that I wanted to work 14 hour days all of a sudden because I really needed the money, well then it'd be cool to have that option as well. Alas, none of this is possible, so I might as well just give up and keep on being stressed and feeling useless... or should I?
I bet a whole bunch of Less Wrongers aren't aware of chances for alternative employment. I myself hear myths of people who work via the internet, or blog for a living, or code an hour a day and still make enough to survive comfortably. Sites like elance and vworker (which looks kinda intimidating) exist, and I bet we could find others. Are there such people on Less Wrong that could tell us their secret? Do others know about how to snag one of these gigs? What sorts of skills are easiest to specialize in that could get returns in virtual work? Are virtual markets hard to break into? Can I just blog for an hour or two a day and afford to live a life of simplistic luxury in Thailand? Pretty much everyone on Less Wrong has exceptional writing ability: are there relatively well-paying writing gigs we could get? Alternatively, are there other non-internet jobs that people can break into that don't require tons of experience or great connections or that dreaded and inscrutable bane of nerds everywhere, 'people skills'? Share your knowledge or do some research and help Less Wrong become more happy, more productive, and more awesome!
Oh, and this is really important: we don't have to reinvent the wheel. As wedrifid demonstrated in the earlier Intelligence Amplification Open Thread, a link to an already existent forum is worth ten thousand words or more.
It really depends on what someone needs you to do. There are a few different approaches to web programming, which include different workflows and different ways of breaking up who does what. Generally, most things on the web can be broken up into "front end" and "back end", which change meaning based on context. "Front end" can usually be divided into "design" and "implementation [or] programming". "Back end" can usually be divided into server administration, the database, and programming.
I work at a small firm (in person) and so do both front-end and back-end programming, but usually someone will specialize in one or the other or some aspect of it. For folks condemned to work in the world of Microsoft, there is usually a lot of complicated technical work to interface various proprietary Microsoft technologies using abstract frameworks on the back end.
The traditional back-end setup in the Unix world is what used to be called LAMP (back when people felt the need to call it something) - a machine with a Linux OS running the Apache web server and MySQL database engine, with Perl (/PHP/etc) serving up dynamic pages.
On the front end, you basically have a web page crafted using HTML (usually served via some complicated method from the back end) as well as whatever the user-agent is going to let you get away with. In practice, depending on the application, you will use HTML for the page's semantic structure, CSS for style and layout of the HTML, and Javascript for dynamic content on the front end, often employing a library like JQuery to abstract away browser quirks or JQuery-ui to add user-interface functionality. Plugins like Flash might also be used to create dynamic content with a more consistent user experience.
It's really impossible to prepare ahead of time for whatever web development job someone might need done, and there are gurus who are experts at any particular one of the technologies above, so it's a little tricky to set out trying to find a niche to fit yourself into. I can do anything we randomly decide to get involved in at my job, but I still don't fit the bill for a lot of the job postings out there because I have no reason to study the technologies used on Microsoft servers, and I hardly ever use Flash since Javascript is actually almost as useful these days, and we've never seen a reason to work seriously with Ruby or Python since they do so miserably in benchmarks against our old standby Perl (or C if we really need performance) and we're not popping out unique web apps on a daily basis that would need a complicated framework (like Ruby on Rails) to abstract away a lot of the work at the expense of performance.
The real trick is staying good at web development. Aside from graphics and games, the web is the main computing frontier where things are constantly changing and improving so constant study and practice is needed to stay ahead of the curve.
What Microsoft is actually good at is linking front and back end. People can pretty much take the mouse, pull an SQL table on a website and have all the CRUD generated for them and it works. The open source / linux world with its strong focus on the separation of concerns and modular architecture is very good for the kind of projects where you want to... (read more)