[HN Gopher] A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
___________________________________________________________________
A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
Author : mad_ned
Score : 925 points
Date : 2021-05-19 10:07 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (madned.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (madned.substack.com)
| _joel wrote:
| Here's mine. I'd just coming to take my GCSE's and decided to
| audit the school's website which was a Frontpage '97 powered
| site. I found the passwd file in the _vti_cnf dir (iirc) and ran
| it through a brute forcer. Found the password quite easily but
| instead of defacing decided to inform the webmaster. They were
| impressed and ended up getting me some paid work experience at
| ICL for the summer, working on an NT4 rollout (those were the
| days). If I'd defaced the site or done something a teenager would
| have perhaps done to impress his peers then I wouldn't have had
| that experience which definitely helped to get another job. It's
| funny how so much of life can pivot on quick, seemingly
| insignificant choices.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'd be curious to hear opinions on how much he should have asked
| for--what could he have gotten away with and still landed the
| job? Would $1,000 (in 1982 money) have been too much?
| bluedino wrote:
| The computer itself probably cost $60,000 new, so $1,000 for a
| software fix wouldn't have been outrageous.
| flaubere wrote:
| I think he picked a good number. It clearly wasn't $1000 of
| effort. Jim may not have been interested in hiring someone who,
| like his previous software guy, was looking to shake him down
| for as much as possible.
| movedx wrote:
| I agree. Anything higher and he might have got paid, but not
| got offered the job.
|
| The fact he DID get the job means he got the better deal in
| the long run.
| philjohn wrote:
| And that job was worth, in today's money, roughly $1100 a
| week, which for a summer job before college is pretty damn
| good.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| $100 in 1982 is about $275 today. $1k ($2.75k today) feels high
| to me because of the combination of unknown teenager and the
| fact that programmer pay was relatively lower in 1982. And if
| you scale that up to $4k per week that's $11k per week in
| today's money which feels pretty crazy for a teenager. $400 per
| week in 1982 is a salary of like $60k in today's money. At 20
| hours per week that sounds like a good deal.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| In the late 1980s I did computer work for a small business
| and was paid about $9/hr. It wasn't really programming
| though, more of an operator job with some hardware
| maintenance/troubleshooting mixed in as needed. My first job
| as a programmer, in the early 1990s, paid $32k base plus
| overtime and a yearly bonus.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > And if you scale that up to $4k per week that's $11k per
| week in today's money which feels pretty crazy for a
| teenager.
|
| Maybe that's because minimum wage did not scale to match
| inflation since 1982. If it had, I don't think $11k would
| sound as crazy.
| DanBC wrote:
| > Would $1,000 (in 1982 money) have been too much?
|
| To compare some prices:
|
| In 1983 Lotus 1-2-3 was selling for $495, which is about $1320
| today.
|
| In 1988 CompuServe was charge $11 (so, over $20 today) an hour.
|
| In 1983 an IBM 5150 was between $1565 and $3000 ($4200 and
| $8000). http://www.oldcomputers.net/ibm5150.html
| remoquete wrote:
| What I love about this story is that feeling of tinkering with a
| logical system and solving problems with clever hacks. For many,
| it's the reason why they ended up working in tech, I guess.
| michaelgrafl wrote:
| That story lifted my mood.
| dope wrote:
| I didn't realise it lifted mine until I read this comment. Have
| a great day!
| LordGrey wrote:
| I really liked this story, and it resonated with me. My
| programming career began in much the same way, at about the same
| time.
|
| The only non-computer job I've ever had was my first, a six-week
| stint at a Burger King, and I was desperate to never do that
| again. I undersold my skills often, and got in over my head just
| as often.
|
| It was a great, if sometimes painful, learning experience.
| anoncow wrote:
| When and how did things change, if I may ask?
| LordGrey wrote:
| If by "change" you're asking, "when did I stop underselling
| myself and getting in over my head" then I am not sure I
| could identify a single point in time where that happened.
| It's been an improvement on a continuum.
|
| Those early years certainly felt painful but in retrospect
| provided valuable concrete experience in negotiating,
| marketing, and self-assessment. I learned how to figure out
| what others _really_ wanted, how much they should be willing
| to pay to achieve their goals, and (probably most
| importantly) whether or not I could deliver. That period of
| time, when computers were exploding into small businesses,
| was a little magical when it came to freelance programming.
|
| Now, ~40 years later, I find myself applying those learned
| skills at my current job every day. I got lucky.
|
| My apologies if I misunderstood your question and blathered
| on about something else.
| ljm wrote:
| One day, when I was 18 or 19, I was invited to a Mercedes
| dealership to try and fix a problem they were having with their
| site. I went there with the same mindset as the OP: I'll
| investigate for free, but a solution would cost money.
|
| Unfortunately I didn't have the experience or perseverance to
| actually work my way through a highly custom CMS, one that seemed
| to be forced on most dealerships. I went in thinking there'd be a
| blob of PHP somewhere, or some code to look into. There was none,
| only an endless series of silver-tinted forms.
|
| I gave up, said this was way out of my depth, and despite their
| insistence refused to bill them for the time. It was enough for
| me, as a young whippersnapper, to say that I worked for Mercedes
| (for a day).
|
| Good to see OP had a similar-ish run-in but managed to see it
| through.
| tristor wrote:
| When I was very young my parents got a computer to help my mom
| finish writing her Master's thesis and for my dad to use for work
| and to use for home accounting. I learned to program and to
| modify games, got into MUDs, IRC, Usenet, and all sorts of things
| similar to that. My parents allowed me to go to an A+
| certification course when I was 11 over the summer instead of
| going to Bible camp, which was motivated by having the middle
| school IT guy as sort of a mentor. Thanks to that I got into
| building computers and really focused on desktop hardware,
| troubleshooting, and the types of things you'd now consider
| "helpdesk" work. I, of course, helped take care of the family
| computer as well.
|
| Along the way, I had gotten into the habit of visiting the homes
| of people in the neighborhood and just sitting and talking with
| the people that lived there, almost all of whom were older
| retired couples or widows, and often made food at home with my
| mom and brought it over for lunch. I noticed that nearly all of
| these people had a home computer that they used for emailing
| their grand kids but didn't really have a lot of knowledge about,
| and many were in horrible disrepair (infected with malware
| mostly). When my parents told me I needed to get a job at 14,
| they figured I'd do what everyone else did and mow lawns over the
| summer, but instead I printed out flyers with strips to tear off
| and my phone number and posted them around the neighborhood
| advertising computer help at significantly cheaper rates than
| usual (I think the going rate was $100 for diagnosis and I
| charged $20).
|
| The most important tool I made for myself was burning a CD that
| just had a bunch of free tools on it and a handful of batch
| scripts I wrote to help me find and remove malware. I'm eternally
| thankful to all the much more capable people who were kind enough
| to put the tools they'd made online for free, folks like Steve
| Gibson (GRC) and Mark Russinovich (SysInternals) made it possible
| for a lot of small town techs to help real people get actual
| value from computers in the early days.
|
| By the end of that first summer I was on a first name basis with
| several small business owners in town and made four times what my
| school friends made mowing lawns. By the time I was in college, I
| had retainers for doing IT with several companies in town and
| leveraged it into a short-term contract through a larger
| contracting firm in the closest proper city, dropped out of
| college to do IT contracting full time, and converted that into a
| full-time role as a sysadmin and from that went into DevOps, and
| the rest is history.
|
| I credit most of my success to having a handful of mentors and
| having parents who were willing to let me guide my own education,
| as well as the wonderful free resources that were all over on the
| Internet in the early days to learn anything you wanted to know
| about computers. I'm also incredibly lucky that something I just
| thought was cool as a kid turned out to create a set of skills
| that I could build a career on.
| intrasight wrote:
| I'll add my own related story.
|
| When I was a sophomore, I applied for and got a summer job at
| Kodak. My father said to not be disappointed if it was driving a
| fork lift because that's usually what they are. But I showed up
| and was directed into an accounting office where on desks, next
| to stacks of IBM punch cards, were some brand new IBM PCs. I
| spent the summer hacking Lotus 1-2-3. They had seen on my
| application that I was familiar with computers.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> And in reviewing this one, it comes off to me as a little
| elitist. Like it is about how this guy, using his great hacker
| skills, avoided the 'menial labor of the commoners' or something.
| I hope that is not the impression it gives - it is not my
| intention, anyway.
|
| No, it's fine. It doesn't come across as bragging about your
| awesome hax0034 skilz0 and I was even kind of surprised about how
| little it brags at all. I would have bragged more.
| timonoko wrote:
| Dammit. I was just browsing commercial database protected by one
| inverted bit. Map tile coordinates are integers, but XORed by
| 010000 producing weird and mysterious errors.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Literally brought tears to my eyes, like a cheesey Disney movie.
| Enormous satisfaction, I loved this story!
| samuelbalogh wrote:
| Such a great story, well written too.
| rozularen wrote:
| Thanks for this post, as others commenters said, it really
| resonated with me.
| movedx wrote:
| I love stories like this. I have one of my own, actually.
|
| When I was first getting into IT I started sending out CVs. Mine
| was terrible. I had been working in call centres for years at
| this point and all my "experience" was basically self-taught, so
| not really experience at all. As a result my CV was void of any
| actual content a hiring manager in IT would want to read, thus it
| was binned a lot.
|
| I applied for a job at a nearby network hardware repair place.
| They needed someone to look after their Cisco kit and about 30
| Debian Linux systems. I was attracted to the mix of
| responsibilities so I applied, sending in me not-so-good CV. I
| was eventually asked to come in to have a chat after waiting
| about a week to hear back from the place.
|
| At the end of the interview, Bob (let's call him), said I was
| more knowledgeable than the RHCEs that were coming through his
| door. This was nice to hear, but then he said something that
| really made me smile...
|
| Apparently my CV was worse than I thought. It was so bad, that
| Bob literally put it in the bin under his desk. About four days
| later, Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG)
| mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. So he opens
| the email and reads the thread in which I helped another LUG
| member compile a sound driver for their kernel. The instructions
| I gave worked.
|
| Bob was impressed but he couldn't quite remember where he had
| seen the name. At this point the business owner, John (heh...),
| was standing besides Bob's desk and noticed my CV in the bin. He
| pulls it out and reads my name across the top. The penny drops
| for Bob and I get the call to come in and have a chat.
|
| I got the job.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| > Apparently my CV was worse than I thought.
|
| I have seen some awful resumes, including for people with PhDs
| and long records of accomplishments. Even people who have been
| through resume writing seminars at job search organizations.
| bityard wrote:
| Ha! My first job was effectively through a LUG as well. In the
| early 2000's, I moved to a new city and joined the LUG there. A
| few months go by and I'm chatting with someone in the room and
| they ask what I do. I replied that I was going to college but
| also looking for part-time work. The next day, another LUG
| member who owned a small consulting company called me up and
| said he overheard what I said and pretty much just offered me
| the job right over the phone.
|
| In fact, looking back at my employment history, only one of my
| jobs was a direct result of someone seeing my resume before
| they even met me.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG)
| mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine.
|
| I had the opposite happen.
|
| I took a job doing some programming, some Linux administration,
| some helpdesk. I came across a convoluted database setup,
| nobody in their right mind would run multiple servers on the
| same machine this way... After researching the issue, I found
| that it was totally unnecessary, and likely a holdover from an
| earlier (like 15 years earlier) version of the software,
| because now it was natively support.
|
| During my searching, on a mailing list I found a message from
| my now-boss. Asking how to do the exact thing they were still
| doing. And a couple messages from developers of the software
| basically saying, "If you did it this way, it would in theory
| work, but it won't ever be supported"
| yabones wrote:
| When I was younger, I inherited a lot of old PC hardware from
| my father. One particular motherboard had a massive gouge
| through the heatsink for the southbridge, and I could never
| figure out why.
|
| One day, I was trying to get Mac OSX to run on this
| particular system, and on page six of google search I finally
| found a guide to configuring the BIOS for this board that
| actually worked! It was one of the very first boards that
| supported UEFI (iirc, before the spec was fully ratified),
| and the documentation was very incomplete.
|
| I dug a few pages deeper in the thread, and the same poster
| was describing the poor design of the heatsinks and how they
| interfered with the full length PCI cards that were used in
| pro audio at the time. The same poster described how they
| carefully prized the aluminum heatsink off, screwed it to a
| board and used a dremel tool to make a slot just wide enough
| for the card to safely fit.
|
| That was strange... I had exactly the same groove cut in my
| heatsink...
| therein wrote:
| And the OP was your father? That would have been a nice
| coincidence.
| bluedino wrote:
| Sounds right up there with filed-down cards or connectors
| that had longer grooves cut in them!
| WalterBright wrote:
| I had a parking light burn out on my car. Went to the car
| store, and a replacement bulb was $$. Perused the lamps
| on tags in the aisles, and found one that looked the same
| but had different "ears" on the side.
|
| Bought it, and filed off the ears so it would fit in my
| car's socket. Worked perfectly, for a small fraction of
| the price.
|
| Of course, my car is full of aftermarket parts, so I am
| used to making "adjustments" to get them to fit.
| Symbiote wrote:
| About every 6-9 months, I'm searching through error logs
| looking at odd messages, or trying to see why we have some
| obscure configuration parameters set, when I start reading
| something relevant-looking on a Blogspot blog.
|
| It becomes uncannily relevant, even to the point of familiar
| IP addresses or pathnames in the blog, at which point I
| realize it was written by my predecessor.
|
| The obscure parameters are usually obsolete, and were
| required because they were running the very latest versions
| of the software before the defaults matured. The blog was
| something like documentation at the time.
| jerf wrote:
| As someone currently wading through resumes and kinda worried
| about missing some one like this, here's a tip to anyone else
| like you: The purpose of a resume is to get you hired. If you
| have something like an incredible technical sound driver
| support email chain like that... _put a link to it in your
| resume_. Yeah, your resume has standard fields, and those are
| indeed sorted on by HR, so don 't leave out the skills &
| experience... but otherwise, the resume is _free form_.
| Generally not _prose_ exactly, but free form. Link to
| _ANYTHING_ you think will help you get the job.
|
| And don't just say "I participate in some LUG"... that can mean
| you show up to the meetings once every couple of months to eat
| the free food. Show your helpfulness in an email chain. Show a
| project that you did with them with a link that explicitly says
| you did a big portion of it. If no such link exists, get one
| created!
|
| By no means do I promise wonders if you do this. HR filters may
| still eat your resume. But if you do get through to a real
| human, they may look at those things, and the ones who will
| understand what this means are the ones you want to work for
| anyhow.
|
| If you've got the skills to pay the bills but your resume looks
| like any other high school dropout's, I can tell you, from the
| other side of the desk, you've given me no way to tell any
| different. It may stink that all we have are resumes in the
| initial process... but at least that resume is _under your
| control_. (Mostly. Sometimes it gets chewed on. But speaking
| for myself, I 'm looking at raw resumes straight from the
| candidate and that's not uncommon.) Don't be afraid to use it,
| and don't be afraid to toot your own horn, that's the whole
| point of this particular document.
|
| (Similarly, to the extent possible without lying, don't say "I
| participated in some project" as your work experience. Write
| something _you did_ in the project. Don 't say "I participated
| in a billing system upgrade", say how you rewrote the UI in
| React to conform to accessibility standards and made it run 10
| times faster than before and customers uniformly loved it and
| paid lots more money or whatever. "Participation" could be "I
| had my hand held for every bug as I struggled to keep up" and
| it could be "I stepped up and took more responsibility than
| anyone expected and almost single-handedly completed the
| project, freeing up the other developers" or anything in
| between. Unfortunately, based on experience, I kinda have to
| assume the worst because it's usually right. If "the worst"
| interpretation of that phrase isn't right, don't leave it open
| to me!)
|
| Believe me, if you're doing Linux support on a mailing list, or
| anything even remotely like that, you stand out, at least to
| the right people. Do whatever it takes to work that on to the
| resume somehow. The "standard resume form" is a skeleton to be
| fleshed out, not a straightjacket of form.
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| This. This is why I always encourage people who I mentor to
| have a skills section.
|
| My first job I got the interview because at the time I was
| attempting to turn a snowmobile into a hovercraft. I had
| plans and everything.
|
| I put this on the resume.
|
| The first question in the interview? "Look, if nothing else
| we had to bring you in to ask. How the hell are you planning
| on turning a snowmobile into a hovercraft?!?"
|
| The project never went anywhere, but it got me the job.
| criddell wrote:
| When you are involved in hiring, it's surprising just how
| bad most resumes are. Have a single page of highlights that
| are going to make me want to talk to you. The interview is
| the time to go deep on details, if that's how the
| conversation goes.
| jfengel wrote:
| It's really hard for somebody to know what's going to
| appeal. Maybe "planning on building a hovercraft" looks
| great to you; maybe it looks like somebody padding their
| resume. Maybe "had a really cool email thread" catches
| your eye; maybe it looks like an irrelevant detail.
|
| A resume page isn't very long, especially presented as
| bullet points as expected. And especially when you have
| absolutely no idea who it is will be reading it. I can
| tell you great stories about every project I've ever
| done, but not in a bullet point.
|
| I have no doubt that most resumes are incredibly bad. But
| I'd venture to say that a substantial fraction of the
| resumes you think are very good will be considered very
| bad by the next hiring manager over.
| criddell wrote:
| > I can tell you great stories about every project I've
| ever done, but not in a bullet point.
|
| If you can figure out some way to distill an important
| project down to a point or two, it's definitely going to
| work in your favor. A resume is not the place for great
| stories but it should make me want to ask.
|
| I agree with your last sentence, although I don't think
| you will find anybody wanting a long resume from you. You
| could always provide a link to your online CV that is
| complete while the one you submit is an edited down
| version tailored to the company and position you hope to
| interview for.
| tolbish wrote:
| I'm guess your resume was still otherwise impressive
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| It wasn't awful. I was a new grad though, so I had a
| grocery store job, some volunteer experience and then
| fluffed up with whatever skills were on the job posting.
| vidarh wrote:
| Second this. And especially the "I participated in" bit -
| that almost immediately makes me heavily discount the value
| of that experience because it tells me nothing and it's
| exactly what someone who has had only peripheral involvements
| but wants to play up their importance would say.
|
| If they get through to an interview, fine, they'll get a
| chance to be specific, but failing to be specific might well
| get them filtered out before that.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Do you have a preferred template that gets past the filters?
| I imagine much of bad resumes comes from people using
| traditional ones.
| pulse7 wrote:
| There was a thread on HN a week ago [1] about "How to write a
| resume that converts" and the most voted comment starts with a
| sentence "The importance of resumes has been overstated for
| many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased
| out entirely."...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112542
| bluGill wrote:
| It is, and always been: who you know more is more important
| than what you know.
| kevinpet wrote:
| I've hired a handful of referrals, but when I get referrals
| I immediately look to see if their resume has relevant
| experience.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| This is really an unhealthy and flawed understanding of
| what is a necessary part of life. The problem is how to
| find good people, and the more society downgrades objective
| measures of excellence, the more people need to rely on
| personal recommendations. It's not that people wouldn't
| take a stranger for a job, but when there is a lot of
| uncertainty, they can't absorb the risk of the stranger not
| being qualified. So they will always prefer someone they
| _know_ is qualified over someone who they don 't know is
| qualified but might be better.
|
| The above is as necessary and unsurprising as rain falling
| to the ground. There is no other way that things can work.
| Thus the practical advice you can give someone is not only
| to learn something but to widen their professional network
| so that there are many people who _know_ they 've learned
| something.
|
| It is the exact same thing in a big bureaucracy. You have
| to know how to sell yourself, which just means you need to
| successfully communicate your accomplishments. Too many
| people do great work, but they don't communicate their
| accomplishments, and then they are surprised that less
| qualified people are promoted over them, and they grow
| cynical or resentful when it is really their failure at
| communication that has caused the problem. Like many things
| in life, it's better to be mediocre at two necessary things
| rather than excellent at one and skipping the other. But no
| amount of righteous anger about the unfairness of life is
| going to change the fact that people are not omniscient and
| that talent is hard for strangers to evaluate.
| [deleted]
| kindall wrote:
| People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs
| I've had in my thirty-year career has come from networking.
| In one other situation I was the guy who got several former
| co-workers hired, all at once, a frankly freak occurrence I
| still don't quite believe actually happened. My current
| job, I was contacted out of the blue by the team's manager
| on LinkedIn. Most of my jobs have come from being active on
| the Internet, or else from applying cold.
| bluGill wrote:
| Many people do get hired cold, but it is the last choice
| of anyone hiring. If you know the right person you skip
| to the front of the line with no competition.
| vitaflo wrote:
| >People always say that, but only one of the full-time
| jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from
| networking.
|
| Funny, only one of the gigs I've gotten in my 30 year
| career has come from _not_ networking...my first one.
| Every job after that has come about because of people I
| know recommending me for the job.
|
| This has been super helpful over the past 15 years as
| I've been an independent consultant. In fact, I went
| indie because I had a network.
|
| I don't need to look for gigs anymore, people come to me.
| I turn down way more gigs than I can take. And I haven't
| had to have an actual interview for a job in over 20
| years.
|
| I'm sure this isn't the norm, but it certainly makes work
| life a lot easier.
| Cerium wrote:
| I have the opposite experience. I have never landed a job
| that I didn't already have a good contact and
| recommendation for, of course that is probably because I
| have never tried.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > People always say that, but only one of the full-time
| jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from
| networking.
|
| Does that not just imply that your network wasn't that
| good but not necessarily that the adage "who you know
| more is more important than what you know" is actually
| false?
| taneq wrote:
| Interesting... Only two of my jobs have _not_.
| vidarh wrote:
| It depends a lot on your network and pure luck.
|
| Here's an example of how much it can matter:
|
| * I co-founded my first company with people I met at
| university.
|
| * We got our first investor thanks to a chance encounter
| between said investor and one of my co-founders at a bar.
|
| * When we exited that company, our investors lawyer
| arranged a meeting for us with another of his clients,
| who hired us.
|
| * One of the execs at that company hired me for his next
| startup, and introduced me to his brothers, so I could
| work part-time for them until he got funding.
|
| * One of my co-workers at that company was one of my co-
| founders at my next company, and our other co-founders
| were friends of that person. One of them had worked for
| the VCs who invested in our first round.
|
| * [I went to Yahoo for a couple of years -- no
| connections there.]
|
| * The general counsel at my last pre-Yahoo startup pulled
| me into my next startup.
|
| * [I then went to a web dev agency, no connections there]
|
| * The co-founder of the company I worked at before the
| web-dev agency contacted me about some contracting, and I
| ended up joining full time (my current job)
|
| So Yahoo and the web dev agency are the only places I've
| worked over the last 26 years where my resume has
| mattered. Even then, at the web-dev agency I name-dropped
| one of people who'd hired me previously, and it impressed
| them, so who knows how much my resume really mattered
| there either.
| taneq wrote:
| That's how the saying goes but what really matters isn't
| who you know, but _who knows you_ (and was impressed by
| your work).
| colechristensen wrote:
| I have had mediocre experiences, at best, with people
| bringing in people that they knew from outside the company.
| There were positive exceptions but usually it ended up
| being a kind of weird political move that increased
| divisions in teams. Like there was the group that knew each
| other from outside and everybody else. something to be wary
| about
| irrational wrote:
| I think that is often true, but I work for a Fortune 500
| company and did not know anyone who worked there before
| getting hired. In the 20 years I've worked there I've been
| involved in tons of interviewing potential hires. Every
| single one got their foot in based on their resume. I've
| never seen anyone hired because they knew someone at the
| company. I'm sure it happens, I've just never met anyone it
| has happened to.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Successful people put themselves in situations where they
| can get to know the people who are important.
|
| For example, attend the tech conferences in your field.
| Contribute to open source projects they are involved with.
| Hang out where they hang out. Etc.
|
| Make it easy for chance encounters to find you.
| trm42 wrote:
| Last time a headhunter managed snatch me was weird. I wasn't
| really active before deadline because I was on a holiday trip
| and the headhunter said "it's okay, let's call after your
| holidays". I wasn't actually looking for a new job but couple
| of the buzzwords sounded promising so I ended up having
| calling one of those chitchat calls with the headhunter which
| then led to a chitchat with the company guys.
|
| When I was meeting the company guys, I'd updated and printed
| my puny resume in case they would've wanted it but realised
| they had "my resume" already. Basically the headhunter had
| copy pasted my puny LinkedIn profile data into their some
| sort of resume template and the guys were thinking I was
| actively looking for a new job.
|
| Weird coincidences but ended up taking the job and haven't
| regretted after 2,5 years.
| robocat wrote:
| I wonder if the headhunter used a geek code[0] to resume
| generator?
|
| Alternatively I wonder if a modern version of geekcode
| could be created with a service that automatically
| compresses a submitted resume into a comprehensible string
| of Unicode characters?
|
| [0] https://www.geekcode.xyz/geek.html
| eointierney wrote:
| A geek code based on distributed peer review (no
| blockchain) could be very elegant. A kind of shared CV
| encompassing gitlogs, third party reviews, customer
| satisfaction, and actual "thinking when it matters"
| ability recognition.
|
| Where are the semioticians when we need them? Syntax,
| grammar, pragmatics, all develop at a rate of knots, but
| we still use a subset of ASCII for the vast majority of
| our symbolic computation. Could we do better than a joke
| from the nineties?
| simion314 wrote:
| Again we see similar issues that motivated RMS to create the free
| software movement. The buy bought a program but did not had the
| ability to read or edit it, today you will get a DRM on top of
| the program and some TOS that would say it is illegal to even
| attempt to get pass the DRM. Video game crackers show this DRMs
| will eventually get broken so the industry switch to services
| instead, now you are really screwed , you can't flip a bit to fix
| an issue or you can wake up and the software is now updated with
| nice new bugs or pointless UX changes.
| mouldysammich wrote:
| I really liked this story. Im much too young to have been around
| for it, but I feel like this era of computing must have been kind
| of magical where there was a lot of access and no walled garden
| nearly to the scale of a google or apple where the obfuscation
| just requires a flipped bit.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I'm old enough that my heart fluttered when he mentioned the
| "ELF II" development board! That's some serious old school
| magical stuff. That used car salesman was incredibly lucky to
| snag such a hacker, who had no fear of jumping into hex dumps
| and flipping bits around, for solving problems.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELF_II
|
| The RCA 1802 processor even had "SEX" and "GET HIGH"
| instructions!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802
|
| https://www.atarimagazines.com/computeii/issue3/page52.php
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Also no scrum!
| metanonsense wrote:
| Some things were also pretty hard back then (a few years later
| but still). When you were too young for university and your
| environment was not academic, getting access to information was
| so difficult. I remember when we made a school trip to London
| and I spent all my savings for programming and computer graphic
| books. There was no wikipedia, no scihub, no blogs, no Github.
| New coding or hacking e-zines were treated like gold and
| sometimes I spent multiple months of my savings to get 1 book!
| mod wrote:
| I think I had to wait about 6 months to rent an HTML4 book
| from the library.
|
| It was massive. Maybe 6 inches thick. I devoured it, and
| later bought my own copy.
| kaybe wrote:
| My computer spoke English. I didn't. I just had some
| nonsensical (for me) commands memorized. Things were indeed
| different back then.
| mjparrott wrote:
| I had two jobs in high school and learned a lot from them.
|
| In the first, I was a temp worker for a P&G re-packaging
| facility. This means some temp agency was paid $12/hour and they
| passed on $9/hour to me. The job was backbreaking, in intense
| heat, and with very strict management rules (e.g. no lunch break,
| sitting down for even a moment was grounds for being fired).
|
| In the second, I did lawn mowing for individual families for
| $20/hour. I found them by referrals and networking, and could
| control my schedule for when I went to do jobs.
|
| This taught me that being creative to find good jobs was super
| important.
|
| In college, I found a series of high-pay, flexible or comfortable
| jobs. A few examples:
|
| $1000 for one week's work to hand out 2 pallets worth of coke
| zero to college students. I was allowed to keep the extras and
| ended up with a 1 year supply of coke zero for myself and all my
| friends. Oh, they also gave me coupon for 1,000 free burritos and
| despite a very diligent effort to hand out as many as humanly
| possible was left with ~300 burritos and told to just keep them.
| Qdoba was my primary diet for quite some time.
|
| A job selling cameras on eBay for a camera shot that went out of
| business. They paid me a 25% commission and had one of the
| largest private collections of highly collectable cameras (I sold
| one for $8,000). I only did it for a summer, and probably should
| have taken a semester off college to just do this full time and
| could have made enough money to significantly reduce my college
| loans.
|
| A freelance role, for a German re-insurance company to write
| white papers for $50/hour and could create my own agenda for what
| I needed to write, and work whenever I wanted.
| sircastor wrote:
| >> should have taken a semester off college to just do this
| full time
|
| This is very adjacent to what you're saying, but every time I
| hear this idea, I can only think that it's really taking an
| entire year off. Most of my courses were structured in a way
| that if you took a term out of the normal hierarchy, you'd have
| to wait until that course came around again at the same time
| the next year.
| tester756 wrote:
| > was allowed to keep the extras and ended up with a 1 year
| supply of coke zero for myself and all my friends.
|
| that's pros or con? :P
| bregma wrote:
| Brings back the days of my youth in about the same era. We had a
| recession on in my country at the time that made student jobs in
| the tech industry scarce and I ended up working in landscaping
| during the summer to try to meet the tuition bills. One of our
| jobs was at the site of a rapidly expanding local tech firm (the
| telecom monopoly had just been forced to open the market to allow
| competition and the industry was beginning to boom). I remember
| digging holes for planting trees and looking through the tinted
| glass windows at a couple of guys in their white shirts and ties
| sitting at a terminal and thinking "some day I'll be on that side
| of the glass". Sure enough, after 40 years, I work for a company
| with offices that overlook that same building. The trees I
| planted are large and mature, I managed to eventually pay for my
| education, and I never forget my roots as I sit down at a
| terminal window.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I never forget my roots.
|
| I hope the pun was intentional.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| The classy way of handling puns is to avoid them if they're
| not intended and leave them unstated if they are. It's
| funnier to everyone who notices that way, and less
| distracting to people that are just there for the content.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Instead of puns, you can substitute the synonym for the
| word you're punning. So instead of "I never forgot my
| roots" you can say, "I never forgot my tree butts" or
| whatever word silly rephrasing you can imagine.
| brazzy wrote:
| Apparently this is the "story time" thread, so here's mine, of
| how I hacked the Linux kernel without ever having written more
| than maybe 50 lines of C code.
|
| This was in early 2001, I was an exchange student in Japan, and
| I'd bought a really cool gadget in Akihabara that almost nobody
| had heard about: a hardware MP3 player. For storage, it used MMCs
| (precursor of SD cards), affordable ones held 32MB. To get music
| onto those cards, I also bought a USB card reader.
|
| And there I ran into problems: the PC in my dormitory room was a
| used Pentium Pro desktop I'd gotten very cheaply without an OS,
| and I'd installed Linux on it. But at that time, USB support on
| Linux was still rather spotty, and while the card reader was in
| principle supported as a mass storage device, the USB driver
| would reproducibly freeze up after a short time accessing it.
|
| As mentioned above, my C skills were basically non-existing, but
| compiling your own kernel was at that time still a pretty common
| thing for Linux users to do, so I had some experience with that.
| And I was motivated. I enabled kernel debug output, and
| discovered that just before freezing up, the driver would report
| that it had received an event with a certain ID. I found the code
| that handled events, and I found the code that handled the
| problematic event. I looked at it and realized that I was many
| months of learning away from being able to fix it.
|
| So instead, I deleted it. I simply made the driver ignore that
| type of event.
|
| It worked. I could use the card reader to put MP3 files on the
| MMCs and listen to them on the player.
|
| I felt a strange mixture of achievement and embarassment.
| rags2riches wrote:
| That's like a scene in some old TV series about a startup I
| only vaguely remember. It's important demo day, but a bug is
| threatening to ruin everything. Everybody is trying to find the
| bug. Somebody yells out "I found it!" and everybody rushes
| over. For a long moment, they all stare quietly at a big red
| flashing line of code on the screen. Then somebody blurts out
| "delete it!" and the person at the keyboard deletes the bug
| with a single keystroke. Everybody cheers. The startup is
| saved!
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| This story I believe, largely because there's no money or fame
| involved, and because it's the software equivalent of "hit it
| with a hammer until it works again."
| FredPret wrote:
| Ahhh, the rm -rf approach to problem solving. My favourite!
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The luck and the postscript really resonated with me. For more
| than 30 years now, I've been telling people I hit the jackpot:
| Computer programming is something I'm really good at, that I
| enjoy doing and that pays really well. Very few people get all
| three.
|
| I had to work summer jobs though, starting at 15: road crew,
| pounding spikes on the railway, lumberjack. I'm not sure I would
| have been better off for not having those jobs though. I learned
| a lot about what the average person does to get by and about how
| much alcohol gives me minor alcohol poisoning.
| flaubere wrote:
| The author said in a postscript that he was worried about
| seeming elitist. I didn't think it was elitist at all, and I
| completely understand why it was a good choice for him to write
| BASIC code.
|
| However, I also did manual labour in the summer when I was ~20.
| There was nothing wrong with it. I would certainly recommend a
| brief stint of it to a young person, especially if you are
| training towards a sitting down/talking type job.
|
| You are outdoors, you end the day physically tired but with
| mental and emotional energy for other things. You gain skills
| and improve your health and fitness. There's usually a good
| atmosphere among the workers. And you get to point at something
| concrete and say 'I helped put that up/knock that down/repair
| that'.
| Symbiote wrote:
| My parents made a similar deal with me, when I was 18.
|
| "Manual work" for all but 3 weeks of the summer was indoors
| for me, in factories -- mostly cleaning and assembling. There
| was a good range of jobs, from boring, tough work more-or-
| less alone, to a place where everyone seemed to chat while
| they worked slowly as the summer was usually a quiet period.
|
| In the final job, I took a half-day off to collect my exam
| results. Going into work afterwards, people naturally asked
| what they were -- all A grades. It was difficult not to feel
| apart from many of the staff from that point. The owner's
| daughter was the same age and also working the summer at the
| factory, and her results weren't good enough to go to
| university.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Did you ever get a "Hey, don't be using twenty dollar words
| in a twenty-five cent conversation." That was a wake up
| call.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Part of why it didn't come off as elitist for me is that
| everyone had their own story; his dad was relatable, his
| mother supportive and he wanted to not disappoint them. The
| car dealer guy sounded awesome and not at all like someone he
| looked down on.
| wjnc wrote:
| Great story. Two things:
|
| 1. Would this still be possible today? It's a certain timeframe
| (for software) where this was possible. Today it's things like
| SAP, integrated systems and DMCA on top of it (or Excel).
|
| 2. I did the menial route and am still happy for it. Flipping
| burgers, cleaning dishes, repairing truck tires and cleaning
| office buildings. It's a different sort of grit and stamina than
| the one that gets you far in your office career, but I still look
| back fondly on the lessons about hard work. It was also an
| introduction into diversity. I've met people on those jobs the
| 16-year old me never met before, and since. For me the lesson is:
| whatever my kids will do in jobs on the side, it pleases somebody
| enough to give them money and them enough to do the job it's a
| worthwhile lesson.
| creshal wrote:
| > Would this still be possible today? It's a certain timeframe
| (for software) where this was possible. Today it's things like
| SAP, integrated systems and DMCA on top of it (or Excel).
|
| There's still a lot of utterly awful, sloppy business software
| around, especially for SMBs.
| ericskiff wrote:
| 1. <Professor Farnsworth voice>Oh my, yes!</Professor
| Farnsworth voice>
|
| I run a "CTO-for-hire" service with about 25 devs, product
| managers, and designers. I'd say at least a quarter of what we
| do is dropping in to rescue projects that have gone bad.
|
| We're often treated like gold just for showing up, doing decent
| work, and bailing them out of a problem.
|
| There's tons of work out there like this if you grow a
| reputation for being good and trustworthy, and you're willing
| to work through those really hard moments of everything being
| broken with no reason why yet. I'm 40 years old, and still just
| got the rush of excitement last week as I solved a major
| production problem for a company after a string of late nights.
| It's just fun.
|
| 2. Totally agreed about the value of other types of jobs as
| well. I will treasure my teenage and early 20s experiences as a
| Pizza Hut cook, Grocery cashier, and bet-taker at a race track
| for what I learned about those industries, how people work
| together, and the differences between intellectual and manual
| labor. As a salesperson, I also STILL reference knowledge from
| my experience in those industries when talking about new
| projects.
| JackFr wrote:
| Under questions you're unprepared for, years ago at a Wall Street
| job a couple of weeks after a re-org my new boss calls me into
| his office and asks me what sort of bonus I was expecting. Caught
| completely off guard I quoted him the real number I had been
| expecting.
|
| He smiled and said great, which let me know I had absolutely left
| money in the table. A trusted colleague then told me if that
| situation ever came up again, take your real, reasonable
| expectation, double it and add 20. The situation has never come
| up again.
| Asymmetryk wrote:
| I'm going to use this story in the future for describing what
| Computer Associates (CA) business strategy for rolling up custom
| line of business applications contracts effectively amounts to,
| or did.
|
| I was seventeen in 1990 and my girlfriend was throwing me out
| unless I got a job that week and I decided to cover myself and
| apply for a bunch of commission only telephone sales jobs that I
| felt that I could rely on one offer from the booby prize if I
| couldn't find better or a possibility that would buy me time. The
| first Monday afternoon interview I found myself talking to the
| manager of a magazine in the fastest growing quoted B2B publisher
| and I am thinking that I have blown it the conversation is
| faltering so I ask what format are media packs sent in and
| receive the most strained look so much to tell me I'm really done
| here and should make my excuses. Then I spot the pile of faxes
| overflowing the adjacent desk and work up the courage to inquire
| if the hard copies are needed for legal reasons and am I looking
| at a representative period of sales, spying the dollar invoices.
| This isn't helping me. The manager lifts up a nearby pile to
| reveal the first of many fax machines I am suddenly realising
| festoon every desk about 2 per 5 people. The room spins as I have
| flashbacks to my last summer job eternally loading and desnagging
| thermal fax rolls for my local pharmacy. Realising that I was
| done without a gambit I've still no idea what impetus was the
| cause but I blurted out "email doesn't have gophers in between
| you and your customers they'll answer your offers directly!" the
| cover sheets for every single fax had fluttered when the manager
| lifted them..Group Company... Operating Company... Country
| Region... Division... Department... Title...Recipient.... "URGENT
| ACTION REQUIRED TIME LIMITED QUOTATION ENCLOSED ACCORDING TO
| REQUEST "... and the longest paragraph of legal disclaimer
| insisting the recipient imdemnifies the sender for all sins
| expressly and especially in relation to the offered business
| contained within. "YOU mean I can sell through these things
| here!?!?!" the manager agitatedly pointing to the email address
| attached to the corporate address given by a display advertising
| page in his magazine. "Individually not only to some waste bin
| mailbox drop nobody cares about?". The total experience I held in
| any way whatsoever related to this was a blissful month using the
| Byte magazine exchange until C&D'd by my father on principle that
| I never told him about ancillary and necessary costs for a
| effectively essential second phone line he was certainly not
| putting in. I wasn't sure if I was right when I pointed to the
| ampersand @ sign and totally winged the dots were machine
| designation separators (thinking about bang paths) but in that
| very second my out reached and gambling hand found itself being
| shaken heartily and the smiling owner of this animated appendage
| was confirming "if I hire you you can't tell anyone else what you
| just told me - I hired you because I wanted someone who
| understands this not because you explained anything to me OK?". I
| was very OK indeed. I held my 18th birthday party in this office
| a few weeks later and I have just entered my 4th decade of
| finding computing knowledge goes very far indeed in the media
| industry.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Stories like this make me sad and depressed.
|
| Basically some greedy jerk didn't want to pay living wages to
| some programmers. Due to his position of already being rather
| well off he was able to put off (through even more cheap labor)
| until he found a naive sucker to do the work basically for free.
| In this case a college kid.
|
| Its the reason I really want to get out of tech. Its a goldmine
| for spineless knowledge workers to get "put over the barrel" as
| the story says for a fraction of what they are worth. Then those
| of us that know what we are worth have to navigate
|
| I don't see a heroic story here. I see someone that took off
| their armor and walked into battle to be slaughtered.
| ggarnhart wrote:
| This is an interesting take -- I don't disagree that these
| sorts of things happen, but in this case, the author clearly
| felt his work was paid for fairly.
|
| I think one's own perspective is a pretty key regulator of
| what's fair and what's not. Perhaps not in the macro level, but
| on a case by case basis. Is the author's point of view
| incorrect in your eyes? Who else should be able to decide that,
| other than the person who experienced it?
| IMTDb wrote:
| I love the fact that in the "explore further" section at the end
| of the post, the first recommended article is "5 different ways
| to fix a pothole".
| mxcrossr wrote:
| Ok but... why? Does anyone have enough knowledge to speculate why
| that bit would prevent you from reading the code?
| jxf wrote:
| The bogus file header was causing them to be interpreted as a
| different kind of file when opened by the viewer-editor (what
| we might consider an IDE today). The code wasn't encrypted at
| all and nothing prevented the author from reading it:
|
| > In the editor, I could also clearly see the text of the BASIC
| source code for all the programs. It was there, not encrypted.
| sircastor wrote:
| Incidentally, I find the various copy/read protection schemes
| of yesteryear absolutely fascinating. It seems like it always
| comes down to some brand of cleverness, and gives credence to
| the idea that there is always someone smarter than you.
|
| Also "Never underestimate a time-rich, money poor kid"
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Presumably the providers of the software also provided the
| editor, it was just to silo you in.
| smcameron wrote:
| No, that doesn't sound right. Probably more like:
|
| "
|
| The RDOS file system provided means for protecting files by
| setting attributes. Because RDOS, not being a multi-user
| system, had no notion of file ownership, attributes applied
| to all programs that accessed a file. The sense of the
| attribute bits was, in most cases, the opposite of that in
| Unix; if the bit was set, the operation was prohibited. Files
| were by default created with all attribute bits cleared,
| permitting all operations. The attribute bits, as identified
| by the letters used to identify them in a file listing, were:
| 'R': prohibited reading 'W': prohibited writing
| 'P': "permanent file"; prohibited renaming or deleting the
| file 'S': identified a "save" file, that is, one that
| contains an executable program. 'N': prohibited
| symbolic links from linking to this file 'A':
| attributed protected; prohibited any further changes to the
| file's attributes. (A file that had both P and A set became
| un-deletable, except by reformatting the disk.) 'I':
| Prohibited reading or writing by means other than direct
| block I/O. (This was removed from later versions of RDOS.)
| '?' and '&': User-defined attributes, ignored by RDOS
|
| "
|
| http://www.self.gutenberg.org/articles/Data_General_RDOS
| mad_ned wrote:
| thanks for this! I've always wondered what the deal was,
| and teen me did not do any research on why the hack worked-
| once I got the files visible I just moved on. It was almost
| certainly this RDOS attribute stuff you show here I was
| playing with (also I took some artistic license in the
| post, not really sure it was 'F' vs. 'E'.)
| doix wrote:
| The fact that it's a single bit confuses me. If it was a full
| null byte (0x00) it would be easier to explain. C strings are
| null terminated, so you could assume the editor stopped reading
| when it hit "the end of a string" but BASIC still executed it?
|
| Or if it was some unreadable ASCII character, maybe it worked
| like an EOF in the editor? But the fact that he switched it
| from an F to an E gives me no clues. This stuff is
| unfortunately before my time, I'm sad I never got to play
| around with stuff like this in my youth.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Some older filesystems, like ADFS[1] which I'm familiar with,
| have a "type" attribute, along with the read/write/execute
| (etc.) bits, as part of the directory node [2].
|
| On RISC OS, as that page says, a BASIC file has type FFB. I
| remember a plain text file had type FFF.
|
| [1]
| https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/adfs.html
|
| [2] https://docs.huihoo.com/doxygen/linux/kernel/3.7/adfs_8h_
| sou...
| HotHotLava wrote:
| The byte apparently was not part of the file contents but
| part of a file header that was interpreted by the editor;
| probably encoding some kind of "file type" that was displayed
| differently when opened.
|
| However, technically, switching an 'E' for an 'F' is flipping
| *two* bits :/
| johnday wrote:
| 0xe to 0xf is a single bit flip.
| [deleted]
| NamTaf wrote:
| For me, the key take-away from this story is right at the end,
| where he contemplates whether he short-changed himself. If you
| look at it on a per-hour basis, he got paid decently ($100 for a
| few hours work in the 80s? Incredible!). However, if you look at
| it from the perspective of the business value he delivered to Jim
| in that transaction, it was a bargain for Jim ($100 once-off to
| fix a problem taht was costing many multiples of that each month?
| Hell yes!).
|
| And therein lies a fantastic reminder that if you can frame tthe
| cost of your work in terms of the value you will provide to your
| customer, rather than a flat labour rate for your time, you stand
| to earn a _lot_ more.
| goatherders wrote:
| Great story. Thank you for sharing.
| mastazi wrote:
| I loved the story!
|
| It seems that in the comment section under the blog post, there
| is good stuff too for example the one that starts with:
|
| > Ned (if that is your real name), I have a story with virtually
| the same beginning, a different middle, and a similar end... [1]
|
| [1] https://madned.substack.com/p/a-teenagers-guide-to-
| avoiding-...
| WalterBright wrote:
| As a teen I got a summer job hoeing weeds out of cracks in the
| sidewalk for the town. At the end of each day I was wringing wet
| with sweat and dog tired. It was the hardest I'd ever worked, and
| for the least amount of money. Pretty motivating to go to
| college!
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| These stories are are always fun to read, and this one was
| especially well-written, so I'm glad it was posted. At the same
| time, there's a fair bit of survivorship bias and mythology in
| the "wiz kid teen helps out a clueless adult and starts a great
| career in tech!" story.
|
| For starters, this was largely a phenomenon confined to a narrow
| strip of time from the late eighties to the late 00s. Before
| that, computers were too expensive and restricted for most teens
| to have access to, even fairly well-off ones. After that,
| smartphones hit, people moved away from desktops and local
| computing/admin to phones and consolidation in the cloud(SaaS
| etc), and a generation that didn't grow up with computers was
| replaced with a generation that did. So the days of "Hey, I know
| how to do that computer stuff!" "Great! Get in here!" are largely
| over.
|
| Second, even in that time period, most teens that knew their way
| around a system never managed to hook up with one of these sweet
| deals. You'd (begrudgingly) provide support for friends and
| family for free, and maybe make a few bucks off some extended
| work for a friend of a friend, but nothing large or ongoing. It's
| like hitting sports really hard in high school and college: some
| will go pro. Most will not.
|
| I'm not trying to be a downer with any of this. But the story of
| the wiz kid who makes it big by accident has essentially become
| an archetypal story by now in some circles, and it's important to
| remember it's more mythology than reality. Most teenage nerds who
| liked messing with computers as a hobby didn't spin it up into an
| explosive career overnight. Some decided to get more formal
| training, and gradually built a career in the traditional way.
| For many more, it never became anything more than a hobby, in
| part because the labor demand for people who are just "pretty
| good" with computers is actually fairly small, and has shrunk
| dramatically over the past two decades due to consolidations
| (SaaS again), offshoring and outsourcing.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| I don't think this phenomenon is quite "over," nor do I think
| it will ever be. I actually got my current job because of a
| similar situation:
|
| During high school, I worked two summers as a lifeguard and
| didn't really care for it. It was boring, hot, and didn't pay
| particularly well, especially for what we had to put up with
| (read: incompetent management and being sorely understaffed).
| There were days where we had so few staff that we had to get
| untrained gate staff/food&bev to run slide dispatch since that
| didn't require a lifeguard license, but I digress...
|
| My senior year, I decided to do something different- tutor
| online for computer science and math. Pay was much better and I
| definitely enjoyed the work more. One of my returning clients
| was working on his Master's and was taking a class that was
| central to his major involving python scripting. He didn't know
| much Python, but found me online and I taught him the basics
| and we had a good relationship going.
|
| After he finished his course, he was very happy with the work I
| had done, and he actually offered me a job! I've been working
| for his company for several months now and just recently
| converted into full time for the summer.
|
| So, yes, the era of "wiz kids" might be over, but getting jobs
| that you might not technically be "qualified" on paper for
| through strange connections absolutely still happens.
| tomkat0789 wrote:
| Reading this reminded me of a humorous Onion video titled
| "Report: 95% Of Grandfathers Got Job By Walking Right Up And Just
| Asking" [0].
|
| Scrolling around the comments, I'm not seeing any stories newer
| than the 90's. Given the layers of HR rules, proprietary software
| shenanigans, and corporate management, I expect similar stories
| are rare today.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV_6RYVbNaw
| iso1631 wrote:
| Depends on the size of a firm. If you rock up to a small firm
| and talk to the owner, you could well get a job, they don't
| have HR rules and corporate management.
| devnull255 wrote:
| I love this story because the story has a an unwritten and deeper
| title "Do what you love and love what you do". True, while the
| unwritten title may not have grabbed most of those here who
| really appreciated it (myself included), it underlies what
| arguably really motivates a lot of teens to work any job, which
| is working a job doing what they like.
|
| I was "tricked" or "crimped" into my first job the day before my
| 16th birthday. I accompanied my dad on a shopping trip, and he
| asked the manager there if he was hiring, gesturing to me. I
| didn't have a chance to express my own point of view in the
| course of this conversation. And by the time we left the store, I
| was supposed to show up the next day to be hired.
|
| I wasn't thrilled to work there, but the first paycheck I
| received motivated me to continue working. It funded my evenings
| out and my sci-fi and comic book collecting, and let me save for
| my first car, a '71 red Buick Skylark with powerful V8.
|
| But I would have liked it better if the story of my first job was
| more like this story.
| zwog wrote:
| I have a kind of similar story when I started studying in the
| late 2000s years. There was a company that had a specialized and
| really expensive measurement device. But the vendor went out of
| service. They changed part of their system but kept the
| measurement device only to find out it could not talk to the new
| system because the file system of the data was proprietary to the
| measurement device.
|
| I got a student job at that company and one of my first tasks
| (and that of several students before me) was to open measurement
| results on the device and type them into excel spreadsheets. I
| did this for an hour or so until I became totally bored so I
| started to tinker around. The measurement device had it's own PC
| that booted Windows (I think it was 95 or 98) and autostarted
| their software in full screen/some sort of . This was easy to
| bypass via the task manager and running explorer.exe. I found out
| that the proprietary file format was simplay an MS Access file
| with a different extension. I tried to open it, but the file was
| password protected. At this time I had little to none experience
| with programming or anything else that was "low level" computer
| stuff, but I occasionally stumbled about writeups about hacks and
| exploits and skimmed over them. So I was pretty sure that there
| had to be a hardcoded password somewhere. I started to open every
| file I could in a text editor with no luck. Then I got a hex
| editor and opened the binaries and finally, in a dll there was a
| password. The next few days at this job I spent teaching myself
| enough Python to read the Access files and write the contents
| into an Excel file.
|
| This worked and I used the free time to study/eat/sleep while
| getting paid for it but then one of my supervisors found out that
| I wasn't doing anything but still got results and wondered how I
| did it. He immediately put me onto another problem they had, thus
| starting my career as a software engineer.
| scrumper wrote:
| This is super similar to my start. I was hired at 17 one summer
| to do data entry for a surveying company, by putting timesheets
| created in Excel into a central system for billing clients.
| That got boring after a day, so I figured out how to use VBA
| (Excel on Macintosh System 8!) and wrote a macro that I linked
| to a button and put on the spreadsheet template, hidden off in
| the corner somewhere. When I got the next set of sheets back I
| hit the buttons and my job was done.
|
| I showed the bosses, and was immediately put to work on some
| much more interesting stuff linking Lotus Notes with SQL Server
| for reporting and dashboarding, and then I was off to the
| races.
|
| (The previous year I'd spent the summer making concrete garden
| ornaments with a group of ex-cons in a shed in the back of a
| farm - an experience which certainly made me appreciate the
| comforts of doing spreadsheets in an air-conditioned office,
| though my muscles were never quite as good.)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Its weird how luck plays a part in all this - I remember as a
| Student temping for the giant Audit firm, Arthur Andersen
| (become accenture eventually). I was doing something like
| typing from one system to another. I think I found VBA and
| demonstrated how I could do a weeks work in a lunch hour.
|
| My boss took one look, freaked out and I was back at the
| Temping agency.
|
| We are still very far from a Software Literate society.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Same story here. Was working for a manufacturer doing help
| desk/support. One of two people in the dept. First task was
| to help someone in a different dept sort through PDF files,
| and rename them to the company standard format. I wrote a
| python script to do this instead of renaming one by one.
|
| Got reamed because "there's no way that is accurate and it
| might mess something up".
|
| They where renaming the file based on the date of review, and
| the creators name.... Both of which were in the damn
| metadata.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| It wasn't the humble beginnings of my programming career (far
| from it), but I still ran into a similar situation in an
| internship at a recycling company, just a couple of years
| ago. "Hey we got all these daily excel sheets that someone
| needs to sit down and aggregate into these monthly balance
| sheets." A couple hours of VBA later and I had automated it.
|
| Then a few days later, I happened to talk to someone from the
| accounting side about this experience. She mentioned that
| they were actually also tracking these same numbers and
| apparently had an automated system already. The production
| floor just knew nothing of it and had been doing the same
| task by hand forever. I guess the realization how inefficient
| organizations can be was probably the greater learning
| experience for me there.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Your story is probably the more common one by far. Most
| employers and managers (especially for starter/entry-level
| jobs) are incredibly insecure, and any sign of intellect or
| creativity scares them. I've learned the hard way to never
| ruffle feathers by trying to think or solve problems at full
| power on a job. Just do what's expected and move on.
| andai wrote:
| > I've learned the hard way to never ruffle feathers by
| trying to think or solve problems at full power on a job.
| Just do what's expected and move on.
|
| This might be the saddest thing I've read recently.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Trust in Mr Schumpeter :-)
| jdbernard wrote:
| It's also why the nimble newcomer can often disrupt and
| slay the giant incumbent. It's a lot easier to create
| high-performance environments when you have teams small
| enough for all members to know each other personally than
| when you have hordes of people and have to use lowest-
| common-denominator bureaucracy to manage them in bulk.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| My dad did this for someone's _whole team_ as a favour
| because he overheard what they were doing over lunch or
| something like that. Later, he met the manager of the team he
| 'd done it for and asked if they were going to transfer any
| of the employees that got freed up for the work and she said
| "no, there's still lots of work to do and the speedup, while
| helpful, wasn't major."
|
| Went to her retirement party a year later and got the truth:
| Her pension was tied to her salary as a manager as an average
| of her last three years, and her salary as a manager was
| directly tied to her number of reports. If she'd have given
| up half the team as she could have, she would have lost
| hundreds of thousands of dollars over the rest of her life.
|
| There was a lot of that type of stuff going on when computers
| first came in and hackers here and there started optimizing
| things. Individual interest and politics doesn't disappear.
| foreigner wrote:
| My first job was at a local computer shop. I literally got out
| the phone book and called them all in order. The one that finally
| hired me was called ZAM.
| mod wrote:
| My first tech job was web dev at a small local shop. I also got
| out the phone book (and performed extensive google searches) to
| find all of the local web development companies.
|
| I emailed them all, and wound up with two interviews. One was a
| wordpress sweat shop, and the interview went poorly--the owner
| had not even read my resume, started my interview while on a
| conference call, and told me my job responsibility was to "make
| her happy." When she said that, I politely declined to finish
| the interview.
|
| The next went fantastically, and I wound up landing that job in
| a 3-person shop. I loved those people, and I'm very grateful
| for the opportunity they provided me. I also think we provided
| a lot of value for some important causes, which makes me
| remember the work very fondly, despite being in way over my
| head many, many times.
| residualmind wrote:
| For some reason, this story made me very happy. Thank you for
| sharing.
| jmmcd wrote:
| Key quote which shows that this young person was a problem-
| solver, even if his computer skills weren't elite:
|
| > I created a "good" BASIC file from scratch [...] Then I
| compared it to one of the "bad" ones.
| WayToDoor wrote:
| I was GOING TO comment this. He was a teenager and found a
| solution no one else has found. That's some great problem-
| solving skills if you ask me.
| movedx wrote:
| > GOING TO
|
| ... mate :P
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| At least it's not COME FROM.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| INTERCAL is a wonderful thing.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| That scenario happens so often as a programmer.
|
| You could read the docs or find the right person to talk to but
| its just faster to poke the black box and watch it's behavior.
|
| Aka the scientific method of debugging
| lostlogin wrote:
| I think this method skips step one.
|
| 1) You turn it off and then on.
|
| 2) You look at one that works.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| it reminds me of the time I "hacked" a strip poker game on my
| C64. I noticed some files on disk had a number after them and
| assumed they were images. I just reversed the numbers and
| voila, I started out with a naked lady that gradually got
| clothed. I didn't really care to learn poker anymore after
| that.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| "A strip poker game on my c64."
|
| I can only imagine what this must have looked like.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Wonder no more! https://archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarc
| hive109-StripPoke...
| FredPret wrote:
| Less is more!
| hearinf82 wrote:
| My summer job is a lot like the job that he avoided - it requires
| "manual labor." But I know Java so... if you know of a computer-
| related job that's remote or in northern Colorado, let me know.
| ggambetta wrote:
| What a nice story :) Reminds me of how I got my first job!
|
| It was 1994 or 1995, I was probably 14, I had outgrown the ZX
| Spectrum and had a 486 at home. My dad and I were in a computer
| parts shop, and near us was this guy my dad's age having trouble
| with his own computer. He was having random crashes, and nobody
| at the shop seemed to figure out what it was.
|
| My dad suggested I offer my help. We approached the guy, an
| architect like my dad. They chatted, and in the end I got the
| guy's computer home. In theory this was about "reinstalling
| Windows" or something.
|
| Reinstalling Windows didn't help, and I don't know how, but I
| figured out that one of the four 1 MB SIMMs (this was before
| DIMMs!) was bad (I think by trying different combinations of 2
| SIMMs at a time until I isolated the one that caused the
| crashes). I triumphantly announced this to the guy, got paid some
| trivial amount, and he took the machine away. I was proud, my
| parents were proud.
|
| A couple of days later, the guy calls again. He had gone to the
| seller, gotten new SIMMs, and the machine was still crashing. My
| dad told me he had an "oh, fuck" moment right there (but he
| didn't tell me).
|
| I stood by my diagnosis. I must have sounded confident enough,
| because the guy took the machine back to the seller again - and
| they confirmed that the new SIMM was also bad!
|
| Everyone was suitably impressed. The guy offered me a super part-
| time job, I think 2 or 4 hours a week. He ran a small
| architecture/building studio, himself and an architecture
| student.
|
| I was "the computer guy" for a while. I set up the LAN (all
| coaxial cable and T-junctions - we're talking prehistory here). I
| designed a logo in MS Paint. Later I got my most ambitious task:
| to write a system to track the monthly payments for the flats
| they were building.
|
| My C++ knowledge was extremely limited, having only recently
| outgrown QBasic. But I took Borland C++, wrote a text-mode
| windowing system (with mouse support!), and the payment tracking
| system, which even printed invoices. Sounds impressive, it
| worked, and it looked OK, but under the hood it was an
| abomination. Off the top of my head: I didn't understand dynamic
| memory, so each "window" had a hardcoded limit of 10 edit fields,
| 10 buttons, 10 labels,...; I didn't know the first thing about
| databases, so the state was serialized to disk by writing the raw
| contents of the structs to a file ("works on my machine!"); I was
| oblivious to the idea of event-based anything, so the whole thing
| was polling constantly and possibly using 100% of the only CPU in
| the system - but it was the DOS time, there wasn't anything else
| running on the computer, so why not? :)
|
| I kept that job for a couple of years, I believe until I started
| university and got a part-time dev job, then got a full-time dev
| job, then quit it to start and run my game development company,
| which I quit 10 years later to leave South America behind, and
| make the jump to Google Zurich.
|
| Here's to humble beginnings!
| mkovach wrote:
| I love this. When I was 17 my dad got me a summer job on the
| plant he worked at. 40 hours a week in the parts shop, ordering
| parts, getting parts, and running around to different places to
| pickup parts. Actually I didn't mind it, but it was hot and dirty
| and my dad was my boss.
|
| They had a computer system there to keep the inventory, running
| dBase III and hooked up to a NetWare network.
|
| First day: No reports could be printed. Reloaded the various
| drivers, re-ran the reports.
|
| Second day: They told me about a bug that caused the counts to be
| off so after checking things in, I had to manually add the right
| answers to the totals. Fixed the bug in dBase app.
|
| Third day: The pull me to the front office, I'm working in the IT
| department and somebody's else kid is working in the parts shop.
| beastman82 wrote:
| I filled potholes and fixed roads for 4 summers and it's one of
| my fondest memories.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Fucking A, man.
| mod wrote:
| I worked in the hot Florida outdoors, with children, for about
| 7 years through high school and after. Minimum wage. It's the
| part of my life I'd most want to re-live, though I can't say
| things have gotten harder or anything.
|
| I had everything I wanted. Fitness, a rewarding job, a running
| vehicle, friends (via coworkers), and a decent set of fishing
| gear.
| jugg1es wrote:
| Definitely not a thankless job!
| Tycho wrote:
| _And I was decent at programming in BASIC, after many hours of
| time spent trying to write games on the neighbor's TRS-80
| computer._
|
| I bet lots of people have stories like this. Does it still
| happen? Someone in the neighbourhood has some unusual piece of
| technology, other people hang out there and learn how to use it.
| jugg1es wrote:
| I have a story similar to many of the others here. Mine was in
| the mid 90s when a kid could make good money developing websites.
| The hardest part was the client interactions, which is not
| something a 14 year old is particularly good at.
|
| But the real take-away is that this era of computing was a true
| green field for the kids growing up in it. My cousins, who are
| over 10 years younger than me, grew up in a totally different
| world and, despite having used computers their whole life, have
| no idea how they work or how to build stuff with them.
|
| A childhood spent writing batch files in order to run DOS X-Wing
| is very different than one spent loading a CD into the 1st gen
| Xbox.
|
| I feel bad for my own kids, who are surrounded by technology that
| is walled off and inaccessible. Even 'View Source' on web pages
| is virtually useless now-a-days. It's a lot harder to get into
| the internals of systems than it used to be.
| jkestner wrote:
| Absolutely. I want to make products that are accessible under
| the hood. It's not for computers any more, but then there are
| many other objects we're adding computing to.
|
| In the meantime, I'll start the kids on my old Apple ][e if I
| can smuggle it by my spouse.
| cmos wrote:
| It was 1992 and I was a high school senior. My teacher got me a
| job at the local DPW in the electical department. I was to work
| in the warehouse under a guy named Al who was an old timer and
| lost his hand in a forklift accident 30 years prior. My job was
| to clean the warehouse, and when I was done Al told me to 'go
| hide somewhere' which I did, at the top of the shelves 20' in the
| air, which I had also cleaned. This got boring and so I wandered
| into the main office where people were huddled over a computer.
| They were doing a mail-merge with quick basic to inform customers
| that their power would be out, and it wasn't working. I looked
| over their shoulders and it was exactly what I had been doing to
| send out mailings to companies for free stuff as I had read in
| Radio-Electonics magazine. I fix the problem, and the Chief
| Engineer said 'come with me' and takes me to the (air
| conditioned!) sub-station and into an even colder computer room
| where they had just setup the SCADA system to control the towns
| breakers and monitor the power. Nobody knew how to program it, so
| he pointed to a 3' pile of manuals and said this was my new job.
| By the end of the summer we saved the town millions by siphoning
| power from the local college at peak power demand. I still hung
| out with Al, and helped him in the mornings. The linesmen still
| made fun of me, even more so when I accidentally turned off half
| the towns power for 15 minutes.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Did you also invent Spicy Cheetos?
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| > saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local
| college at peak power demand.
|
| I'd like to hear more about the details of how this worked. Did
| the college have its own power source like a research reactor?
| Was this technically legal or in some part of a grey area?
| gpm wrote:
| > Did the college have its own power source like a research
| reactor?
|
| Not the person you're replying to (and never directly
| involved in electricity generation), but my university just
| had it's own small power plant:
| https://www.fs.utoronto.ca/utilities-and-building-
| operations...
|
| I assume it was a mix of historical coincidence and a
| solution for less-interruptible power supply for the labs,
| but I'm not really sure.
| irrational wrote:
| The university I attended had large smoke stacks that old
| maps said belonged to the power plant. I never saw anything
| come out of them, so I assume by the 90s they had switched to
| using city power, but I wonder now if it was common for
| universities in the old days to have their own power plants?
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| The land grant universities were often in the middle of
| nowhere. I imagine not uncommon.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Such a fun story. I'm glad you and Al still hung out.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| This is one of the best things that I've read here. It's
| awesome that you got the opportunity, figured it out, saved
| energy and money, and still helped out on the physical work.
| Unrelated, Woods Hole does great work.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| The comments here are full of delight. So many people who had
| others over a barrel and could have charged so much money but
| didn't! And it actually still seemed to have worked out great in
| the long run.
| teeray wrote:
| I started working at my town's library during the summer, putting
| books away. When I later started to learn about algorithms and
| data structures, I kept thinking back to pushing that cart of
| books around the stacks (sorting them ahead of time was faster),
| rebalancing the distribution of books among a shelf, etc. Tons
| and tons of CS concepts are made physical in the library.
| znpy wrote:
| The most interesting thing is probably that in 1982 or whatever
| you could find a nice summer gig, work 20h/week for the summer,
| and pay a full academic year and a computer.
| mod wrote:
| He specifically noted that his tuition was paid for. He was
| paying for supplies & incidentals.
|
| Also $400/week in 1982 was fantastic money for an 18 year old.
| So a normal school-kid could not, in fact, replicate this.
| ninive wrote:
| Same here, thanks Ned, this really touched me. I was 9 yo on a
| hot Italian summer day of 1985 when my dad bought his first
| computer for the bag-handcrafting company he still has with mom.
| I had my C64 since 1983 and I was also quite fluent in Basic at
| that point, so I was super curious to see the new IBM XT 8088D in
| action.
|
| The sales agent from this "big" Italian company arrived, unboxed
| the PC, and started to explain to my dad the default MS-DOS
| commands. I was sitting there sneaking the prompt commands he was
| typing when, while installing the accounting software (which was
| the selling reason) the installation utility failed with an error
| twice and the sales guy was in a panic. A new version of the
| software was shipped early that week, and this was the first live
| installation of it. He tried some commands, started to screw up
| turning the PC OFF and ON, and at the end, he was completely
| clueless.
|
| That's when I've stepped in - I've gently asked him permission to
| touch the keyboard and once got access, I started to play with
| MS-DOS and found the batch file that was responsible for the
| installation. The guy was looking at me with an expression that
| mixed surprise and hope when I've found out this file was a
| script that was similar to Basic and I've found a way to edit it.
| After poking for 1 hour in tests and trials, I've finally fixed a
| bug on a conditional that was bringing the data loading to a dead
| disk path.
|
| The guy talked with his department the same day, and a manager
| from the company called me to understand what I did. They were so
| thankful! Nobody paid me a cent for this but after that phone
| call, I realized my passion could also be my future job and life,
| and 36 years later is still true. Thanks again!
| eb0la wrote:
| I wonder if with this "big" Italian company you mean Olivetti.
| They had their own 8088 PC and if I remember well they also
| sold IBM back in the 80s.
| TomVDB wrote:
| Same here. The machines were really good looking too.
| ninive wrote:
| Thanks, yep I think you are right about Olivetti, but in this
| case the company was Buffetti, a national-wide office
| supplier company that moved into software in the '80s to surf
| the PC era, cooperating with IBM for the hardware. I think at
| that point that was the first version of their software, and
| the department didn't last a long time.
| ppierald wrote:
| Age 14, I worked 2 hours a day, 5 days a week at the local fish
| market doing clean up and end of day work. Nasty stuff. I worked
| the summer before college at a friend of my parent's warehouse
| basically relabeling overstock canned goods with a white label
| for use in restaurants. Hot, loud, and smelly job. During my
| sophomore year, I thought I wanted to drop out. My dad said he
| could probably get me into the plumber's union, and no disrespect
| to plumbers (they probably make more money than I do), but the
| memories of that work made me go back and give college one more
| shot. It all worked out in the end. I graduated, found work, and
| am still in the industry happily three decades later, but it all
| could have gone the other way if not for those hard manual work
| summer jobs.
| me_me_me wrote:
| That was an interesting and well written story.
|
| Early days of programming were sure facinating. Small businesses
| using other small businesses to write custom software. Lots of
| tinkering and hacking. Interesting times.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Who are these people who write software locks. Can anyone here
| justify it for me? It's seems to be just plain evil. But maybe
| i'm attacking a straw man. I don't know.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It was more like a curtain than a lock.
| thathndude wrote:
| Loved this one. When I was mid-20's I found myself in a "how
| much" situation as well. Thankfully I had the gumption to "go for
| it."
|
| I had found a solution to save the business 100k+ when another
| contractor charged 10k+ and failed to complete a job because the
| business couldn't pay them any more. The thing is, once I started
| digging into it, the other contractor had done 95% of the work;
| It just needed a nudge to get finished. But As far as the
| business was concerned, it was 0% done because it was an all-or-
| nothing situation (either it worked or didn't).
|
| I did the final 5% and charged $3,000. I presented it as "I can
| fix the problem for 3k." Was that completely fair to them I
| sometimes wonder? I don't lose any sleep over it -- they had a
| problem and I fixed it. I think it was wrong for the first
| contractor not to finish the work up and deal with a final
| invoice rather than insisting on pay in advance and abandoning
| them that close to the finish lone.
|
| As far as the business was concerned I was a very cheap solution,
| and I made an hourly rate of about $2k per hour.
| somedude895 wrote:
| It's crazy sometimes the gap between an appropriate hourly pay
| and the monetary value of the output. I'm sure OP would have
| come up with something in between as well, but being put on the
| spot and caught completely off guard like that for the first
| time I think the $100 was a fine deal.
| xuki wrote:
| You saved the business 100k+ and you charged 3k? Next time call
| yourself a consultant and add another zero.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Well they had failed to pay "$10k+", so it seems likely that
| $30k wouldn't work.
| [deleted]
| StavrosK wrote:
| That's just economics. It's just like Apple or Samsung
| "magically" deciding that the price to fix your broken screen
| is just slightly under what it costs to buy the same phone
| used.
| tudorw wrote:
| Old fashioned economics ;) http://happyplanetindex.org/
| jmuguy wrote:
| Great story, and that approach to troubleshooting ought to be
| familiar to anyone that worked in IT and seemed to "magically"
| figure out problems (at least to anyone observing them).
|
| One note on editing - you use the phrase "to be honest" in two
| consecutive sentences in the first paragraph.
| ddingus wrote:
| Honestly honest, honest!
| mad_ned wrote:
| whups. i really need to hire an editor, with all that crazy
| substack money :-)
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