A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

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 Zürich.

Here's to humble beginnings!

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.

>> 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"

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!

And that job was worth, in today's money, roughly $1100 a week, which for a summer job before college is pretty damn good.